November 21, 1981

November 21, 1981, is the date Leslie Slavin disappeared after leaving friends in Westwood, an abduction that disrupted Bret’s account of the Trawler and Robert Mallory. With the Trawler claiming responsibility for Audrey Barbour’s death and renewed home invasions reported, the evidence increasingly identified Robert not as the killer Bret had portrayed, but as the object of the Trawler’s stalking and manipulation. The date marks both the return of the threat and the beginning of Bret’s social isolation.

The Date and Leslie Slavin’s Disappearance

Leslie Slavin, seventeen, vanished on a crowded Saturday night in Westwood. She had left a group of friends at Yesterdays and was walking to her car, parked in a garage on Glendon Avenue. Her abduction was not a distant rumor that Bret could fold into a finished story: it was a new crime, occurring after he had told his classmates that Robert was the Trawler and that Robert had died after trying to kill him.

The disappearance interrupted the narrative Bret had been building around the attack at Century Towers. His classmates had listened with horror as he described the incident and showed them the stitches on his chest. Their reactions had made him a celebrated survivor, and his account positioned Robert as the danger from which the school had been saved. Leslie’s abduction, followed by further intrusions, made that version harder to sustain.

Renewed Crimes and the Trawler’s Account

After Leslie disappeared, a number of home invasions began again. They were described as less violent than the attack at Susan Reynolds’s residence on North Canon Drive. The Trawler denied that the North Canon Drive assault was his work, while tacitly acknowledging the other invasions. That distinction complicated the account Bret had presented as settled fact: the Trawler was active, but his own claims did not simply confirm Bret’s accusations against Robert.

A letter to the Los Angeles Times, verified by the Los Angeles Police Department, referred to Robert indirectly as “the God.” It claimed that a sacrifice had been left for him at the Benedict Canyon house he sometimes visited, and identified that sacrifice as Audrey Barbour. The letter described her as the latest in a series beginning with Katherine Latchford and insisted that Robert had committed no wrongdoing. Rather than implicating him, the writer resented the suspicion directed at him and asserted ownership of the crimes and the victims.

The letter also supplied details that altered the meaning of the Benedict Canyon house. The Trawler said he and his friends had soundproofed its basement and that Audrey had been held there for days before her death and discovery. Bret realized, while reading the report, that her body might have been in the house during his own visit. The revelation placed his earlier exploration in proximity to a crime he had not understood at the time.

Robert as the Trawler’s Target

The letters were addressed to Robert as expressions of devotion, not as clear explanations of the crimes. They called him “the God,” claimed that he was being watched, and promised gifts, sacrifices, and treasures around the city, but did not name victims or connect the messages to particular home invasions. Robert had not understood the letters as part of the wider pattern. According to Abigail Mallory, he had at one point suspected they came from “psycho chicks” or a girl he had dated and abandoned after arriving in California.

The newly disclosed pattern showed that Robert had been stalked for almost a year and a half, along with the students closest to him after he arrived at Buckley. The Trawler and his supposed friends had been observing him and leaving messages and gifts, while Robert failed to connect those gestures to the crimes. Leslie’s abduction and the letter about Audrey made the implications clearer: Robert had been made the center of the Trawler’s private mythology, not established as its author.

Bret’s Account and Its Consequences

Abigail publicly disputed Bret’s account of what had happened between Robert and Bret in her condominium on November 7, but she had not witnessed the encounter. Bret’s forceful version nevertheless became the core truth around which the remaining story was understood: Robert might not be the Trawler, but he was still presented as dangerous and as having wanted to harm a student who suspected him. That account could not protect Bret once the Trawler’s later actions made Robert’s victimization more apparent.

Bret’s decline among his classmates began subtly. People stopped greeting him; teachers looked away, and students avoided him at his locker. He stood alone at assembly and no longer found anyone waiting in the senior parking lot or under the bell tower. He was excluded from lunches and from a birthday party Debbie Schaffer hosted for Jeff Taylor. As friends gathered around other tables and made plans without him, Bret recognized that he was becoming an outsider. November 21 therefore marks not only the return of the Trawler’s crimes, but the collapse of the social standing Bret had gained by telling a dramatic, increasingly untenable story.