Publication of the Trawler’s letter

The publication of the Trawler’s letter in the Los Angeles Times makes the killer’s own account a public event and a new frame for interpreting Los Angeles’s recent violence. For Bret Ellis, the article does more than disclose crimes: its excerpts seem to confirm that the city’s scattered horrors belong to a deliberate pattern. Yet the account is partial, crafted by the killer and filtered by the newspaper, and its omissions leave important questions unresolved.

Background: A City Learning to Read Threats

The letter appears amid the darkening atmosphere that Bret associates with Robert Mallory’s arrival in September 1981. Reports of targeted homes, a cult’s trespassing and later explosives, a sniper in Beverly Hills, a Christmas Eve bomb threat, a dangerous attempted exorcism, a near-fatal prank at a UCLA fraternity party, and other unsettling stories accumulate into a sense that ordinary life has become permeable to violence. The Trawler’s emergence is presented as part of this wider crisis, though Bret hesitates to claim that Robert caused it.

The killer’s identity had not yet been publicly established when the earlier crimes began. The name “The Trawler” originated as a private, lewd joke between two Hollywood-division investigators; a leaked, unredacted line in a police memo then carried the nickname into the few newspaper reports. The joke referred to the killer’s methods and to details associated with Katherine Latchford’s aquarium, but the name was inadequate to the scale of his violence. By the time the press connected the victims, the killer had already been operating in Los Angeles County since Katherine disappeared in June 1980. Julie Selwyn would be identified as his third victim, although readers and the public did not yet know the full pattern.

The newspaper’s earlier reporting on the Riders of the Afterlife offers another relevant context. Bret had read about the group’s young members, their trespassing and confrontations, and their evasive, utopian slogans. Their conspicuous presence made the cult seem threatening even before its later acts were reported. In the novel’s crowded news landscape, the Trawler’s letter does not arrive in a vacuum: it enters a city already trying to turn unrelated incidents into a legible story of danger.

The Article and Its Revelations

Bret encounters the coverage at Buckley, where a front-page row of black-and-white photographs identifies Katherine Latchford, Sarah Johnson, Julie Selwyn, and Audrey Barbour alongside a report about the serial killer haunting the San Fernando Valley. The article says the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Police Department have verified that the letter came from the Trawler. Its continuation fills a page in the Metro section with images of the places where the victims’ bodies were found and excerpts from the letter, some typed and redacted, others handwritten in different-colored pens.

The letter describes the killer and his companions roaming through the city, staying in motels and moving at night. They select neighborhoods and homes, follow young women, and decide which potential victims are suitable for what the Trawler calls a “sacrifice” to “the God.” He describes the victims as “paradises” needed to display what he calls “the alterations,” and presents his activity in Los Angeles as part of a longer continuum. The article’s phrasing makes the crimes sound not like isolated attacks but like a ritualized project with its own vocabulary and sequence.

The published excerpts also describe the intervals between killings. The Trawler’s home invasions and surveillance serve, in his account, as tests of potential targets and a means of managing his paranoia. He portrays the process as structured: driving through selected neighborhoods, choosing a house and its young resident, watching the residence, and searching for animals. Following people, he says, helps keep him in control and distracts him from pain. His claimed distinction between people he attacks and those he ultimately sacrifices further complicates any simple reading of the letter as a straightforward confession of one continuous act.

The article withholds much of what the Trawler describes. It does not specify the materials used in the alterations, and it omits graphic particulars; instead, brief references to bleach, a hacksaw, and Polaroids leave the reader to confront the gaps. The letter says the process could take up to a week, and describes the recorded cries of victims as part of its climax. The Los Angeles Times also makes clear that Audrey Barbour’s case is not confirmed in this article and does not mention Matt Kellner or any male victims. The publication therefore expands the known pattern while marking the limits of what has been disclosed.

Bret’s Encounter with the Story

The article overwhelms Bret because it seems to make the hidden logic of the city visible. He reads the letter’s references to stalking, “the God,” and the planned “sacrifices” as evidence of a secret madness beneath familiar life. At the same time, he is drawn into the details, trying to understand the killer’s motives and the meaning of his ritual language. The account’s horror and its explanatory promise arrive together: it repels Bret, yet he reads as if starving for confirmation.

That confirmation has immediate consequences. Unable to remain at school or follow a conversation at lunch, Bret leaves Buckley for the empty house on Mulholland. He smokes what remains of Jeff Taylor’s marijuana, watches television, and drifts in and out of reality. Later he swims and sits in the unheated Jacuzzi, while his thoughts return to Thom Wright’s departure, Robert, the Trawler, and the relationship he expects to lose. The newspaper story does not resolve his fears; it displaces him from school and deepens his isolation within them.

The article’s omissions matter as much as its revelations. Because it names four female victims but says nothing about Matt, it cannot settle Bret’s suspicions about Matt’s death. Later, Dr. Croft questions Bret about whether Robert accused him of involvement in Matt’s death and whether the two boys might both have active imaginations. Bret’s knowledge of his own intimate history with Matt makes the question personally dangerous, but the publication itself supplies no proof about Matt or Robert. The public account sharpens the mystery without making Bret’s private knowledge reliable evidence.

Public Meaning and Later Revision

The letter initially appears to give Bret a framework for understanding the crimes and the city. But its language is also self-dramatizing: the Trawler describes himself and his companions as watchers, narrates the murders as a continuing project, and assigns Robert the elevated role of “the God.” The newspaper’s excerpted presentation lends this private mythology public force, even as redactions and missing details prevent it from becoming a complete account.

Subsequent revelations overturn the inference that Robert was responsible for the murders. After the Trawler abducts Leslie Slavin, a later verified letter to the Los Angeles Times claims responsibility for Audrey Barbour’s death and refers to Robert indirectly as “the God,” absolving him of wrongdoing. It also says that the Trawler and his companions had soundproofed the basement of the abandoned house in Benedict Canyon, where Audrey had been held before her body was discovered. Bret realizes that her body may have been there when he himself wandered through the house. The Trawler’s letters, he learns, had been messages of surveillance and gifts to Robert, not a clear account of crimes Robert could decipher.

This correction damages the story Bret had imposed on events. Abigail Mallory publicly disputes Bret’s account of what happened between him and Robert, while Bret’s dramatic version continues to serve as a core explanation for Robert’s danger and death. But once the Trawler’s later actions make it clear that Robert was the object of the killer’s obsession rather than the killer himself, Bret’s accusation loses its apparent authority. The publication of the letter is thus both disclosure and misdirection: it makes the Trawler legible enough to influence public belief, while leaving the reader to distinguish the killer’s self-authored narrative from what the evidence can actually establish.