Snakes

Snakes appear both as animals kept or encountered in ordinary domestic settings and as part of the Trawler’s later crimes. The contrast is central to their significance: an animal first listed among the pets that vanished around targeted homes becomes, in a later revelation, material used to stage a victim’s body.

Early Pattern of Animal Disappearances

In the first wave of home invasions, the people attacked seemed to have little in common, and the apparent randomness made it difficult to know who might be at risk. Animals supplied a recurring clue. Pets of many kinds—including a snake in one instance—disappeared from a victim’s home or from the surrounding neighborhood before an invasion. The early accounts did not yet explain why the animals vanished or what became of them; that connection was made only later.

The pattern was not limited to household pets. The narrative describes neighborhood animals disappearing in advance of an attack and says that, before some assaults, three animals in the same neighborhood were ultimately sacrificed. Snakes therefore belong to a broad, cross-species pattern rather than to an isolated incident, though the evidence does not specify the identity of the snake or the home from which it disappeared.

Domestic Presence

During the summer of 1980, Bret regularly visited Matt Kellner’s pool house, a converted guesthouse on his parents’ Encino estate. The room’s aquarium, television, stereo, drinks, and other familiar possessions establish an environment organized around leisure and private routine. Matt’s cat, Alex, sometimes came in and settled in front of the aquarium. A snake is mentioned separately among the kinds of pets associated with the emerging disappearance pattern; the account does not say that Matt kept one.

This distinction matters because the narrative places animals in more than one register. At Matt’s pool house, the aquarium and Alex are part of the ordinary surroundings of Bret’s visits. Elsewhere, animals become clues to impending violence, and later their bodies are made part of the Trawler’s crimes. Snakes are thus connected to domestic animal life without being assigned an unsupported direct role in Matt’s household.

Use in the Trawler’s Crimes

The clearest later appearance of snakes comes in the account of Audrey Barbour’s body, discovered in a soundproofed room in an abandoned house in Benedict Canyon. Details of the scene emerged gradually; the narrator explains that the extent of the Trawler’s animal alterations was not fully revealed for a year. In the account eventually given, dead snakes whose heads had been cut off were arranged over Audrey’s head like a wig. The snakes were one element of a broader assemblage made from animal remains.

That use transforms the earlier clue without fully explaining it. The disappearance of pets had once indicated that an attack might be coming, while the later revelation showed that animal bodies could be incorporated into the staging of a victim. The text does not identify the snakes used in Audrey’s presentation as the same individual animals that had disappeared from any particular neighborhood. Their recurrence links the pattern and its later explanation, but does not close every evidentiary gap.

Narrative Significance

Snakes occupy a deliberately limited but consequential place in the book’s animal imagery. They are named among the varied pets that could disappear during the home-invasion period, and later appear among the animals used in the Trawler’s presentation of Audrey’s body. The movement from an unexplained disappearance to a revealed use makes the early animal reports seem less incidental, while preserving the uncertainty of what happened in any individual case.

The recurrence also resists reducing animals to a single function. In domestic scenes, animals belong to the routines and surroundings of human characters; in the crimes, animal bodies are treated as components of a violent display. Snakes connect these settings, showing how the Trawler’s violence extends beyond human victims and turns living creatures into both warning signs and objects within the crimes.