The Trawler’s December photo package

The Trawler’s December photo package is a collection of roughly forty black-and-white photographs sent to Bret shortly before Christmas. By arranging scenes from his school life, his trespasses, and Matt’s last night beside images made inside supposedly private homes, the package makes surveillance tangible: someone has watched Bret across years and places, and can reach into the spaces he believed he controlled. Its final photographs of Matt and the mutilated dog Shingy connect that surveillance to the Trawler’s violence without explaining exactly who took the pictures or how every image was obtained.

Delivery and opening

In December, Bret comes home from school on an overcast Thursday afternoon before Christmas break and finds a sealed manila envelope on the kitchen island among the mail and magazines. It is addressed only with his name, misspelled as BRETT with two t’s. Rather than open it in the kitchen, he carries it to his bedroom, locks the door, and sits on the bed before removing the contents. There are about forty black-and-white eight-by-ten photographs; many appear to have been taken with a telephoto lens. The private, deliberate opening establishes the package as an intrusion that Bret cannot immediately share or explain.

A photographic record of Bret

The first five photographs show Bret alone at the top of the bleachers on Gilley Field, then with Robert. The photographer seems to have been in the wooded hills below Beverly Glen on the October day when Robert voiced his suspicions about Bret and Matt. The sequence preserves not merely Bret’s presence, but a conversation and a moment of exposure: someone was positioned to watch an encounter Bret had treated as private.

Other photographs follow Bret to the house on Benedict Canyon. In his school uniform, he stands beside his mother’s Jaguar on the curving stone driveway and looks up at the house; later images show him trying the front-door handle, circling the property, pushing open the wrought-iron gate, stepping out of the 450SL, and slipping through a side door. The succession records a progression from looking to entry, turning his attempted concealment into an observed sequence.

One picture carries Bret back to Haskell Avenue and his final conversation with Matt in the pool house. Taken from the back of a van parked down the street, it shows Bret leaving Matt with a grimace, his face clenched with tears—or, as the image might suggest, anger. The photograph fixes an emotionally ambiguous departure in the watcher’s frame, preserving a moment Bret himself has struggled to contain. Its viewpoint also gives the van a concrete place in the history of the surveillance: it was not only near Matt at Crystal Cove.

Houses entered and made visible

Five photographs depict empty rooms: a living room, a large bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a view through a sliding glass door toward a swimming pool and backyard with a tiled fountain and ficus tree. Bret eventually recognizes the location as his aunt’s house on South Toledo Avenue in Palm Springs. The emptiness does not make the images reassuring. Instead, it shows that the photographer has been inside a house Bret recognizes only after studying its interiors.

Five more photographs were taken inside Bret’s house on Mulholland. They show the garage without the 450SL, the living room, Bret’s bathroom and bedroom, and the comforter where the Maxell tape and Matt’s jockey shorts had been laid out. The images place the watcher among objects tied to Bret’s concealed history with Matt. In bringing those objects into the same photographic archive as the earlier encounters and house entries, the package makes private evidence part of a record assembled by someone else.

Matt, Shingy, and the van

The last series shifts from distant observation to clear medium and close-up portraits of Matt. In one, he stands on a bluff above the Pacific as the sky darkens, wearing a windbreaker and carrying a backpack; someone has drawn a pentagram in black marker on the glossy mat. Another shows him in a deserted parking lot, looking lost but not frightened. A third catches him looking away and half-smiling at someone beyond the frame, at Crystal Cove before nightfall and the bonfire. Bret sees Matt’s face as beautiful and seemingly innocent, but the pictures’ intimate clarity makes the apparent tenderness uneasy: the photographer was close enough to record him without his awareness being evident.

Behind Matt’s shoulder in the Crystal Cove photograph sits the beige van, almost blending into the pale sand and sky, its door fully open and its license plate concealed from view. The word shhhhh is scrawled above Matt. The image makes the van, previously a motif of threat, a visible part of the scene around Matt; the instruction to silence him turns the photograph itself into a menacing message. It does not, by itself, identify the person behind the camera or establish every detail of what happened that night.

The final photograph shows Shingy, a dog Bret recognizes, in a bare white room with a cardboard box behind him. Shingy has no collar and has been shaved below the neck; a red felt-marker pentagram hovers above his cocked head. On closer inspection, Bret sees that one eye is missing and the tail has been cut off. The photograph moves the package beyond watching and into the evidence of deliberate mutilation, while offering no explanation of where Shingy is or what was done to him.

Surveillance without resolution

The package gathers images from Gilley Field, Benedict Canyon, Haskell Avenue, Palm Springs, Bret’s house on Mulholland, and Crystal Cove into one chronology of observation. Some pictures show Bret being followed; others show empty rooms after an intruder has reached the interiors. Together they suggest not a single intercepted encounter but a watcher with sustained access to Bret’s movements and private spaces. The sequence’s reach is especially disturbing because it links Matt’s last night to the same visual archive as Bret’s hidden evidence and Shingy’s mutilation.

The timing gives the photographs further force. By December, Bret has been accused over his account of what happened with Robert, while the Trawler’s stalking and violence have become increasingly difficult to separate from the stories Bret has told about Robert. The envelope arrives before Christmas with no sender identified in the supplied scene, and its images do not settle every question: they make surveillance undeniable but leave the photographer, the exact chain of custody, and the full relation between the pictured events unresolved. Bret’s recollection of the package belongs to the much later account of a fall in 1981 that still haunts him; the images thus survive as both physical evidence and an image-bound return to the past.