Trawler–Bret Ellis relationship

The Trawler–Bret Ellis relationship is a hidden contest over who controls the story of the violence surrounding Robert Mallory. The Trawler’s surveillance makes Bret an observed subject long before Bret understands the scale of the attention; later, a package of photographs turns that unseen presence into material evidence. Its images link Bret’s movements across several locations to the Trawler’s broader campaign, while revealing that the apparent pursuit of Robert had also reached the people around him. The eventual exposure of the Trawler’s letters shifts the meaning of that attention: Bret had not uncovered a straightforward trail to Robert’s guilt, but had become entangled in a network that watched, manipulated, and left objects for its chosen targets.

A relationship formed through surveillance

The evidence does not establish a face-to-face encounter between Bret and the Trawler. Instead, their connection emerges through observation and the Trawler’s communications. In a letter, the Trawler says that he and his friends had become intimate with acquaintances of Robert and had left gifts for Robert’s classmates, including mementos, photographs, and posters. Bret’s later discovery of photographs documenting his own movements gives those claims a personal and unsettling force: he is among the people the network has watched, even though he was not the center of its stated devotion.

The Trawler’s letters had been sent to Robert from the summer of 1980 into the early fall of 1981. They repeatedly told Robert that he and his friends were watching over him, had spotted him in different places, and were leaving gifts and sacrifices around the city. The letters did not name victims or explain the home invasions, and Robert did not connect them to the crimes. He reportedly thought the writers might be obsessive women or a former girlfriend. This gap between what the Trawler’s messages implied and what Robert understood helps explain how the network could remain hidden while operating close to him and his classmates.

The December photographs

Before Christmas break, Bret finds a manila envelope on the kitchen island, addressed to him with his name misspelled. He takes it to his bedroom, locks the door, and discovers a collection of roughly forty black-and-white photographs, many made with a telephoto lens. The sequence records Bret at Gilley Field with Robert, then at the house in Benedict Canyon: standing by his mother’s Jaguar, testing the front-door handle, moving around the property, opening the gate, and entering through a side door. The photographs make ordinary movements read as a record assembled by someone who had followed Bret’s presence around Robert’s life.

Other images extend the record beyond that house. One shows Bret leaving Matt Kellner at the pool house on Haskell Avenue, a moment he recognizes as their last conversation. Several empty-room photographs turn out to depict his aunt’s house in Palm Springs. Five more were taken inside the house on Mulholland, including images of the garage, living room, bathroom, and bedroom; one shows a comforter with a Maxell tape and Matt’s shorts laid out on it. Together, these pictures show that the surveillance had reached multiple private settings and preserved traces of Bret’s connections to Robert and Matt. The photographs establish the breadth of the intrusion, but do not by themselves identify who took each image or prove every inference Bret draws from the collection.

Matt, the van, and the warning

The final photographs connect the surveillance directly to the past Bret shares with Matt. They show Matt on a bluff above the Pacific and in a deserted parking lot at Crystal Cove. In the parking-lot image, a beige van is visible behind him, positioned so that its license plate cannot be seen. Bret recognizes the location as Crystal Cove before nightfall, when Matt was there before the bonfire. Across another photograph, someone has written “shhhhh.” The image turns a previously inconspicuous vehicle into a detail associated with the Trawler’s concealed observation, while the word frames the package as a warning to keep silent.

A last photograph depicts Shingy in a bare room, without his collar and with his coat removed beneath the neck. The image also shows that the dog has lost an eye and his tail, and a pentagram has been drawn above his head. Its inclusion places the animal’s mistreatment within the same photographic package as the records of Bret, Robert, and Matt. The package does not merely document places Bret has been: it juxtaposes his private history with images of harm, making the act of watching itself threatening.

Exposure and reversal

The letters ultimately recast the relationship. The Trawler claims responsibility for Audrey Barbour’s death and other attacks, and says that he and his associates watched Robert and approached his acquaintances. The letters had not supplied Robert with enough specific information to connect their threats and promised gifts to the crimes. Once Abigail releases them, their consistent voice identifies the Trawler as the sender and helps exonerate Robert. The same evidence that reveals a prolonged surveillance campaign therefore undermines Bret’s confident accusation that Robert was responsible for the murders.

Bret’s account of what happened between him and Robert remains disputed: Abigail publicly challenges his version, while Bret’s dramatic story becomes the central account for a time. But the Trawler’s later claims and the letters’ history expose the weakness of treating that account as settled truth. Bret becomes a pariah after the Trawler abducts Leslie Slavin and claims Audrey’s death, as it becomes clear that Robert was a target of the Trawler’s mind games rather than the killer Bret had insisted he was. The relationship’s decisive consequence is thus both personal and narrative: Bret discovers that he, too, was watched, while the Trawler’s evidence overturns the interpretation through which Bret had tried to explain the surrounding violence.