Trawler–Robert Mallory relationship

The Trawler–Robert Mallory relationship is not a partnership but a one-sided fixation: the Trawler and his followers watch Robert, cast him as “the God,” and leave him gifts and sacrifices without making the nature of their crimes clear to him. The letters that later expose this pattern overturn Bret’s account of Robert as the Trawler. They recast Robert as the object of a long-running obsession—and, in the story’s aftermath, as one of its victims.

An unseen audience

Robert’s connection to the Trawler begins with messages sent to him after Katherine Latchford disappeared. The letters, which began in the summer of 1980 and continued into the early fall of 1981, addressed Robert as “the God.” They spoke of being watched over and promised that gifts and sacrifices had been left around the city for him to discover. Their language made the attention sound like adoration, but its repeated insistence that Robert had been spotted and was being watched also made it a form of stalking.

The letters did not name victims or describe crimes. They offered no clear explanation that could have enabled Robert to join them to the disappearances or home invasions. Their withholding matters: what looks to an outside observer like a trail of clues was, for Robert, an opaque and unsettling correspondence. According to Abigail Mallory, he at one point thought the letters might come from “psycho chicks” or from a girl he had dated and then abandoned after moving to California. He did not, she said, understand the connection between the notes and the crimes.

Gifts and sacrifices

The Trawler’s language of gifts gave the surveillance a ritual shape. He called the offerings “treasures” and claimed that he and his friends left them for Robert, while framing Robert as the intended recipient rather than as a participant. The letters’ declarations of devotion therefore conceal a sharp imbalance: the Trawler assigns Robert a symbolic role, but the evidence does not show Robert knowingly accepting or understanding that role.

The most consequential offering was Audrey Barbour. After her body was found in the soundproofed basement of the abandoned house in Benedict Canyon, the Trawler’s letter described her as a sacrifice for “the God.” The Trawler claimed that he and his friends had soundproofed the basement, that Robert sometimes visited the house, and that Audrey had been held there for days before her death and discovery. The connection to a place Robert visited helped fuel suspicion, but the letter itself insisted that the crime belonged to the Trawler and his followers, not to Robert.

The Trawler’s account also linked the offerings to Robert’s classmates. He said he had become “intimate” with many of Robert’s acquaintances, and that his friends had done so too, without identifying those people. He described leaving mementos, photographs, and posters for Robert’s classmates. The claim extends the campaign beyond Robert: his school and social circle had become part of the Trawler’s field of attention, even though the letters withheld the identities and circumstances that would have made that danger legible.

Suspicion and misidentification

Before the letters were publicly understood, Robert’s visits to the Benedict Canyon house and his connections to the crimes made him a focus of suspicion. Bret’s own certainty hardened into accusation. When Dr. Croft questioned whether Bret had something against Robert and asked if Robert had done something to him, Bret called Robert a liar and resisted being compared to him. The scene shows how the dispute over Robert’s credibility was entangled with Bret’s own concealed history and his fear of being implicated in Matt Kellner’s death; it does not establish that Robert committed that crime.

Bret later gave an account of his confrontation with Robert that became the dominant version of what happened on November 7. Abigail publicly disputed Bret’s account, but had not witnessed the confrontation. The force and drama of Bret’s telling nevertheless shaped the surviving story: Robert could be portrayed as dangerous and suicidal, and as someone who wanted to harm a student suspicious of him. That account persisted even as the evidence of the Trawler’s fixation began to undermine the larger accusation that Robert was the killer.

Letters, exoneration, and aftermath

The decisive change came when Abigail released the letters sent to Robert from 1980 through the early fall of 1981. Their consistent voice identified the Trawler as their author. In retrospect, the correspondence revealed not a hidden accomplice communicating with Robert, but a follower’s sustained attention to him. The letters had made Robert their imagined recipient while concealing the crimes and people behind the promises of gifts.

A later letter to the Los Angeles Times, verified by the Los Angeles Police Department, made the Trawler’s claim to the killings explicit and referred to Robert only as “the God.” It rejected suspicion of Robert and expressed resentment that anyone had thought him responsible. The Trawler also claimed Audrey as a sacrifice and said she was the last victim he would offer to the deceased boy he called “the God.” His insistence on credit clarifies the relationship’s grotesque logic: Robert’s symbolic elevation did not make him the author of the crimes; it made him the focus around which the Trawler organized them.

That disclosure did not restore Robert’s reputation cleanly or erase the damage caused by Bret’s account. Bret recognized that Robert had been subjected to the Trawler’s mind games and that he himself had insisted Robert killed people. As the truth shifted, Bret’s own standing at Buckley collapsed: classmates and teachers avoided him, friends no longer included him, and he came to understand himself as an outsider. The relationship therefore has consequences on two levels. It exposes Robert as the target of a prolonged campaign, while showing how an unsupported certainty about that campaign could also distort the story Bret told about himself and others.

The relationship as a false narrative

The Trawler’s letters turn attention into authorship. By naming Robert “the God,” the writer makes him the center of a private mythology, then leaves offerings that appear to connect him to violence without plainly explaining their source. The gap between the letters’ devotion and their concealment is the relationship’s defining feature: Robert is watched and assigned a role, but the evidence describes him as failing to recognize the pattern.

That gap also unsettles the competing narratives told about Robert. His psychiatric treatment the previous spring became another point of dispute when Susan described it as time spent at a “developmental center”; Bret recast the phrase as institutionalization and an asylum, while Susan objected to his embellishment. Those labels do not establish the Trawler’s claims or Robert’s guilt. Against Bret’s confident accusations, the letters supply a different account: the person who watched Robert and called him divine was the one claiming responsibility for the sacrifices, while Robert’s place in the story was that of a watched, manipulated figure whose role had been written for him by someone else.