📌 In This Deep Dive
While The Trawler in The Shards is a fictional creation by Bret Easton Ellis, his gruesome home invasions and ritualistic animal sacrifices draw directly from true 1980s Los Angeles crime history: from Westside predator Brandon Tholmer to the Hillside Stranglers and rising Satanic panic, the series captures the genuine paranoia that gripped California suburbs in 1981. Here is a look at the real-life serial killers, cult rumors, and true crime cases that inspired Ellis’s unsettling story.
Early 1980s Los Angeles, real locations, the music playing back then, and that distinct atmosphere we’ve already experienced through other movies and shows, created by people who actually lived through those times firsthand. The FX and Hulu series The Shards is based on Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 novel, bringing another promising screen adaptation of his dark crime stories after that formula worked so well with American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction.
Because the story feels so grounded and realistic, told directly from the protagonist’s first-person perspective, it naturally makes you wonder how much truth lies behind the serial killer terrorizing Los Angeles in the show. Dubbed The Trawler, the killer in The Shards targets victims in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, blending his murders with Satanic-tinged rituals and animal sacrifices. The show itself explicitly points it out, the 1980s were basically the golden age of serial killers, so the question comes up naturally: is The Trawler real? And who are the actual serial killers from that era who inspired this deeply disturbing figure?
Is The Trawler Based On A Real Serial Killer? The True Story Behind The Shards
The Shards inherits the real-world setting of early 1980s Los Angeles. The main character, Bret, is a direct reflection of the author as a young man, and the locations shown in both the book and the series are pulled straight from his actual adolescence. But as the show itself makes clear, and as Ellis has confirmed in plenty of interviews, The Trawler is purely fictional, designed to turn the eerie atmosphere of those years into a story of fear and bloodshed.
That doesn’t mean Bret Easton Ellis didn’t draw inspiration from real-life serial killers when creating The Trawler, though. The concept of a serial killer stalking those specific neighborhoods wasn’t just made up out of nowhere. Those years were genuinely shaped by widespread fear, with real killers operating across that exact area for extended periods.
The two real serial killers who come closest to The Trawler in The Shards are Brandon Tholmer, known as “The West Side Rapist,” and the Hillside Stranglers (Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr.). Both of these cases unfolded in the Los Angeles area right around that time, spreading terror through the community in much the same way as the events we see play out in The Shards.
Brandon Tholmer: “The West Side Rapist” and L.A. Paranoia
Brandon Tholmer was active right around 1980 and 1981, haunting the exact West Los Angeles neighborhoods where Bret Easton Ellis grew up. Dubbed “The West Side Rapist,” Tholmer targeted women in affluent residential areas like Brentwood, Bel-Air, and Westwood. What made him so terrifying to the local community was his method: he didn’t just strike in dark alleys, he invaded homes, stalked his targets, and shattered the belief that wealth and gated properties could keep people safe.
As this 1986 report from the Los Angeles Times archives points out, Tholmer primarily targeted elderly women in the neighborhood, but the panic he sparked hit people of all ages.
Tholmer was eventually convicted of four murders and dozens of sexual assaults. His spree created a heavy, suffocating paranoia throughout Westside LA during the exact years Ellis was attending the Buckley School. When you look at how The Trawler operates in The Shards, invading pristine homes and targeting wealthy teenagers in Benedict Canyon, Tholmer’s real-life terror campaign is easily the closest geographical and psychological twin to the show’s fictional killer.
The Hillside Stranglers: The Lingering Trauma of the Canyons
Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr., known together as the Hillside Stranglers, terrorized Los Angeles between late 1977 and early 1979. Though they were arrested a couple of years before 1981, the psychological scar they left on the city was still fresh during the exact time The Shards takes place.
Operating as a duo, they kidnapped, tortured, and murdered young women, leaving their bodies dumped along the hillsides and steep roads across Los Angeles, including areas surrounding Benedict Canyon. For teenagers living in those wealthy hillside enclaves, the winding, dimly lit canyon roads at night suddenly felt deeply unsafe.
In The Shards, The Trawler treating the geography of Los Angeles like his personal dark playground echoes that exact kind of fear. The Hillside Stranglers permanently changed how LA residents viewed the hills above the city, proving that those scenic, isolated driveways weren’t just private hideaways for the rich, but also ideal territory for a predator.
The Satanic Element and Animal Sacrifices: Real-Life American Crime Stories
As the plot of The Shards unfolds, we learn that The Trawler doesn’t just kill young women indiscriminately. His ritual involves kidnapping the victims’ pets and dismembering their bodies alongside their owners in a distinctly Satanic procedure. And this, too, is obviously inspired by true crime cases that actually happened in the United States during the 1980s.
The most famous cases of serial killers who tied their crimes to animal killings involve two names that anyone who has read our book Disturbed knows well: Richard Trenton Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento, and the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz.
Richard Trenton Chase earned his terrifying nickname, the “Vampire of Sacramento,” because he consumed the blood of his human victims.But that horrific practice started with animals years before he ever targeted a person: Chase was convinced that he needed the vital force of living creatures to survive, so he began capturing, torturing, and killing small animals, birds, and pets, often blending their remains or drinking their blood raw. When killing animals was no longer enough, he escalated to home invasions and murder, leaving behind crime scenes that deeply shocked California in the late 1970s.
David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” who terrorized New York between 1976 and 1977, became famous for an entirely different kind of connection to animals. Following his arrest, Berkowitz famously claimed that he carried out his shooting spree because his neighbor’s dog was possessed by a demon ordering him to kill. However, beyond that headline-grabbing claim, investigators and journalists later uncovered a trail of real animal violence around Untermyer Park in Yonkers: police reports from that exact era documented mutilated dogs found in the woods near the park, fueling claims that Berkowitz was tied to an underground occult group and heavily feeding the initial wave of Satanic Panic that swept America right into the early 1980s.
The idea that many serial killers were driven by a Satanic mission obviously stems from how high-profile crimes were perceived back then. That specific narrative really spread after Charles Manson was arrested, a killer who had a devoted group of followers and a clear ideological mission, even if Satanism wasn’t actually behind it. But after the tragic murder of Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, making a Satanic connection felt natural to people, largely because of the movie Polanski was famous for at the time, Rosemary’s Baby.
From this perspective, the Riders of the Afterlife Satanic cult in The Shards takes inspiration from real-life occult groups that operated with that exact kind of intent. The most famous examples are probably The Ripper Crew, active in Chicago between 1981 and 1982, the cult behind the Fall River murders covered in the 2021 documentary Fall River, and The Children, the group David Berkowitz allegedly belonged to, according to the story uncovered by journalist Maury Terry and documented in Netflix’s Sons of Sam.
Ultimately, it’s hard to call The Shards and The Trawler purely fictional: plenty of true crime cases from the early 1980s mirror the murders we see on screen, with some unfolding in the exact Los Angeles neighborhoods featured in the book and show. Real history runs deep through the plot of The Shards, and if it feels like you’re watching a true story unfold, it’s because American crime back then was packed with killers operating in strikingly similar ways.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, The Shards is a fictional thriller written by Bret Easton Ellis. While the story features a fictionalized version of Ellis as a teenager in 1981 Los Angeles and uses real locations, high schools, and period music, the serial killer storyline and main characters are fictional.
No, The Trawler is a fictional serial killer created for The Shards. However, his pattern of invading upscale Los Angeles homes, targeting teenagers, and leaving ritualistic animal remains draws heavy inspiration from real 1980s criminals like Brandon Tholmer (“The West Side Rapist”) and Richard Trenton Chase (“The Vampire of Sacramento”).
No. Bret Easton Ellis attended The Buckley School in Sherman Oaks during the early 1980s, but the mystery surrounding new student Robert Mallory and his connection to a string of murders is purely a narrative plot device invented for the book and series.
The fictional cult featured in The Shards is called the Riders of the Afterlife. They represent the ambient “Satanic Panic” that swept through American suburban communities during the late 1970s and 1980s following high-profile crimes like the Manson Family murders.
