Joel Bremmer (b. 1958) was the police reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He was raised in a suburb of Austin, Texas by his mother in a single-parent home, seeing his father, an itinerant blues-musician, once or twice a year at most. His mother was described as "a disciplinarian and plain mean-spirited when it came to her son"; she died of complications stemming from alcoholism in 1972. At that time, he was sent to a state boys' farm, where he wrote for a student newspaper. Bosch described him as overweight, with thinning hair and a thick beard.