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WORK TITLE: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 4/14/1970-4/21/2016
WEBSITE: http://truecrimediary.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Deceased wife of comedian Patton Oswalt.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born April 14, 1970; died April 21, 2016, in Los Angeles, CA; daughter of Thomas W. and Rita Rigney McNamara; married Patton Oswalt (a comedian), September 24, 2005; children: Alice.
EDUCATION:University of Notre Dame, B.A., 1992; University of Minnesota, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Investigative writer.
WRITINGS
Author of the TrueCrimeDiary blog; contributor to Los Angeles.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is being adapted into an HBO documentary series.
SIDELIGHTS
Michelle McNamara was an investigative writer who focused years of her life on the crimes of the Golden State Killer. She grew up in the Midwest in a large Irish Catholic family and was influenced from an early age by the unsolved murder of a family friend. McNamara died unexpectedly from an undiagnosed heart condition in 2016 while working on her first book.
McNamara’s book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, was posthumously published in 2018. The account looks into the crimes of the Golden State Killer who raped fifty women and killed another twelve in the 1970s and 1980s in San Francisco’s East Bay. McNamara turned her attention to the DNA evidence in 2011 that began to link these crimes to an unknown individual. After her death, her husband, Patton Oswalt, and investigative journalist Billy Jensen and researcher Paul Haynes continued her work by piecing together what she had written and following the leads she had traced. In an article in the New York Times Book Review, Oswalt confessed after his wife’s death concerning the unfinished state of her investigation: “Knowing how horrible this guy was, there was this feeling of, you’re not going to silence another victim. Michelle died, but her testimony is going to get out there.”
In a separate article in the New York Times Book Review, Hayes admitted that “it’s a very ambitious book to write, about a case like this with a scope as vast as it is. … The question was, what holes should we attempt to patch.” In the same article, Alexandra Alter explained that “rather than attempting to mimic her voice and flesh out fragmentary chapters, or condense her sprawling research into a taut true crime narrative, Mr. Haynes and Mr. Jensen let the jagged edges of the unfinished project show. They preserved her completed chapters,” while “some sections read like raw, unfiltered research.”
In an interview in Rolling Stone, Oswalt talked with Josh Modell about the role McNamara and her book played in helping to break the case of the Golden State Killer. Oswalt asserted that I’ll Be Gone in the Dark “put way more light and attention on this case. Even before she passed away, there were suddenly news reports about it. 48 Hours did a piece after she passed away, and there was a lot more activity on the message boards. So of course it increased attention. I’m not trying to minimize the work of the police and the investigators at all. I know what they went through. Michelle was interviewing those guys for years. She knew the decades of frustration. But I certainly think that the book helped.”
Booklist contributor Kathy Sexton noted that although the book’s posthumous completion “makes for occasionally disjointed reading, it’s a small distraction from McNamara’s impressive gifts for language and storytelling.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly claimed that “with its exemplary mix of memoir and reportage, this remarkable book is a modern true crime classic.” The same reviewer called McNamara’s investigation into this story “indefatigable.” Writing in Entertainment Weekly, David Canfield claimed that “there’s a twinge of melancholy here, given the firsthand nature of McNamara’s writing. In the way she mulls over her obsession with the mysterious and the unseemly, her narration is essential: You can practically smell her laptop overheating in the dark of the night, see her eyes flicker at the news of a clue, feel every beat in her painstaking research methods.”
Reviewing the book in the London Guardian, Jeremy Lybarger commented that “some of McNamara’s most arresting passages detail the copycat strip malls and subdivisions that replaced orange groves and lush farmland.” Lybarger appended that “this hangover feeling is part of the larger tragedy that the book documents. More than 8,000 suspects were investigated as part of the Golden State Killer case. Detectives crisscrossed the country to retrieve DNA samples and follow leads. Yet the killer was never caught or even identified. Even decades after retirement, some detectives are unable to shake the case.” Lybarger recalled that in the book’s epilogue, “McNamara sketches a hypothetical but hopeful scene in which a car pulls up to the kerb and detectives emerge to finally arrest the monster who has eluded them for more than 40 years. You can’t help but believe that had McNamara lived, that outcome might have been a little more likely.”
Writing in Spectator, Suzi Feay reasoned that “the killer’s evasion of justice is of huge significance in the real world, but the lack of closure doesn’t harm the book. In her introduction, Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, puts it succinctly: ‘I want him captured; I don’t care who he is.’ The reasoning behind the acts of what Patton Oswalt calls ‘a wounded, destructive insect’ can only be banal; this chilling, empathetic account is anything but.” In an article in USA Today, Marco della Cava mentioned that “if there is a criticism about McNamara’s otherwise scintillating work, it’s the book’s disjointed structure. We rocket back to the past for the crimes and zip to the present for conversations with experts. We race up and down California incessantly. The antidote, however, is McNamara’s poignant prose.”
In a review in Slate, Laura Miller recorded that “criminals, no matter how banal the details of their actual lives, fascinate. Once the identity of a notorious transgressor becomes known, he sucks up all the air in the room. The lack of a ‘who’ at the end of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark forecloses any focus on a traditional ‘why’—although you can make some educated guesses about the motives of a man who would do the things this man did.” Miller clarified: “Instead, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark blossoms into a masterful accounting of what might at first seem like a minor issue: where. We’re used to thinking of crime as the product of psychological, historical, and social factors, but in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark McNamara skillfully demonstrates the role geography and architecture played in shaping the Golden State Killer’s reign of terror.” Miller insisted: “Had she lived, McNamara might have helped identify the man who committed that violence, but before she died, she did something nearly as miraculous: making them all live again in some small way.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Kathy Sexton, review of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, p. 5.
Entertainment Weekly, June 3, 2018, David Canfield, review of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.
Guardian (London, England), March 21, 2018, Jeremy Lybarger, review of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.
New York Times Book Review, February 15, 2018, Alexandra Alter, “Michelle McNamara Hunted, and Was Haunted by, the Golden State Killer,” p. C1.
Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2018, review of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, p. 184.
Rolling Stone, April 27, 2018, Josh Modell, “Golden State Killer: Patton Oswalt on Michelle McNamara, Catching a Serial Killer.”
Spectator, March 24, 2018, Suzi Feay, “Getting Away with Murder,” p. 41.
USA Today, February 28, 2018, Marco della Cava, “One Writer’s Obsession with a Serial Killer,” p. 2D.
ONLINE
Slate, https://slate.com/ (March 14, 2018), Laura Miller, “Michelle McNamara’s Search for Truth.”
6/3/2018 Michelle McNamara Hunted, and Was Haunted by, the Golden State Killer - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/books/michelle-mcnamara-patton-oswalt-book-serial-killer.html 1/8
BOOKS NEWS
Michelle McNamara Hunted, and
Was Haunted by, the Golden State
Killer
By Alexandra Alter
Feb. 15, 2018
Three days before she died, Michelle McNamara typed some notes in a cryptic to-do list on her
laptop.
Among the looming tasks: “Find out from Debbi D about flashlight.” “Find out from Ken exactly
what he meant about the husband or the guy in the clown suit walking down the street.”
The list cataloged potential clues she planned to chase down as she completed her book, “I’ll Be
Gone in the Dark,” an exhaustive investigation into the identity of the Golden State Killer, who
committed upward of 50 sexual assaults and at least 10 murders in California in the 1970s and
1980s.
She never finished it. On April 21, 2016, her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, found her dead
in the bedroom of their Los Angeles home. An autopsy showed that Ms. McNamara, who was 46,
had an undiagnosed heart condition, and had taken a dangerous mix of prescription drugs,
including Adderall, the pain narcotic Fentanyl and the anti-anxiety medication Xanax.
The story that she spent the last five years of her life obsessively researching was half written,
the gruesome mystery still unsolved. After losing his wife, Mr. Oswalt couldn’t bear the thought of
her work languishing.
“This book had to be finished,” he said in a telephone interview. “Knowing how horrible this guy
was, there was this feeling of, you’re not going to silence another victim. Michelle died, but her
testimony is going to get out there.”
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6/3/2018 Michelle McNamara Hunted, and Was Haunted by, the Golden State Killer - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/books/michelle-mcnamara-patton-oswalt-book-serial-killer.html 2/8
Shortly after her death, Mr. Oswalt recruited Billy Jensen, an investigative journalist, and Paul
Haynes, who worked closely with Ms. McNamara on the book as a researcher, to comb through
her handwritten notes and the roughly 3,500 files on her computer and piece together the story
she set out to tell.
6/3/2018 Michelle McNamara Hunted, and Was Haunted by, the Golden State Killer - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/books/michelle-mcnamara-patton-oswalt-book-serial-killer.html 3/8
6/3/2018 Michelle McNamara Hunted, and Was Haunted by, the Golden State Killer - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/books/michelle-mcnamara-patton-oswalt-book-serial-killer.html 4/8
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
“I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” due out Feb. 27, is both a vivid and meticulous investigation of a
twisted predator who terrorized quiet, upper middle-class communities in California for nearly a
decade, and a wrenching personal account from a writer who became consumed by her subject.
It’s drawn accolades from some of the country’s top crime and horror writers, including Stephen
King, Michael Connelly, Megan Abbott and Gillian Flynn, who wrote an introduction to the book.
The tragedy of Ms. McNamara’s death became a meta-narrative running through the book. Its
pages are punctuated with recurring editor’s notes that serve as a reminder that the author, who
is so palpably present on the page, is absent from the world. She wrote frankly about the
psychological toll the project took on her, how immersing herself in the grisly details left her
emotionally frayed. “There’s a scream permanently lodged in my throat now,” Ms. McNamara
wrote.
Rather than attempting to mimic her voice and flesh out fragmentary chapters, or condense her
sprawling research into a taut true crime narrative, Mr. Haynes and Mr. Jensen let the jagged
edges of the unfinished project show. They preserved her completed chapters, which recount the
killer’s attacks in unsparing detail and examine his methodology, and explore her own fascination
with unsolved crimes and her evolution as an amateur detective. Other chapters were pieced
together from her notes, and are marked with disclaimers. Some sections read like raw, unfiltered
research: one mesmerizing chapter consists entirely of a transcript from Ms. McNamara’s
interview with Paul Holes, a criminalist in the Contra Costa sheriff’s office.
6/3/2018 Michelle McNamara Hunted, and Was Haunted by, the Golden State Killer - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/books/michelle-mcnamara-patton-oswalt-book-serial-killer.html 5/8
Patton Oswalt and Michelle McNamara in December 2011. Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
6/3/2018 Michelle McNamara Hunted, and Was Haunted by, the Golden State Killer - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/books/michelle-mcnamara-patton-oswalt-book-serial-killer.html 6/8
Toward the end of the book, just as Ms. McNamara’s investigation seems to be gaining
momentum and the killer’s hazy profile begins to come into focus, it grinds to a halt. An editor’s
note explains how, after Ms. McNamara died, Mr. Haynes and Mr. Jensen were brought in to “tie
up loose ends and organize the materials Michelle left behind.” In that final section, Mr. Haynes
and Mr. Jensen lay out some of the avenues that Ms. McNamara had planned to explore. They
describe what they found on her laptop — old maps and aerial photographs of Goleta, the site of
multiple murders, images of shoe prints found at crime scenes, and a spreadsheet with names
and addresses of men who competed on a 1976 high school cross-country team (she thought the
perpetrator might be a runner, based on victims’s descriptions of his muscular legs). They
explore the potential for using D.N.A. and genealogy databases to identify the killer’s family,
which Ms. McNamara believed was the best route for finding a criminal who had evaded
investigators for four decades.
It took Mr. Haynes and Mr. Jensen about a year to put the book together, and one can feel their
frustration at wrestling with all of the evidence and theories that Ms. McNamara compiled, and
still coming up empty.
Mr. Haynes, who worked closely with Ms. McNamara for several years, was stunned and
devastated by her death, he said. He also had to wrestle with the sweeping territory Ms.
McNamara intended to cover.
“It’s a very ambitious book to write, about a case like this with a scope as vast as it is,” Mr.
Haynes said. “The question was, what holes should we attempt to patch?”
Ms. McNamara became fascinated with unsolved crimes when she was growing up in Oak Park,
Ill., the youngest of six siblings in a large Irish Catholic family. When Ms. McNamara was 14, a
young woman named Kathleen Lombardo was murdered near the McNamaras’s home. More
curious than afraid, Ms. McNamara went to the alley where the body was found, and picked up
shards of the victim’s broken Walkman. The killer was never caught.
She was living in Los Angeles and writing screenplays and TV pilots when she met Mr. Oswalt in
2003, at one of his comedy shows. They went on a few dates and bonded over their shared
obsession with serial killers. They got married a couple of years later, and Mr. Oswalt urged her to
channel her grim hobby into writing. In 2006, she launched her website, True Crime Diary, where
she chronicled hundreds of unsolved crimes.
In 2011, she wrote on her blog about a string of unsolved rapes and murders from the 1970s and
1980s that were committed by an unidentified man who was known as the East Area Rapist and
the Original Night Stalker. “I’m obsessed,” she wrote. “It’s not healthy.” For a true crime addict,
the case was tantalizingly complex. So much was known about his methods and even his
psychology, yet the killer had thwarted investigators for decades. He was a meticulous planner
who stalked his targets in advance, learning their daily routines before breaking into their homes.
6/3/2018 Michelle McNamara Hunted, and Was Haunted by, the Golden State Killer - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/books/michelle-mcnamara-patton-oswalt-book-serial-killer.html 7/8
He brought his own precut ligatures to tie victims up, and always wore a mask. He stole objects
that had sentimental value for the victims, like engraved jewelry and class rings. He grew
increasingly confident, and went from assaulting women who were home alone to attacking
couples in their bedrooms. She gave him a catchier name: the Golden State Killer.
Law enforcement drawings of the Golden State Killer presented at a news conference in
Sacramento in June 2016. Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
Ms. McNamara wrote about the case for Los Angeles magazine, and signed a book deal with
Harper several months later.
The research consumed her, and began to weigh on her. She suffered from insomnia and anxiety.
Once, she panicked because she woke up to a scraping sound: A neighbor was dragging his trash
can to the curb in the middle of the night, Mr. Oswalt said. Another time, when Mr. Oswalt tiptoed
into their bedroom, trying not to wake her, she mistook him for an intruder and jumped out of bed
and swung a lamp at his head. She felt an obligation to solve the case, and was devastated each
time she developed a promising theory or zeroed in on a suspect but failed to find sufficient
evidence.
“She had overloaded her mind with information with very dark implications,” Mr. Oswalt said.
6/3/2018 Michelle McNamara Hunted, and Was Haunted by, the Golden State Killer - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/books/michelle-mcnamara-patton-oswalt-book-serial-killer.html 8/8
Mr. Oswalt wasn’t aware of all the prescriptions she was taking or what the medications were for,
he said. Both of them led busy work lives and were devoted parents to their then 7-year-old
daughter, Alice, and Ms. McNamara seemed to be managing the stress. It wasn’t until he saw the
coroner’s report months after her death that he realized that Ms. McNamara was coping in part
by taking prescription drugs.
“It’s so clear that the stress led her to make some bad choices in terms of the pharmaceuticals she
was using,” he said. “She just took this stuff on, and she didn’t have the years of being a hardened
detective to compartmentalize it.”
Mr. Oswalt, who married the actress Meredith Salenger last year, said he still thinks there’s a
chance the killer will eventually be caught, due in part to the work Ms. McNamara did and the
attention it brought to a decades old cold case.
Ms. McNamara believed that too. In a letter to the killer that appears at the end of “I’ll Be Gone in
the Dark,” she addresses him directly, and says it’s only a matter of time until officers arrive at his
door. “This is how it ends for you,” she writes.
Follow Alexandra Alter on Twitter: @xanalter.
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A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2018, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hunting (and Haunted by) a Serial Killer
Golden State Killer: Patton Oswalt on Michelle McNamara, Catching a Serial Killer
The "sleep-deprived, exhilarated" comedian and actor on his late wife, her life's work and how a serial killer might finally be brought to justice
Michelle McNamara passed away in 2016, before she finished writing her true-crime investigation into the Golden State Killer. Matt Sayles/AP/REX/Shutterstock
By Josh Modell
April 27, 2018
Patton Oswalt has had an insane two days, but really, the insanity began years ago. Michelle McNamara, his investigative-journalist wife, died unexpectedly in 2016, leaving the actor/comedian a single father and leaving her life's work unfinished. Then Oswalt, along with a couple of McNamara's colleagues, Billy Jensen and Paul Haynes, completed I'll Be Gone in the Dark, her gripping, obsessive true-crime book about a monster she had dubbed the "Golden State Killer." McNamara had faith that the man, who was responsible for 12 murders and more than 50 rapes, would eventually be brought to justice. And she was convinced that old DNA evidence – the crimes took place between 1976 and 1986 – coupled with new technology would play a key role in ending the story.
RELATED
'Golden State Killer' Suspect Arrested: What We Know
Police appear close to breakthrough on a case that's remained unsolved for decades
This week – on the very day that an HBO documentary series based on her book began filming, and almost exactly two years to the day after her death – McNamara might have been proved right. The alleged killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, was arrested and charged with two of the murders, and authorities have reportedly linked him to the rest via DNA evidence, using information from a "commercial online genealogy database," according to The New York Times. It was almost exactly as she predicted. As Haynes and Jensen wrote in the book, "The idea that the answer to this mystery is probably hiding in the databases of 23AndMe.com and Ancestry.com kept Michelle up at night."
Early the morning after the arrest, Oswalt's phone began to light up as the news broke. He caught a plane to New York, where an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers gave the slightly bewildered comic a chance to process some of his emotions and pay tribute to McNamara. Rolling Stone caught up with him just after he landed back home in Los Angeles on Thursday; he was exhausted, slightly jubilant and a bit stern, sometimes all in the same sentence –an understandable combination of emotions considering the particularly unusual web he'd crawled through in 48 hours.
Can you walk me through what your day was like on Wednesday, when the news first broke that an arrest had been made?
I kinda tweeted it all out! Tuesday I was in Chicago doing a book event, which was also being filmed for this HBO documentary. The whole [McNamara] family was there. We talked about the book, talked about the case – me, Billy Jensen, Paul Haynes. One of us said, "Time's running out for this guy." We went to bed around 11, then Wednesday morning around 4 a.m., texts start pinging in. "They caught this guy, it seems real." The rest of the day was airport, New York, interviews, calling people, answering texts. You can imagine.
[Before the arrest,] did you actually feel like things were closing in, that "time was running out" for the killer?
I didn't feel like things were closing in at all. I was just being hopeful about it. I didn't have any information or intuition about anything.
I'll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara
McNamara's book, 'I'll Be Gone in the Dark,' was published earlier this year.
At the press conference announcing Joseph DeAngelo's arrest, a reporter asked whether Michelle's book had anything to do with the case being solved, and the answer from authorities was essentially that no, it hadn't. People on Twitter, including you, feel that that's not entirely true. In your mind, what did Michelle's work do to help bring him to justice?
It put way more light and attention on this case. Even before she passed away, there were suddenly news reports about it. 48 Hours did a piece after she passed away, and there was a lot more activity on the message boards. So of course it increased attention. I'm not trying to minimize the work of the police and the investigators at all. I know what they went through. Michelle was interviewing those guys for years. She knew the decades of frustration. But I certainly think that the book helped.
In her Los Angeles Magazine article from 2013 about the case, Michelle wrote that naming these types of killers was important to catching them. "Marketing matters," she wrote, and she coined the name "Golden State Killer" for a person who had been called a lot of confusing names up until that point.
It's important to have an evocative name that lands, rather than a mish-mash of acronyms, which is going to happen in a case that's this long, and happening in that many jurisdictions, where they don't share information. And they didn't know these crimes were linked by DNA until the Nineties, when DNA [testing] came out. So there were a whole bunch of reasons that he ended up having the names that he had. They were trying to get the "East Area Rapist" thing going again at the press conference, but it quickly turned into "Golden State Killer," because that's what everyone knows him as now. And that's the name Michelle gave him.
Did Michelle have any private theories about who the killer might be that she didn't feel comfortable putting in the book?
I don't think she was comfortable with theories. She wasn't going to say a theory unless she had facts to back it up. She had some wide-ranging ideas of what his profession might be, but as far as a specific person, no. She didn't like to speculate. She wanted facts before she moved.
You mentioned a couple times that you might want to meet DeAngelo at some point.
I'm certainly not a courageous man. I would just bring the questions that she has at the end of her book, and just ask him those. If that ever happened, it would happen years down the line. This guy's gotta go through trials. But it would be nice to get answers to those questions. I'm not bloodthirsty. I don't want to gloat or gawk at the guy. If an opportunity came up I would certainly take it, just for her sake.
I assume this development is going to completely change the scope of the HBO documentary.
It's a completely different storyline now. We don't know which way it's going to go. We're going to talk about that next week. We have no idea. That was the first day of filming, the day before he got caught. It's gonna become very interesting.
What, if anything, does your daughter Alice know about all this?
I haven't told her yet. I've been traveling, and I don't want to tell her over Facetime or e-mail. She's 9. I'll probably tell her tomorrow in the afternoon. I'm going to pick her up from school and we'll talk. She knew what Michelle did, but tomorrow I can lay some stuff out. When she's older – much older – she can read the book and see that her mom was kind of a hero. She was a voice for the voiceless.
How do you think Michelle would have reacted to the news?
I would never insult her by trying to predict what her reaction would be. She was way too complex a person for me to do that. That was one of the reasons I loved her so much, she was so unpredictable. She would have had 50 different emotions every minute.
What about you? How would you describe your emotions over the past couple of days?
I'll know that in a couple of days. I'm still in sleep-deprived, numb, exhilarated mode. I honestly don't know. I'll know in a few days.
I'll call you back in a few days, then.
[Laughs.] Okay! Follow up!
Michelle McNamara’s Search for Truth
The true-crime writer died while hunting for a killer. Her final book is a testament to her gifts.
By LAURA MILLER
MARCH 14, 20182:23 PM
Drawing of houses with a silhouette of a female detective in front.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Thinkstock.
Great true-crime writers tend to fall into one of two schools. The first are detectives, gifted at both finding overlooked information and synthesizing old data to arrive at new insights. They excel at taking a scrambled heap of loose facts and shaping it into a narrative that makes sense. Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven), Dave Cullen (Columbine), and Errol Morris (the film The Thin Blue Line but also the book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald) approach true crime this way, as the perilous and ever-fascinating process of arriving at a workable truth of what really happened. The other school consists of evokers, more focused on character and mood than detection. These writers are drawn to crimes in which the bare bones of the narrative are relatively uncontested, yet an enigma lingers: Why? Even if they cannot conclusively answer that question—and often they can’t—evokers use the crime as a key to unlock the shadowy inner rooms of human nature. The most celebrated true-crime book of all time, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, is the quintessential work of an evoker.
The late Michelle McNamara was remarkable for being both types of true-crime writer at once. You can see the outline of her detective skills in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the book she was working on when she died suddenly in her sleep in 2016. The book, though, is unfinished, just as the decades-spanning mystery it examines remains unsolved. Her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, joined the journalist Billy Jensen and McNamara’s lead researcher on the case, Paul Haynes, to piece together I’ll Be Gone in the Dark from her draft, notes, previously published feature stories, and interview transcripts.* McNamara had, after much effort, recovered a long-neglected cache of documents from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; she believed that with the help of former police investigators and the online community of fellow investigators, she could finally identify the criminal she called the Golden State Killer.
She only made it a quarter of the way through those files before her death. Readers with a detective-style true-crime jones will probably find I’ll Be Gone in the Dark a bit of a letdown, as McNamara herself likely would have. “One day soon,” McNamara writes in a letter to the Golden State Killer used as the epilogue to I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, “you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk.” She not only wanted very badly for the murderer to be caught, she fully expected him to be. “I was married to a crime fighter for a decade” is how Oswalt puts it in his afterword—“an emphatically for-real, methodical, ‘little grey cells,’ Great-Brain-type crime fighter.” But the lack of a concrete answer in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark works to highlight McNamara’s other, more evocative gifts.
Criminals, no matter how banal the details of their actual lives, fascinate. Once the identity of a notorious transgressor becomes known, he sucks up all the air in the room. The lack of a “who” at the end of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark forecloses any focus on a traditional “why”—although you can make some educated guesses about the motives of a man who would do the things this man did. Instead, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark blossoms into a masterful accounting of what might at first seem like a minor issue: where. We’re used to thinking of crime as the product of psychological, historical, and social factors, but in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark McNamara skillfully demonstrates the role geography and architecture played in shaping the Golden State Killer’s reign of terror.
The GSK brutally raped at least 50 women and murdered 12 people in California in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The crimes fell into roughly two periods. In the first, in Sacramento, he established his pattern of casing his targets’ homes by prowling around outside, sometimes breaking in but leaving only slight traces of the intrusion. This he followed with a home invasion in which he woke his sleeping victims by shining a flashlight into their faces. Using a weapon (a knife or gun) to ensure their compliance, he tied them up. Although he sometimes chose single women to assault, over time, he showed an increasing preference for straight couples, forcing the woman to tie up the man before leading her into another room where he bound and raped her. Things he said during the attacks and his efficient modus operandi indicated that he had stalked his victims for days beforehand, gathering information.
The second stage, beginning in 1979, took place in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay area. It was there that the GSK turned lethal. He killed, by bludgeoning or gunshot, four couples and two solitary women, and was thwarted in an attempt on a fifth couple when the woman’s escape and screams frightened him off. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that DNA testing would prove that the same man had committed both sets of crimes. Sacramento law enforcement nicknamed him the East Area Rapist while a remark made by one of the investigating officers in Southern California led the press to call him the Original Night Stalker (that is, the home-invasion killer who preceded Richard Ramirez, who is more commonly known by that name). He is often referred to by the acronym EAR/ONS.
All of the victims were attacked in single-story houses in middle-class suburbs, homes in neighborhoods that amounted to a common version of the American dream. They had addresses on streets with picturesque names like Cockleshell Drive and Queen Ann Lane. The series of murders the killer committed in the Southern California town of Goleta led local residents to call him the Creek Killer because all of the houses targeted abutted a leafy, trickling gorge. One house was only visible from the path that ran through it. McNamara herself walked along the bed of San Jose Creek and was struck by
how captivating the overgrown path, shrouded in huge, draping trees and strewn with moss-covered rocks, would be for a certain kind of suburban adolescent boy, a semiwild, underparented kid yearning for refuge. Rope swings dangled from sycamore trees. … There were secret tunnels and cement-lined drainage ditches where kids skateboarded. There were no lights and the path was confusing and hard to follow. It felt like the kind of place you’d know only if you spent a lot of time down there as a kid.
The people who lived in these neighborhoods typically thought of them as safe, but the same idyllic features that added value to their property—tall, dense trees, the adjacent creek, a healthy distance from the neighbors—made them vulnerable to the GSK. Until his crime streaks made the news, victims and their neighbors overlooked the little signs that a household had attracted his attention: footprints in flowerbeds, a door left open, a dog barking, small sounds coming from the roof at night.
Photo of the author alongside the cover of her book.
Michelle McNamara.
Photo by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic
McNamara weaves her own autobiography through I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—her Irish Catholic girlhood in the Midwest and the unsolved murder of an acquaintance—but the anecdote that feels most relevant to the GSK case is a chapter about the neighborhood where she and her family lived while she wrote the book in California. Asking herself why witnesses so seldom called the cops, sometimes even when they spotted young men jumping fences and other suspicious activity in the neighborhoods the killer targeted, she recalls a morning when her own neighbor’s house was burglarized; she’d seen two youths in suits on the sidewalk but assumed they were selling magazine subscriptions door to door. She, her husband, and her neighbor, talked it over afterward: “From now on, the three of us told each other, we’ll look out for each other. We’d alert each other when we were going out of town. We’d be better neighbors, we promised.” She writes that the neighbor seemed like a great guy; they wave and chat now and then, but, she observes, she still doesn’t know his last name. A suburban neighborhood doesn’t necessarily make it difficult to know your neighbors, but it does make it easy not to.
Nowhere do the impulses that created a hunting ground for the GSK appear more evident than in Rancho San Miguel, a development in Walnut Creek designed in the 1950s by Joseph Eichler. Eichler houses, coveted by aficionados of midcentury modernism, feature blank walls facing the street contrasted with glass walls and sliding doors opening onto a backyard enclosed by high fences. Although Eichler is celebrated for establishing nondiscrimination policies in his planned communities, what the architecture of the houses themselves communicates is a desire to turn away from the neighborhood and toward a dream of secluded, semioutdoor living. The development is catnip for peeping toms—display cases for their residents’ private lives with minimal chances of being spotted. “I call this the Bermuda Triangle of Contra Costa County,” a criminalist in the sheriff’s office told McNamara. “We’ve had other serial killers attack in this same neighborhood.”
Whatever personal history formed the psychopathology of the Golden State Killer, he was also, McNamara and most of her law enforcement forces believe, a product of an environment much like this one. Although he wore a ski mask during his attacks, the few witnesses who saw his face describe him as white and fit, with slightly shaggy blond hair: indistinguishable, that is, from hundreds of young men who inhabited the neighborhoods he terrorized, like a surfer, perhaps, or a former skateboarder. Many of the houses he broke into were for sale or near ongoing construction; maybe he worked in a housing-related job, or maybe he chose spots where an unfamiliar car or man would be less remarkable, where he could surveil his potential targets while attracting minimal attention. People came and went in these neighborhoods, restlessly searching for a Californian ideal.
McNamara is so good at evoking these milieus—the teenage girls hanging out at a Sacramento park to watch “shirtless boys wax their cars” before heading out to see the Eagles or Peter Frampton play at the outdoor Days on the Green concerts in Oakland; the way the St. John’s River, with its water “the color of weak coffee” would wash away the alkali dust from an inner tube rider’s feet; the smell of night-blooming jasmine drifting through Santa Barbara’s windows on hot evenings—it’s sometimes hard to believe she grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. The detective’s nose for the crucial clue transmutes so easily into a novelist’s eye for the concrete detail that conjures a memory or emotion. She applies the same gift to a handful of portraits of people affected by the killer’s crimes: a girl who lost her mother at 16, in the midst of the stormy filial conflict that so often unfurls at that age; a young man who envied his married brother’s life and then bonded with his fiancée when she helped him clean his sister-in-law’s blood from the walls of the house he’d once coveted. These read like fragments from Raymond Carver stories, tales of ordinary lives fractured by incomprehensible violence. Had she lived, McNamara might have helped identify the man who committed that violence, but before she died, she did something nearly as miraculous: making them all live again in some small way.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara. Harper.
Michelle McNamara
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Michelle McNamara
Born Michelle Eileen McNamara
April 14, 1970
Died April 21, 2016 (aged 46)
Los Angeles, California U.S.
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Notre Dame
University of Minnesota
Occupation Writer
Years active 2006–2016
Spouse(s) Patton Oswalt (m. 2005; her death 2016)
Children 1
Website Official website
Michelle Eileen McNamara (April 14, 1970 – April 21, 2016) was an American writer and crime blogger.[1][2] She was the author of I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, a true crime book about the Golden State Killer[3] .The book was released posthumously in February 2018 and is being adapted as an HBO documentary series.[4][5]
Contents
1 Early life and education
2 Career
3 Personal life
4 Death
5 Selected works and publications
6 References
7 External links
Early life and education
McNamara grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, the daughter of Thomas W. McNamara, a trial lawyer, and, Rita McNamara (née Rigney), a stay-at-home mom who loved Hollywood.[6][7] Her parents were Irish American and had six children, five daughters and a son. McNamara was the youngest child and grew up Irish Catholic.[3][8]
In 1988, she graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park, Illinois, where she was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, the Trapeze.[8]
In 1992, McNamara graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a bachelor's degree in English.[9] She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota.[10]
Career
After graduate school, in 1997 McNamara moved to Los Angeles to write in the film and TV industry.[8]
In 2006, McNamara launched her website TrueCrimeDiary.[1][11] McNamara had a long-standing fascination with true crime originating from the unsolved murder of Kathleen Lombardo that happened two blocks from where she lived when she was young.[3][9][12]
McNamara became interested in the Golden State Killer case and penned articles for Los Angeles magazine about the serial killer in 2013 and 2014.[13][2] In 2014, McNamara and true crime investigative journalist Billy Jensen were on a SXSW Interactive panel called "Citizen Dicks: Solving Murders With Social Media."[14][15][16] McNamara and Jensen had a long-term friendship based on their shared passion for researching and writing about true crime.[17]
McNamara coined the term "Golden State Killer", after authorities linked DNA evidence that connected the Original Night Stalker and East Area Rapist.[18] She then signed a book deal with HarperCollins and began to work on a book about the case.
Her book, titled I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, was posthumously updated and finalized by true crime writer Paul Haynes and her widower Patton Oswalt. The book, released posthumously on February 27, 2018 (almost two years after her death), reached number 2 of The New York Times Best Seller list for nonfiction and number 1 of combined print and e-book, nonfiction.[19][20] As of April 29, 2018, the book had been on the list for eight weeks.[21]
In April 2018, HBO announced that they had purchased the rights for I'll Be Gone in the Dark and were developing it into a documentary series.[4] Filming for the series began on April 24, 2018.[22] The documentary is being directed by Liz Garbus (What Happened, Miss Simone?).[5]
On April 25, 2018, Californian authorities arrested Joseph James DeAngelo as the alleged Golden State Killer.[23][24] Oswalt stated that authorities' use of the killer's name that McNamara coined was "proof of the impact of her work."[25] Authorities have also linked DeAngelo to the Visalia Ransacker.
Personal life
McNamara married actor Patton Oswalt on September 24, 2005.[6][26] The couple's daughter Alice was born in 2009.[27][28]
Death
McNamara died in her sleep on April 21, 2016, seven days after her 46th birthday,[29][30] as a result of an undiagnosed heart condition that caused blockages to her arteries. The autopsy also showed that she was taking the ADD/ADHD medication Adderall, the anxiolytic Xanax, and the pain medication Fentanyl. [31] She is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles.[32]
Selected works and publications
McNamara, Michelle (February 27, 2013). "In the Footsteps of a Killer". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (February 27, 2013). "Hear the Golden State Killer" (includes audio). Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (February 27, 2013). "The Five Most Popular Myths About the Golden State Killer Case". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (February 27, 2013). "The Evidence Locker: Inside the Case of The Golden State Killer". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (March 7, 2013). "Update: In the Footsteps of a Killer". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (March 25, 2013). "New Evidence: Investigators Release a Third Recording Believed to Be of the Golden State Killer's Voice - NSFW". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (April 15, 2013). "Golden State Killer Update: One Victim's Family Responds to Our Coverage of the Cold Case". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (June 4, 2013). "Sleuthing with Science: A Q&A with Forensic Genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (June 28, 2013). "Killer Mystery: Is Charles Manson Responsible For More Murders?". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (July 1, 2013). "Why Charles Manson Won't Die". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (July 8, 2013). "Who Murdered UCLA Medical Center Nurse Melanie Howell?". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (July 10, 2013). "Dead Men Talking: The Program Keeping Serial Criminals from Taking Intel on Unsolved Cases to their Graves". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (September 9, 2013). "Update: Investigators Have a New Lead on the Golden State Killer". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle (January 22, 2014). "Update: Was The Golden State Killer a Cowboy?". Los Angeles Magazine.
McNamara, Michelle; Haynes, Paul (completed by); Flynn, Gillian (introduction by); Oswalt, Patton (afterward by); Jensen, Billy (2018). I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. New York, NY: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-0623-1980-7. OCLC 1023574441.
Getting away with murder
Suzi Feay
Spectator. 336.9891 (Mar. 24, 2018): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State
Killer
by Michelle McNamara
Faber, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 321
This true-crime narrative ought, by rights, to be broken backed, in two tragic ways. One is that the serial attacker it concerns, a sneaking California rapist who graduated to multiple murder, was never caught. The other is that its author died aged 46 before the book could be completed. That it is nevertheless so gripping and satisfying is thanks to its sensitive editors and compilers, but mainly due to the remarkable skills of Michelle McNamara herself.
The subtitle is 'One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer'. McNamara coined the catchy nickname for the shadowy figure that slaughtered five couples and two women between 1978 and 1986. The investigators knew him as EAR-ONS, after DNA connected the 'East Area Rapist' of Sacramento with the 'Original Night Stalker', so-called because his attacks began before those of the infamous Richard Ramirez, active 1984-85.
The EAR-ONS rapes and murders were not linked to begin with, because the latter took place further south, in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange County. After the killing of Janelle Cruz, they abruptly stopped; conventional wisdom maintains that violent serial killers only give up for two reasons: incarceration, whether in a mental hospital or prison, or death. But so much about EARONS resists conventional explanation. He combined explosive rage and impulsiveness with lengthy planning and surveillance. He liked to steal victims' clock radios.
The sheer scale of offending gives the impression of someone who was able to attack almost at will, fleeing on foot or on stolen bicycles, even on one occasion outpacing a pursuer in a car. Identifying details are frustratingly vague. He usually wore a ski-mask. Witnesses' and survivors' assessments of his build, hair colour or age vary widely; the only things agreed on are his height, around 5ft 10, and his penis size --unusually small. Similarly diverse are interpretations of his behaviour: breaking off an attack for a bout of heavy breathing could be asthma, ungovernable excitement or theatrical sadism.
McNamara explains that an unsolved murder of a young woman in Chicago, close to where she lived as a child, fed an obsession with crime and killers that led ultimately to her widely admired blog, TrueCrimeDiary.com. It's hard to characterise her role in all this, exactly: informal investigator, data-miner, an information-cruncher who eventually became a virtual colleague to the various investigators on this cold, cold case. McNamara visited crime scenes, rifled phone directories and high-school yearbooks, cross-referencing, intuiting and swapping tips with other amateur sleuths.
His DNA never matches any database, so the geographic trail seems the best one to follow: 'There are only so many white men born between let's say 1943 and 1959 who lived or worked in Sacramento, Santa Barbara County, and Orange County between 1976 and 1986.' Enter the investigator McNamara calls 'The Kid', who owns the 1977 Sacramento Suburban Directory and has 'the 1983 Orange County telephone directory digitised on his hard drive'. (The Kid is Paul Haynes, who helped complete the book.) Enthusiasts like he and McNamara are willing to spend thousands of hours meticulously referencing such data. Dealing with successive investigators, she is fascinated by their impassivity:
I'm a face-maker. I married a comedian [Pat ton Oswalt]. Many of my
friends are in show business. I'm constantly surrounded by big
expressions, which is why I immediately noticed the lack of them in
detectives.
There's none of the prurient gloating over ghastliness that mars much crime writing; rather, McNamara spotlights the appalling detail while leaving much to the imagination. A coda by Haynes and the investigative journalist Billy Jensen, who together tied up the loose ends of McNamara's manuscript, almost functions as a review. 'She didn't flinch from evoking key elements of the horror and yet avoided lurid overindulgence in grisly details, as well as side-stepping self-righteous justice crusading or victim hagiography.'
The killer's evasion of justice is of huge significance in the real world, but the lack of closure doesn't harm the book. In her introduction, Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, puts it succinctly: 'I want him captured; I don't care who he is.' The reasoning behind the acts of what Patton Oswalt calls 'a wounded, destructive insect' can only be banal; this chilling, empathetic account is anything but.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Feay, Suzi. "Getting away with murder." Spectator, 24 Mar. 2018, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538249010/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b36353fb. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538249010
One writer's obsession with a serial killer
Marco della Cava
USA Today. (Feb. 28, 2018): Lifestyle: p02D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Marco della Cava, USA TODAY
Michelle McNamara was an obsessive. She was also a damn good writer. That combustive mix has produced I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (Harper, 328 pp., ***), a dark page-turner about a serial rapist and killer with a tragic twist.
The Golden State Killer's last victim was, in ways, the author herself. McNamara, who was married to comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, died at age 46 in 2016 as she was writing this book, felled by an arterial blockage exacerbated by medications that helped her battle ailments including insomnia.
You wouldn't sleep either if you lived in the haunted world described in Dark.
From the mid-1970s to the '80s, a man snuck into homes across California and committed more than 50 rapes and 10 murders. Dubbed by local law enforcement the East Area Rapist -- many of his crimes happened in eastern Sacramento -- he was never caught.
McNamara, a TV writer (and dedicated amateur criminologist who started the website True Crime Diaries), spent years tracking the killer, whom she called the Golden State Killer, or GSK.
The author befriended equally obsessed cops, cased victims' homes to try to determine a pattern and used the Internet to build an army of fellow Nancy Drews.
Frustrations abounded. A lack of technology in the '70s perhaps helped the killer get away; an abundance of modern crime-busting tech, foremost DNA testing, cleared the most promising suspects in recent years.
And still McNamara pressed on, like a mathematician obsessed with solving a theorem or an archaeologist bent on finding a lost civilization.
If there is a criticism about McNamara's otherwise scintillating work, it's the book's disjointed structure. We rocket back to the past for the crimes and zip to the present for conversations with experts. We race up and down California incessantly.
The antidote, however, is McNamara's poignant prose. You turn the pages just to see which revealing gem you'll be presented with next.
Here's McNamara on a killer's mind: "He's the maltreated hero in the story. Staring up at him anguish-eyed is a rotating cast of terrified faces. His distorted belief system operates around a central, vampiric tenet."
McNamara was with Oswalt for 13years, but she lived with GSK.
While McNamara had assembled much of the book before her death, it was finished with the help of her lead researcher, Paul Haynes, and investigative journalist Billy Jensen, who gained access to their friend's 3,500 computer files on the GSK case.
Despite her dogged sleuthing, McNamara did not identify the killer. Her collaborators offer a solemn promise: "We will not stop until we get his name."
In his afterword, Oswalt -- who has agreed to undertake publicity duties for Dark -- hints the next generation of GSK sleuths may be close to home.
He describes the couple's now 8-year-old daughter, Alice, opening a Christmas present that contained a digital camera. She was pleased with the gift but something nagged.
"Later that morning, she asked, out of the blue, 'Daddy, why do you and Santa Claus have the same handwriting?'
"Michelle Eileen McNamara is gone. But she left behind a little detective. And a mystery."
CAPTION(S):
photo
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
della Cava, Marco. "One writer's obsession with a serial killer." USA Today, 28 Feb. 2018, p. 02D. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529413921/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=204059e7. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529413921
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Print Marked Items
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's
Obsessive Search for the Golden State
Killer
Kathy Sexton
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p5.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. By Michelle
McNamara. Mar. 2018. 352p. illus. Harper, $27.99 (9780062319784). 364.
McNamara's posthumously published book tells both the nightmarish story of the Golden State Killer
(GSK) and the neighborhoods he terrorized and her own story of true-crime addiction. Growing up in Oak
Park, a Chicago suburb, McNamara became obsessed with unsolved murders after a young woman was
murdered in an alley blocks away from her home, and the killer was never found. McNamara's holy grail of
killer obsessions came in the form of a serial rapist and murderer responsible for more than 50 sexual
assaults and at least 10 murders in California during the 1970s and 1980s. She obtained hundreds of pages
of official documents, interviewed those who worked the GSK case then and those who still work it now,
and formed her own theories. After she died suddenly in 2016, the book was finished by piecing together
her articles, notes, and taped interviews. Though this makes for occasionally disjointed reading, it's a small
distraction from McNamara's impressive gifts for language and storytelling. Her work paints a picture of
not just a killer but of the towns and lives, including hers, that were irrevocably altered by the horror he
inflicted. Gillian Flynn and the author's widower, Patton Oswalt, contribute an introduction and afterword,
respectively.--Kathy Sexton
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer."
Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 5. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250745/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=447a732a. Accessed 3 June 2018.
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I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's
Obsessive Search for the Golden State
Killer
Publishers Weekly.
265.5 (Jan. 29, 2018): p184.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
Michelle McNamara. Harper, $27.99 (352p)
ISBN 978-0-06-231978-4
This posthumous debut recounts the chilling crimes of a serial murderer in California in the 1970s and '80s,
alongside the indefatigable investigation of crime writer McNamara to uncover the identity of the killer
decades later. When McNamara first started writing about the case on her website TrueCrimeDiary in 2011,
DNA testing had already linked 10 murders and 50 sexual assaults to one unknown man. The culprit, whom
McNamara later gave the moniker "The Golden State Killer," was a serial rapist in San Francisco's East Bay
in the mid-1970s, attacking women and girls in their homes. But in 1979, a close encounter with law
enforcement led to a change in his M.O., and from that point on no one survived his attacks. McNamara
fills in each crime with haunting details ("The suspect began clicking scissors next to blindfolded victims'
ears") and tells the story of her own investigation, going as far as to track down and purchase from a vintage
store a pair of cufflinks that she believed the Golden State Killer stole from a victim. By the time of her
sudden death in 2016, McNamara had inspired an online community of sleuths who continue to research the
crimes. With its exemplary mix of memoir and reportage, this remarkable book is a modern true crime
classic. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer." Publishers Weekly,
29 Jan. 2018, p. 184. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526116577/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4cdbf62a. Accessed 3 June 2018.
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I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara review – in search of a serial killer
A fanatical quest to identify California’s 1970s Golden State Killer is told in gripping, grisly detail
Jeremy Lybarger
Wed 21 Mar 2018 03.29 EDT Last modified on Fri 23 Mar 2018 20.10 EDT
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Crime-scene tape cordons off the Santa Barbara cul-de-sac where Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez were murdered. Thirty years later, DNA connected the double homicide to the Golden State Killer.
Crime-scene tape cordons off the Santa Barbara cul-de-sac where Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez were murdered in 1981. Thirty years later, DNA connected the double homicide to the Golden State Killer. Photograph: Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office / Orange County Sheriff’s Department
For at least a decade between 1976 and 1986, a psychopath stalked California. He targeted bungalows in middle-class neighbourhoods stretching from Sacramento in the north to Dana Point, nearly 450 miles to the south. He wore a mask. He was white, probably in his late teens or 20s, wore size nine shoes and had type A blood. He sometimes stuttered, and sometimes cried after attacking his victims. He had a small penis.
This is almost all that is known about the prolific rapist and murderer who has been variously dubbed the Original Night Stalker, the East Area Rapist and, perhaps most evocatively, the Golden State Killer. This last epithet was coined by the late Michelle McNamara, whose posthumous book chronicles her decade-long quest to identify this mysterious bogeyman. Like the Zodiac Killer, who terrorised California in the late 60s, the Golden State Killer was never apprehended, and his case continues to intrigue amateur sleuths.
The FBI Golden State Killer wanted poster, issued in 2016 with a $50,000 reward for information on the unknown suspect
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The FBI’s Golden State Killer wanted poster, issued in 2016 with a $50,000 reward for information on the unknown suspect Photograph: FBI
A lifelong devotee of true crime, McNamara blogged about her DIY cold-case investigations on the website truecrimediary.com. In 2007, she learned of the East Area Rapist, and her life seems to have changed. “There’s a scream lodged permanently in my throat now,” she writes in her New York Times bestselling, unforgettable I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. When she died at the age of 46 in 2016, leaving the book unfinished, she had amassed 3,500 files related to the case, plus dozens of notebooks, legal pads, digitised police reports and 37 boxes from an Orange County prosecutor (the book was finished by her lead researcher and a colleague). Some of this material went into the blockbuster story she wrote about the case for Los Angeles magazine in 2013, but this book is the real testament to how all-consuming and dogged McNamara’s search was.
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Like other recent true-crime books – Claudia Rowe’s The Spider and the Fly, Carolyn Murnick’s The Hot One – McNamara’s is as much a memoir as it is a procedural. Early chapters describe the unsolved murder of 24-year-old Kathleen Lombardo in 1984, which occurred just steps from McNamara’s childhood home in Oak Park, Illinois. The case fascinated the teenage McNamara and whetted her appetite for the dark side. “I was a hoarder of ominous and puzzling details,” she writes. “I developed a Pavlovian response to the word ‘mystery’. My library record was a bibliography of the macabre and true. When I meet people and hear where they’re from I orient them in my mind by the nearest unsolved crime.”
As a record of obsession, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark delivers a nearly fluorescent portrait of the fanatic’s life: the sleepless nights and shut-in days, the rabbit holes of online message boards, the underground economies of samizdat information. In one vivid passage, McNamara recounts holing up in a Sacramento hotel room to review 4,000 pages of police reports on a flash drive she’d just acquired. A raucous wedding reception was being held 10 floors below. “I was jittery from sugar, hunger, and spending too much time alone in the dark absorbing a 50-chapter horror story narrated in the kind of dead voice used by desk clerks at the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles],” McNamara writes. “My eyes were stripped by computer glare and as devoid of moisture as if they’d been vacuumed clean by an airplane toilet. Kool & the Gang’s ‘Celebration’ wasn’t the soundtrack for my frame of mind.”
Some victims described how he cried after attacking them; one said he ate crackers in the kitchen during the assault
This excerpt indicates what’s so unique and convivial about the book: no matter how grisly things get – and there’s no shortage of horror with more than 50 sexual assaults, at least 10 murders, and tableaux of psychological torture – McNamara retains a sense of humour. But it’s a humour tempered by moral exigency. To identify a killer is to take away his power and render him banal, McNamara argues. In one of the book’s many sharp insights, she likens herself and all amateur detectives to the killers they seek. Both perpetrator and sleuth share an uncommon and singular compulsion. One seeks to destroy, while the other seeks to create, however haphazardly, some kind of explanation.
Explanations are hard to come by in the case of the Golden State Killer. His first crime was probably a rape in Rancho Cordova, a suburb of Sacramento, in June 1976. His first murder occurred two years later. All the evidence and eyewitness accounts add up to a mere fragment, a faceless cipher who taunted the police and his victims with crank phone calls, kept houses under surveillance before his attacks and seemed to relish playing mind games. He bound some of his female victims, raped them, and then went silent. Just when they believed the terror was over, he’d whisper in their ears or scrape a knife along their backs. He told one victim that he’d been in the army; others described how he cried or hyperventilated after attacking them. According to one, he took a break from his assault to eat crackers in the kitchen. One couple told detectives he “seemed like someone straining to appear tough”.
Investigators process the Rancho Cordova backyard where two victims, Brian and Katie Maggiore, were found shot dead in 1978.
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Investigators process the Rancho Cordova backyard where two victims, Brian and Katie Maggiore, were found shot dead in 1978. Photograph: Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office / Orange County Sheriff’s Department
Whatever the extent of his instability, his crimes were real, and they spread panic in California. By 1977, he averaged two rapes a month. McNamara describes how entire towns in northern California were transformed into de facto garrisons patrolled by vigilante squads. “In one house, tambourines were tied to every door and window,” she writes. “Hammers went under pillows. Nearly 3,000 guns were sold in Sacramento County between January and May. Many people refused to sleep between 1 and 4am. Some couples slept in shifts, one of them always stationed on the living room couch, a rifle pointed at the window.”
The killer was never caught or even identified. Decades after retirement, some detectives are unable to shake the case
McNamara resurrects two Californian offenders from the 1970s who have largely faded into obscurity – the Early Bird Rapist and the Ransacker. Nothing connects these men. As McNamara points out, crime rates were high all across the country in the 70s. It was a decade adrift from violence and the nihilism of seeing the counterculture erode into drugs, anomie and post-Vietnam malaise. California metabolised 60s idealism and 70s cynicism into a kind of toxic slag. Some of McNamara’s most arresting passages detail the copycat strip malls and subdivisions that replaced orange groves and lush farmland.
This hangover feeling is part of the larger tragedy that the book documents. More than 8,000 suspects were investigated as part of the Golden State Killer case. Detectives crisscrossed the country to retrieve DNA samples and follow leads. Yet the killer was never caught or even identified. Even decades after retirement, some detectives are unable to shake the case. “The Golden State Killer haunts their dreams,” McNamara writes. “He’s ruined their marriages. He’s burrowed so deeply inside their heads that they want to, or have to, believe that if they locked eyes with him, they’d know.”
You come away from I’ll Be Gone in the Dark suspecting much the same of McNamara. In the book’s lyrical epilogue, she addresses the killer, who she imagines is now an old man somewhere in the dregs of America. (She may be right. In 2001, a man presumed to be him called a woman he’d assaulted 24 years earlier: “Remember when we played?” he whispered.) McNamara sketches a hypothetical but hopeful scene in which a car pulls up to the kerb and detectives emerge to finally arrest the monster who has eluded them for more than 40 years. You can’t help but believe that had McNamara lived, that outcome might have been a little more likely.
• I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer is published by Faber. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99..
Michelle McNamara's posthumous I'll Be Gone in the Dark is exceptional true crime: EW review
HarperCollins Publishers; Jim Spellman/WireImage
DAVID CANFIELD February 20, 2018 at 10:06 AM EST
I'll Be Gone in the Dark
TYPEBookGENRETrue CrimePUBLISHERHarperPAGES352PUBLICATION DATE02/27/18AUTHORMichelle McNamaraWE GAVE IT AN
A-
Michelle McNamara spent nearly a decade researching I’ll Be Gone in the Dark before her sudden death at the age of 46. Most every night, while the rest of her family — husband, comedian/actor Patton Oswalt, and their young daughter, Alice — was sound asleep, she’d scan internet archives and police reports related to the “Golden State Killer,” an unidentified man believed to have committed at least 50 sexual assaults and 10 murders across California from 1976 to 1986. Her mission wasn’t merely, or even primarily, to write a book about him — it was to solve the case.
The book is landing in the midst of an explosive true crime boom, with the popularity of (and debate around) programs such as Serial and Making a Murderer helping to bolster the genre’s visibility. McNamara operated as an accomplished armchair detective for years, gaining notoriety for her cold case website True Crime Diary and her articles on the Golden State Killer published by Los Angeles Magazine. But I’ll Be Gone is more of a personal endeavor than your typical true crime effort. The book isn’t so much about finding a killer as it is about wanting to find a killer.
While McNamara was — spoiler alert — ultimately unable to unmask the killer’s identity, her book is reflective and candid in such a way that it still produces revelations. The narrative sways back and forth throughout. Some chapters function as vivid autobiography, with McNamara illustrating just how consuming this process of pursuit was for her. (In one passage, her eyes are glued to her phone at a red carpet film premiere, absorbing new case-clues while Oswalt mingles around her.) Other chapters describe — with unbearable clarity — encounters between the Golden State Killer and his victims. Via the former, we develop a nuanced understanding of our storyteller; via the latter, we fall into her storytelling rhythms.
Lester Cohen/WireImage
What we discover, beautifully, is McNamara’s interest in human beings. There’s a spooky, suspenseful magic to the way the author constructs bite-sized short stories — tales of jealous siblings, happy young couples, impulsive children and “stony” parents — and infuses them with that lurking inevitability of terrible, potentially deadly crimes. McNamara is unsparing in explaining the killer’s macabre habits, but ethically so, favoring information over indulgence and emotion over gore. She’s also able to perfectly execute the procedural aspect of true crime: She seems most at home when detailing prolonged police work, showing off her alacritous prose while still managing to subvert the genre’s conventions.
This book, of course, has a complex and tragic backstory. Though much of I’ll Be Gone had already been completed by the time McNamara unexpectedly died in her sleep in April 2016, it was left to Oswalt (who also writes the afterword) and others to compile her unassembled research and notes into a finished product. The book is divided into three parts: The first two are written by McNamara, and the slim third is by her lead researcher, Paul Haynes, and crime journalist Billy Jensen.
There’s a twinge of melancholy here, given the firsthand nature of McNamara’s writing. In the way she mulls over her obsession with the mysterious and the unseemly, her narration is essential: You can practically smell her laptop overheating in the dark of the night, see her eyes flicker at the news of a clue, feel every beat in her painstaking research methods. It’s why the book’s patchwork in Part 3 — effective as it is — can’t quite compensate for the loss of her voice. And yet this is all part of what makes I’ll Be Gone such a singular, fascinating read. It’s lifelike in its incompletion. Had McNamara lived to wrap this book on her own, one suspects the end result could have been a masterwork. It still is, mostly — a posthumous treasure that feels thrillingly alive. A-