I'll Be Gone in the Dark

I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
by Michelle McNamara
Recommended Ages: 14+

Michelle McNamara, the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt, was a screenwriter, blogger and true crime enthusiast who, it is said, had a way of getting people involved to open up to her about cold cases. One of her obsessions was a connected series of rapes and murders, spanning 1976 to 1986 from the Sacramento area to Southern California. She coined the nickname “Golden State Killer” for the guy (previously described as the “Original Night Stalker”), and she died in 2016, only 46 years old, not knowing his real name.

The investigators who, in 2018, pinned the crimes on former cop Joseph DeAngelo, deny that McNamara’s research turned up any evidence that led to his capture, but she does seem to have brought an investigation that had been getting nowhere into the public eye, and perhaps played a role in re-focusing the efforts to catch the creep. The fact bears noting that by the end, law enforcement was using the “Golden State Killer” moniker that Michelle helped coin. And it’s remarkable how little attention the unsolved case got during the three decades after his last known attack, until she started sending stories about it to the Los Angeles Magazine. That’s amazing, considering that he committed some 50 rapes, murdered 10 people and terrorized an entire region for parts of a 10-year period.

The parts of this book that McNamara lived to write are a lyrically personal, compassionate and deeply disturbing examination of police records and witness testimony about the case. They look back on the beginnings of her fascination with true crime – an unsolved murder in the Chicago neighborhood where she grew up. They also poignantly document the toll the case took on the author’s personal life. The autobiographical parts reveal, for example, the emotional peaks and valleys of discovering something buried in the evidence that seems to point to a plausible suspect, and then finding out he couldn’t have been the guy.

Completed by friends and co-workers after McNamara’s death, the book takes the refreshingly non-exploitative approach of not devoting space (even in its afterparts) to the revolting character revealed in Joseph DeAngelo. Rather, it is with the victims and their loved ones that this book sympathizes – as evidenced by the fact that the first time I cried while reading this book was during a passage about the brother-in-law of one of the victims and his fiancee cleaning the scene of her murder. Emotionally, the real ending of the book is a letter McNamara wrote to the killer, imagining the day of his capture, which she would never see, and predicting that the psychopath himself would prove the most boring part of the story.