Michelle McNamara (1970–2016)

Fuuuuuuck. Fucking Michelle McNamara. I have so many feelings. I haven't read a lot of true crime, it's a rabbit hole I have been precariously lurking near without letting myself go down, but I know there is something different about this book...about her. She wasn't conducting this research for her book. She was trying to catch this motherfucker and the aggregate of her research just so happened to be a poignant, well-written true crime novel slash memoir. I'm so sad at the thought that she show more didn't live to see a suspect arrested and that she won't write another book-she would have SHOOK the genre and I would have honestly read the fuck out of whatever she wrote. McNamara was the person every true crime groupie wants to be when they grow up. show less

I woke up on April 25th to a story I never thought, but I had long hoped, to see: there was an arrest in the Golden State Killer case. The Golden State Killer (GSK), aka The East Area Rapist (EARS) or The Original Night Stalker (ONS), was suspected of fifty rapes, a dozen murders, and more than 100 burglaries, all committed in California over the course of a few decades, and it was long thought that he wouldn’t be caught. As a huge true crime fan, I knew this case fairly well, thanks two show more big factors. The first was the podcast “My Favorite Murder”, and that led to the second: the book “I’ll Be Gone In The Dark” by Michelle McNamara. McNamara was a true crime writer with the blog “True Crime Diary”, and had been doggedly pursuing The Golden State Killer (a phrase she created) at the time of her tragic death in 2016. Earlier this year “I’ll Be Gone In The Dark” was released, in part to Bill Jensen, a co-investigator and investigative journalist in his own right. So when an arrest was made, the news spread like wildfire, and while the police were reluctant to give McNamara any credit outside of raising awareness, many think that that very awareness (starting with her blog and various articles she wrote) was vital to putting pressure on, which in turn led to an arrest. I read “I’ll Be Gone In The Dark” before Joseph DeAngelo, a former police officer and seventy two year old man, was arrested for the crimes. But now that he has been, I want to shine a light on this great book, especially since the story has finally found some closure.

What stands out immediately about this book is how personal it is. While McNamara herself didn’t know anyone who was hurt or killed by GSK/EAR/ONS, an unsolved murder of a childhood neighbor always stuck with her throughout her life. As she started to learn about The Golden State Killer, she began to feel a deep sense of injustice for the victims that he left behind, and started to investigate it herself. She made connections with investigators, she dove into online groups of fellow armchair investigators, she visited locations and dug through box after box of evidence. Her almost obsessive commitment to this case is juxtaposed with the crimes themselves, and the horror that GSK/EAR/ONS brought upon his victims. But she is always sure to be respectful, and to keep the details vague enough to be respectful, but precise enough to paint a picture of just how awful these crimes were. She gives voice and context for the people that GSK/EAR/ONS raped or murdered, and always puts them at the forefront and the fact that justice eluded them and those they left behind for so long. In many true crime books (with a few exceptions, of course, like Ann Rule) the focus is primarily on the murderer, and the victims merely objects in a salacious story. But with McNamara, she wants the reader to know the victims and makes their voices the most important ones. Would this be different had DeAngelo been identified at publishing? Possibly. But I do get the sense that for McNamara, the identity was only important for justice purposes; this wouldn’t have been a story to give him any glory or to make his crimes entertainment.

As you read, McNamara instills actual terror into you. I had to stop reading this book after dark, because any noise and anything out of place sent me into a paranoid spiral. Her writing is that immersive, pulling you in and keeping you engaged. She also makes herself vulnerable by being fully aware and honest with her own obsession, and the toll that it takes on her life and her own mental health. Unlike the book that Robert Graysmith wrote about The Zodiac Killer, McNamara knew that she was treading towards obsession, and that it was deeply affecting her life. The sad fact of the matter is that when Michelle died unexpectedly in her sleep, she could have been seen as, in a way, GSK/EAR/ONS ‘s last victim. She had been having trouble sleeping, and her husband (comedian Patton Oswalt) had suggested she take some Xanax and just sleep until she woke up. And she didn’t wake up, because of an undiagnosed heart condition in tandem to the Xanax and other prescriptions. The tragedy of her death lingers on the page, as there are sections with editor’s notes that explain that they were originally unfinished, or that they were pieced together by her notes or previous articles. It’s so great to see that this book and story she was so dedicated to was finished by people close to her, but the loss is still palpable.

So how does the new information about John DeAngelo affect this book? If anything, it makes it more poignant, and it certainly doesn’t diminish it. I say this because of a specific moment in the epilogue, entitled “A Letter To An Old Man”. It’s a final moment that is essentially a letter from Michelle to GSK/EAR/ONS, and it works as a powerful cap off to a wonderful book. The final paragraph is all the more powerful now. I’m going to quote part of it here to show you what I mean, a quote that’s made the rounds on social media a lot in the days after DeAngelo’s capture.

“The doorbell rings. No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly towards the insistent bell. This is how it ends for you. ‘You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark,’ you threatened a victim, once. Open the door. Show us your face. Walk into the light.”

And as Patton Oswalt and many others have pointed out, this is exactly what happened on April 25th, 2018.

“I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” is a stunning true crime book and an opus for a voice that left us far too soon. It will surely be considered one of the greats of the genre in the years to come, and Michelle McNamara will be remembered for all the good that she did in her help to bringing closure to the victims of a horrible monster. But it’s also just well written book about confronting darkness in life and in ourselves, and how to battle it as best we can. show less

It's difficult to disentangle I'll Be Gone in the Dark as a book from the marketing campaign which surrounded it and from the tragic early death of its author, Michelle McNamara, before the book could be completed. I say this in acknowledgement of the fact that my rating for this book is probably more along the lines of what I think I might have rated it had McNamara lived to finish it, rather than what's on the page.

If she had done so, I think, the book as a whole would have been tweaked show more to better fit its subtitle, One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. McNamara does a very good job at conjuring up the atmosphere of terror which the GSK created across a broad swathe of neighbourhoods in California during the 1970s and '80s, synthesising others' investigative findings, and showing how her compulsion to find out his identity originated in an unsolved murder which happened near to her home when she was a child. However, as someone whose day job involves a lot of research, I can't say I was impressed with any of the tacks McNamara described herself as taking here (the thing with the cufflinks in particular had me rolling my eyes), and contrary to the hype I don't think McNamara played any role in the arrest of Joseph Deangelo in 2018. show less

Abandoned at about 30%.
I found it a frustrating listen and kept wondering what was the point of it. I assume the original hope was to gather enough information, restructure it and possibly help catching the guy. I understand the thrill of being an armchair detective. But as it is, no such answer is provided and, once the killer was caught, it turns out that nothing done by the author actually helped the investigation.

So we get a book that is very one-sided: the side of the victims. And that show more is a very frustrating story to tell: in every chapter there is at least one murder or rape and the culprit vanishes into thin air. It's a time loop of human suffering.
Honestly, that's not something I enjoy reading. It even does a poor job of representing the victims as real people - in this contexts, they are only defined by the actions of a madman in a moment when they had no control over their lives. I feel like that's unjust.
The police is also noticeably absent. Maybe finding out why would have made for a better story.

This is my first attempt at reading a true crime book and maybe this is just not the right thing of me. There is structure and reason in fiction. Reality is messy. But I do believe a writer's job is to put order in that chaos. Otherwise we might as well read a collection of news clippings. show less