Haunted by a serial killer
It’s no spoiler to say that the killer isn’t caught by the end of Michelle McNamara’s book, but this true crime account of the Golden State Killer — responsible for 50 rapes and 10 murders from 1976 to 1986 in California — is compelling reading.
Possibly more so now that Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, who was fired from the Auburn Police Department in 1979, was arrested after DNA evidence linking him to the crimes was uncovered.
This breakthrough aside, the impact of I’ll Be Gone In The Dark — a phrase the killer said to one of his victims in an early attack — is further complicated by the sudden death of McNamara in 2016, before her book was finished.
It was completed by her researcher, Paul Haynes, and colleague Billy Jensen from McNamara’s voluminous notes. Though they do a fine job, a sense of what might have been hangs over the book and one misses the verve and polish of McNamara’s prose, which shines in her completed chapters.
Early in the book, she details leaving a glitzy Hollywood party — her husband was comedian Patton Oswalt — when she gets word on her phone that another killer she was obsessed with has been apprehended — “I return not to my sleeping infant but my laptop . . . in search of information about a man I’d never met, who murdered people I didn’t know”. It turns out not to be him. McNamara’s obsession with killers led her to insomnia, nightmares and over-dependence on medication — which, in part, caused her death. Apparently her fascination with killers stemmed from a 1984 murder near her Illinois home when she was 14.
She walked to the abandoned crime scene a few days later and collected the victim’s broken Walkman, but one suspected the roots go deeper than that. Indeed, it’s McNamara’s own story — glimpsed in tantalising fragments — which is the other unresolved mystery here; a fraught home life, a rebellious teen, that increasing
fascination with the darkest sides of human nature, which led to her setting up the truecrimediary.com website before narrowing her focus to the Golden State Killer.
McNamara was well aware of her obsession’s toll on her health and family but, like an addict, couldn’t stop, even as many of her theories and suspects in IBGITD became dead ends — “the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write”.
No doubt the dramatic possibilities of this dual mystery played a part in HBO recently picking up the rights to make a documentary series.
Now they quite possibly have the ending.