Comedian Patton Oswalt
has a special message for his late wife Michelle McNamara, who wrote “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” a book about the search for the Golden State Killer.
“You did it, Michelle.” Comedian Patton Oswalt proudly and tenderly spoke those words to his late wife in an Instagram video on Wednesday.
Finally, an arrest had been made in the case of the Golden State Killer, a moniker Michelle McNamara coined on her personal mission to catch a man responsible for at least 12 killings and 50 rapes throughout California in the 1970s and ’80s.
McNamara died in her sleep at 46 in April 2016. She had been in the middle of her hunt for the killer and her book, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer.” Oswalt helped finish the book after McNamara’s death. It became a No. 1 New York Times best-seller.
On Wednesday, authorities announced that a DNA match led them to arrest the Golden State Killer, whom they identified as Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer.
Oswalt appeared on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” early Thursday and said “it feels like this thing that she wanted so badly is done,” he said.
He and McNamara’s fans were crediting the late sleuth’s years of dogged work with helping solve the crime and were disappointed when police didn’t give her credit at a news conference announcing the arrest. Asked specifically about whether McNamara’s book helped solve the case, Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said his office had gotten that question “from literally all over the world in the last 24 hours.”