The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Diary of ‘a murder habit’
How a true-crime obsessive’s quest to catch a serial killer led to HBO’s ‘I’ll Be Gone in the Dark’
On the very first night of filming for the HBO series “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus trailed Patton Oswalt to a Chicago suburb, where the actor-comedian headlined an event for his late wife Michelle McNamara’s true crime book of the same name.
At the same time, at a house outside Sacramento, police were swooping in to arrest a man they believed to be the notorious serial killer and rapist who was the subject of McNamara’s “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer.”
For decades, no one had been able to catch the man responsible for a string of at least 13 murders and 50 rapes across California from 1974 to 1986, despite the best efforts of law enforcement and the research, writing and public attention that McNamara had given it for years.
But the hunt was over, though neither Oswalt nor Garbus knew that as the book tour and film shoot began April 24, 2018, almost exactly two years since McNamara had died in her sleep of an accidental drug overdose at the couple’s Los Angeles home.
“The timing was insane,” Garbus says. “We went to bed and woke up to texts at 6 o’clock in the morning that a suspect had been arrested.”
Adds Oswalt: “It was a crazy whirlwind, and I don’t quite remember the day, but luckily it all got filmed.”
Joe DeAngelo, a former police officer — as McNamara had suspected the killer to be — was charged with dozens of crimes after his arrest. He recently pleaded guilty to 26 charges — 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping.
For Oswalt and Garbus, the arrest is important for the closure it may bring to the survivors and families affected by the bloody trail he traveled from Citrus Heights and Visalia in Northern California to Ventura and Irvine in the south.
But “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” the six-part series that premiered recently on HBO, also tells a story that focuses on the subtitle of McNamara’s book. It’s about a woman with a quest, and about the joy she found and life she led before her own tragic death.
“The thing that was truly amazing about her personality was that it couldn’t be summed up,” Oswalt says. “It can’t be summarized in one sentence, and that’s what so amazing about her to me.”
Husband and champion
“I love anyone that has a passion for a very, very specific area and is unapologetic about it, like, ‘This is what I love,’“Oswalt says of McNamara’s devotion to crime writing. “So the fact that this was her thing made her even more delightful to me.”
They met after one of his stand-up shows at Largo in Los Angeles and married in 2005. A year later, she launched a website, True Crime Diary, where she wrote about cases in a personal, compelling style that quickly found fans.
Their daughter was born in 2009, and as Oswalt describes in the first few episodes of the show, both of them balanced unusual jobs — showbiz for him, what McNamara once described as “a murder habit” for her — with the everyday joys of family and friends.
“I didn’t think of it as, ‘Oh my god, she’s tracking down all this crazy stuff, isn’t this weird?’ “he says of McNamara’s proclivity to get the baby in bed, say good night to her husband and disappear into the night online to track down information about whatever grisly murder she was following.
“It never felt weird to me,” Oswalt says. “It just felt like, ‘Oh, I’m with somebody really, really special and unique.’
“It was hard for me to think of it like, ‘Oooh, my girlfriend’s got a murder habit.’ My girlfriend has a really unique set of skills and outlook on life, and I’m with this extraordinary individual.”
Oswalt says he doesn’t remember exactly when the crimes of the East Area Rapist or Original Night Stalker — the less-thancatchy nicknames for the criminal before McNamara successfully rebranded him the Golden State Killer — started to dominate her attention and writing.
“It felt like another case, but over time, and organically, it sort of took over,” he says. “Not to speak for Michelle, but I think one of the things it had was it had so much evidence and had been going on so long and not been solved.
“And it was so horrific,” Oswalt says. “How could something that horrific not get the kind of attention that a case like that would need to be solved to her was a very, very curious thing.
“And I think she realized maybe in her writing, maybe in her way of describing things and capturing people’s imagination, she could put some light back on the case and get some interest back on the case.”
Through a message board about the case, she found fellow citizen sleuths such as Paul Haynes, who became her researcher on the book and helped writer Billy Jensen finish it after her death.
She started to travel to Sacramento and other towns around California to meet with survivors and witnesses, getting them open up by her empathetic way of listening.
“I think people saw early on that she was listening for real,” Oswalt says. “That she was patient and wasn’t on anybody’s timetable except theirs.”
An article she wrote in Los Angeles magazine was an important break for both McNamara and the story of the Golden State Killer. A book deal — a dream of hers since childhood — soon followed.
When she died, the manuscript was about threefourths complete, Oswalt says, and initially, in his grief, in his need to care for their child, he didn’t think of its future.
“And then it was just that day when I was like, OK, I have to (finish it),” he says. “I’m not going to be able to lie with this thing unfinished. I’ve got to get it done.”
The filmmaker
Garbus has won Emmys for documentaries such as “Bobby Fischer Against the World” and “What Happened, Miss Simone” as well as Academy Award nominations for the Nina Simone film and the earlier “The Farm: Angola, USA.”
And she’s often worked with HBO, which sent her a galley of McNamara’s book. Garbus says it hooked her, and she quickly signed on to direct several episodes of the series and serve as executive producer for the whole thing.
“Michelle’s writing was so engaging and I felt like
the search for the Golden State Killer in and of itself was fascinating,” she says. “But what made me want to do it was really the fact that we could bring this incredibly relatable point of view to the storytelling and examine the nature of obsession through Michelle’s own voice.”
Garbus says that as an East Coast native, she had not known of the Golden State Killer and his crimes until she read the book.
“I think it was shocking that it wasn’t a household name the way Zodiac or Son of Sam or other killers were,” she says. “I’m grateful that Michelle got so much publicity for this case, and now he is (well-known), and he’s also an inmate.”
While the lore and obsession around unsolved crimes was part of her original interest in the project, Garbus says the arrest of DeAngelo one day after she shot her first footage didn’t really change that much of the story she wanted to tell.
“Finding him is part of the story that we tell, but the search itself, which is so fundamental, is still an area of interest,” Garbus says. “I don’t think this is a series about Joe DeAngelo. I think this is a series about Michelle McNamara and her search, and the survivors and their searches.”
Garbus, who this year made her feature film directing debut with “Lost Girls” starring Amy Ryan, says “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” is a different, more complex documentary than anything she’s done before.
“We ended up creating quite elaborate sets and scripting many sequences, and that was not something I’ve done for a doc before,” she says. “And then combining that with period archival [footage] and figuring out how do we feel, like we’re on this journey with her, going down these rabbit holes that lead to tremendous disappointment on the one hand or adrenaline on the other.”