I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – A Powerful and Gut-Wrenching True-Crime Book

One day soon, you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk……The doorbell rings…….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.

Journalist and creator of True Crime Diary Michelle Eileen McNamara spent nearly a decade researching for her true-crime book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which focuses on the unsolved crimes of a serial rapist and killer who terrorized Californian suburbs between mid 1970s and mid 1980s. Unfortunately she died in 2016 at age 46 (from the effects of prescription drugs and a heart condition) before completing her book. Michelle’s husband, the actor/comedian Patton Oswalt sought the help of investigative journalist Billy Jensen and researcher Paul Hynes to piece together his wife's manuscript and get it ready for publication. The book was published in February 27 this year and became an instant best-seller. Early in April, there was news that HBO will be producing a documentary series based on the book. And then followed the fascinatingly shocking news: a suspect named Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested in link to the serial murder-rape cases (72-year-old DeAngelo was a Navy Veteran and a former police officer). ‘One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer’, the caption in the book’s cover now felt evermore perfect.

It was Michelle McNamara who coined the moniker ‘Golden State Killer’, a man responsible for at least 100 burglaries, 50 home-invasion rapes, and 13 murders. He has also gleaned other nicknames during decades of police investigation and reporting: ‘Visalia Ransacker’, ‘East Area Rapist’, ‘Original Night Stalker’, ‘Diamond Knot Killer’, etc. As a dedicated researcher, accomplished armchair sleuth, and author of the website True Crime Diary, McNamara has possessed a long-standing fascination for cold cases (crimes that go unsolved). Earlier in the autobiographical portions of the book, she remarks, “The part of the brain reserved for sports statistics or dessert recipes or Shakespeare quotes is, for me, a gallery of harrowing aftermaths”. She sneaks into her little daughter Alice’s playroom in late nights, noting down penal codes in crayon and jolting notes for her next article. But McNamara terms her obsessive investigation to unmask the identity of Golden State Killer as more of a personal endeavor. She recalls the cold-blooded murder that happened closer to her neighborhood in 1984 (when Michelle was 14; a murder attributed to the serial-killer whom she pursued later in life).

Patton Oswalt and Michelle McNamara

For years, Michelle McNamara has interviewed rape victims, surviving kins of the murder victims, tracked down old police reports, forged a strong working relationship with members of law enforcement in the hopes of seeing the culprit behind the jail bars (“There's a scream lodged permanently in my throat now”, she writes when thinking the killer is still at large). There may have been many disappointments in the path she chose, but at the same time her continuous coverage on the 3 to 4 decade-old crimes of Golden State Killer brought renewed attention to the cases. Most importantly, the vicious nature of these crimes was broadcasted beyond the confines of Californian police reports (I also possess an eerie fascination for serial-killers and true-crime subjects yet I have never heard about Golden State Killer before the release of McNamara’s book).  Nevertheless, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark isn’t a book full of cold facts, as vouched by author Gillian Flynn in the foreword, trying to render an edge-of-the-seat narrative by plowing through the savage acts of an unfathomable killer, while treating his victims as mere ciphers. McNamara’s writing rather flows with nuance and humanity. She is deeply empathetic in narrating the hell the rape victims went through, and without delving much on violence and lurid details she pushes us into those distressing atmosphere. When it comes to portraying killer’s macabre habits at his victims’ homes, McNamara tells things with unbearable clarity, but in a way that blocks one’s unnecessary curiosity in the killer’s perverted indulgence.

While the first part of the book concentrates on the crimes, killer’s M.O., and the trauma of the victims, the second part follows array of cops from different counties, most of whom has retired after chasing dead ends throughout their career. The 2^nd part of the book also contains the author’s various theories (including the ones shared by her equally obsessive online patrons), and in-depth researches made by studying maps of crime scenes (geographic-profiling). Many of the chapters are pieced through from McNamara’s notes and the book’s third part, entirely written by Billy Jensen and Paul Hynes conveys the depth of her involvement in the case and the avenues she was about to chose to identify the killer. One of those things is that she wanted run the killer’s DNA through public databases like Ancestry.com, which was what the investigators eventually did to nab James DeAngelo.

The alleged Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo

Of course, the book’s incomplete nature shows through. Despite McNamara’s deeply evocative writing I felt the book’s structure makes the narration disjointed and repetitive (an unavoidable consequence after the author’s sad demise). There are chapters that can’t really compensate the absence of McNamara’s voice. Had she lived to finish the work, the final product would have been a masterpiece of true-crime literature.  In the ensuing months and years, debates would go on about whether McNamara’s book truly led to the capture of the serial-killer (already some articles have hailed her as prophetic and condemned certain police counties for not acknowledging McNamara’s book). But shoving aside these sentences that start with ‘if’ and look at the book’s merit, one could still find an enlivening and diligent work. Michelle McNamara robustly conveys the 70s American suburban life, where a rapist and murderer lurked in between the rifts of alienation and isolation that pervaded these communities (where people failed to look out for each other). She has also impeccably captured what it meant for her and the people of her generation to shine light upon this deranged killer (the “Letter to an Old Man” chapter would definitely be hailed as wondrous piece in the history of true-crime writing). Eventually, the devastating image of Golden State Killer turning the Californian dream into nightmare reminded me of the opening shot of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), when the camera zooms inside a well-manicured lawn to find squalid things that wholly contrasts with the idyllic space of American serenity and domesticity.

 
Patton Oswalt on his late wife's book