"I'll Be Gone In The Dark" by Michelle McNamara

 

Michelle McNamara did not solve the Golden State Killer murders.  The name of the man who eventually pleaded guilty to those crimes and who was sentenced to life in prison without parole does not appear in her book, I’ll Be Gone In The Dark:  One Woman’s Obsessive Search For The Golden State Killer (Harper Perennial, 2018).  Her research team and her husband attested to this in their completion of the manuscript after McNamara’s death in 2016 of an undiagnosed heart problem exacerbated by prescription anti-anxiety medication and painkillers.

What she did do was keep the cases in the public mind.  She did what every homicide detective should do:  speak up for the victims and continue to seek justice.  One of those charged with taking the killer down, Ken Clark, says that McNamara “brought attention to one of the least known, yet most prolific serial offenders ever to operate in the United States…Her professional research, attention to detail, and sincere desire to identify the suspect allowed her to strike a balance between the privacy of those who suffered while exposing the suspect in a way that someone may recognize.”  However, the name of the killer, Joseph DeAngelo, never appears in the book, only in the Appendix sections compiled by others.  That is not a slight on McNamara, her investigative abilities, or her writing.

The book is part memoir, part true crime, and although it is not always successful for the writer to get in the way of the story, especially one as gripping as this, we need to see McNamara’s abilities and how she came to be interested in such homicides from an early age.  We see her dogged determination to pursue the case, first using tools available to anyone with an internet hook-up.  Later, as she meticulously maps the crime scenes, searches for patterns, and traces seemingly unrelated pieces of information critical to pushing the investigation forward, those charged with investigating the crimes develop a healthy respect for the writer and her talents.  They share information with her; she does not hesitate to reciprocate with her findings.  These were cold cases, relegated to a file box on a shelf in a dusty police evidence locker.  Without McNamara’s insistence, these cases may have well been forgotten and never linked together.

McNamara believes her interest in unsolved crimes began in childhood.  A jogger is brutally attacked and murdered in her neighborhood of Oak Park, Illinois.  She thinks she knows the case from neighborhood gossip, but it is only when she investigates the unsolved case as an adult that she gets the true, horrific details from some of her childhood acquaintances who actually stumbled upon the murder scene.  From the start, McNamara clearly has a calling to do this investigative work.  She visualizes details, uncovers patterns, and chases down leads.  Her efforts are more Sherlock Holmes than action hero.  McNamara teases apart the layers with brainpower, digital acumen and shoe leather, and her pursuit is fascinating to watch unfold in the book.  She is an expert at analyzing the details and proving or disproving a hypothesis.  She hits several dead ends, but she is diligent about going back and trying another avenue; she is not discouraged or thrown off by setbacks.

Along the way, she shares her views on the cases:  “Most violent criminals are impulsive, disorganized, and easily caught,” she writes.  “The vast majority of homicides are committed by people known to the victim and, despite game attempts to throw off the police, these offenders are usually identified and arrested.  It’s the tiny minority of criminals…who represent the bigger challenge, the ones whose crimes reveal preplanning and unremorseful rage.”

She is angry that the police never solved the case from her childhood.  “Everyone in the neighborhood was gripped with fear and then moved on,” she writes.  “But I never could.  I had to figure out how it happened.”  She wants to see the face of the killer because “He loses his power when we know his face.”  In the Golden State Killer case, this obsession with his face is palpable.  She collects together all the witness and victim composite sketches.  There are commonalities she recognizes, but what does he truly look like?  She wants to look him in the eyes at arraignment, at conviction.  All the more reason her death thwarted the satisfaction she might have felt with the final outcome of the case earlier this summer.

The title of the book comes from something the Golden State Killer said to one of his victims who survived:  “Make one move and you’ll be silent forever and I’ll be gone in the dark.”  In these crimes, he did disappear into the dark—on foot, running, riding a bike.  He narrowly escaped capture and being shot by an FBI agent who chased him from one crime scene.  His ability to blend into shadow, to avoid witnesses, to stalk his prey was uncanny.  Often the crimes were committed within blocks of each other.  Yet, he was not caught.

McNamara is not immune to purple prose now and again.  There are mixed metaphors that do not work.  After a long day of research, she writes, “My eyes were stripped by computer glare and as devoid of moisture as if they’d been vacuumed clean by an airplane toilet.”  Metaphors like this often get in the way of the story.

Ultimately, what we learn from Michelle McNamara’s writing here is that the human animal is, first and foremost, an animal.  In these stories of death and shattered lives, we see in full color how violence is often inescapable, how, despite laws and law enforcement, we are still vulnerable.  That unfortunate fact is not one that will go away in the dark anytime soon.