I'll Be Gone in the Dark

Ever since I discovered In Cold Blood as a teenager, true crime has been one of my guilty pleasures.

I binge watch shows like Making a Murderer, The Jinx, and American Crime Story. I revel in podcasts such as My Favorite Murder. And I devour books ranging from Columbine to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to The Executioner’s Song. A girl can’t subsist on literary fiction alone, you know?

So when Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was released a few months ago, I picked up a copy right away. The book tracks McNamara’s relentless search for a serial rapist and murderer she dubbed the Golden State Killer – a search so all-consuming that it contributed to her death in 2016 before she was able to solve the case. Of her very particular (and peculiar) obsession with serial killers, McNamara writes:

“I’m envious, for example, of people obsessed with the Civil War, which brims with details but is contained. In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write.”

I dove into the book in March, completing it soon after. Little did I know that, just weeks later, DNA evidence would crack the case wide open, resulting in the arrest of former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo. DeAngelo was charged with 12 counts of first-degree murder and is also suspected in more than 50 rapes. As McNamara’s husband Patton Oswalt quipped when the news broke, “I think you got him, Michelle.”

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a fascinating trip down the rabbit hole of one woman’s mind and another man’s crimes. Chapters cross both geography and subject matter – from the Chicago suburb where McNamara’s interest in crime was piqued by a brutal local murder, to Sacramento where Internet-christened heartthrob Paul Holes searched in vain for the killer for decades, to Southern California where DeAngelo is alleged to have first escalated to murder. As Sophie Haigney writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, a sense of place is a “particularly rich vein” for McNamara:

“She evokes the Eichler homes of Walnut Creek, the unique stoicism of Sacramento, the orange groves and suburban doldrums of Irvine, the Irish Catholic suburb of Chicago where she grew up. Crime layers over crime across time and place.”

I felt a chill of the familiar particularly in McNamara’s descriptions of Walnut Creek, a wealthy East Bay suburb where I’ve worked before – attending focus groups for ice cream and frozen fruit bars that drew from the same population DeAngelo once stalked.

After ushering her readers through the saga of her preoccupation and persistence, McNamara ends I'll Be Gone in the Dark with a prediction of how the killer who eluded her would eventually be caught:

“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. Like they did for Edward Wayne Edwards, twenty-nine years after he killed Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, in Sullivan, Wisconsin. Like they did for Kenneth Lee Hicks, thirty years after he killed Lori Billingsley, in Aloha, Oregon.

The doorbell rings.

No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly toward the insistent bell.

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.”

When the end did come for DeAngelo, it came much like McNamara imagined. After decades of dead ends, investigators finally cracked the case by feeding the suspect’s DNA into GEDmatch, a genealogy database which linked that DNA to distant relatives. Investigators then traced those peoples' descendants to DeAngelo. Next, officers bided their time, surveilling DeAngelo until he discarded an item that they could use to grab DNA and verify the match. Once the match was made, officers waited for him to come out of his residence, and when he did, a team took him into custody. DeAngelo literally opened the door and walked into the light.

McNamara’s herculean efforts to track the Golden State Killer have been widely heralded, and the quality of her writing has been compared to the best of the genre (even to Capote!). Since DeAngelo’s arrest, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark has been picked up by HBO for a docu-series, has sold out from many booksellers, and will be reissued with a new chapter addressing the case’s conclusion.

And while I can’t vouch for all true crime, I can vouch for the propulsive, fascinating qualities of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. As McNamara herself wrote:

“I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.”

And McNamara is certainly these things.