I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2018)

Michelle McNamara's true-crime book about the so-called Golden State Killer is already making it to recommendation lists of best true-crime ever. This is likely due more to circumstances above and beyond the book itself. It's a very good book, such as it is, but explicitly it's incomplete. A fair amount of its reputation has to do with the killer, who was so elusive for so long that he has at least two other police and/or media nicknames. I first learned about him in the 2000s from an episode of the A&E channel's Cold Case Files. Joseph James DeAngelo, as we finally learned was his name, was an amazingly skillful and sickeningly prolific sexual offender who finally graduated to serial killer. He was savagely cruel with a penchant for bizarre gestures. I kept him in the back of my mind and looked out for more information about him. McNamara reportedly had much the same experience, perhaps even with the same TV episode. She really went to work on it as a web sleuth in the 2010s. At some point I remember running across her blog, True Crime Diary. I read enough of it to appreciate she was on the case and that it was still unsolved. In fact, it was McNamara who gave him the “Golden State Killer” sobriquet. He had previously been known in Sacramento as the East Area Rapist and in Southern California as the Original Night Stalker. McNamara's blog was way deep in the weeds when I found it around 2013 and I didn't end up visiting often. She died in 2016 at the age of 46, while working on this book. The book is constructed from manuscript parts, notes, and other sources by true-crime writer Paul Haynes, investigative journalist Bill Jensen, and McNamara's widower Patton Oswalt. It's a work of love and done really well. It was published in February 2018. Two months later, in a dramatic turn of events, DeAngelo was finally run to ground at the age of 72. He was subsequently convicted in 2020 and sent to prison for life, which is probably not a very long sentence, but still. All the stuff that McNamara wrote here, including a long section of memoir about an unsolved murder in her Chicago neighborhood when she was growing up, are far and away the best parts of I'll Be Gone in the Dark. But the book is often fragmented. One section is a partial transcription of a day she spent with one of the cold case detectives on the case. A valiant job was done pulling this together after her death, but her touch on a final pass is missed, and inevitably, as we learn more details with time, someone is going to do a better job of telling DeAngelo’s whole story. But he may always be known casually as the Golden State Killer—the nickname McNamara gave DeAngelo before we knew his name. I'll Be Gone in the Dark is more and more a curiosity as time goes by, and an incomplete one at that, but still worth looking into.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.