I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

Summary (from the publisher): A masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer—the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California for over a decade—from Michelle McNamara, the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case.

"You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark."

For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

At the time of the crimes, the Golden State Killer was between the ages of eighteen and thirty, Caucasian, and athletic—capable of vaulting tall fences. He always wore a mask. After choosing a victim—he favored suburban couples—he often entered their home when no one was there, studying family pictures, mastering the layout. He attacked while they slept, using a flashlight to awaken and blind them. Though they could not recognize him, his victims recalled his voice: a guttural whisper through clenched teeth, abrupt and threatening.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Framed by an introduction by Gillian Flynn and an afterword by her husband, Patton Oswalt, the book was completed by Michelle’s lead researcher and a close colleague. Utterly original and compelling, it is destined to become a true crime classic—and may at last unmask the Golden State Killer.

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins.

 

I could not put this book down. I thought about it all day. I laid awake in the darkness wondering about what I would read next. Although her death was already a tragedy, I mourned anew because now I knew what death had ripped her away from: the conclusion of this masterfully written work of art and the untold hours of research it represents.

 

Michelle McNamara spent hundreds of hours meticulously researching the serial rapist turned murderer that she dubbed the 'Golden State Killer.' Responsible for more than fifty sexual assaults and at least ten murders, this elusive killer had terrorized Northern California through the 1970s and 80s. McNamara has provided a chilling, horrifying look at the work of a brilliant killer, while also detailing her own compulsion to hunt down this unknown killer.

 

"That summer I hunted the serial killer at night from my daughter's playroom" (1). From the very first line, McNamara reels the reader in, beckoning you to come closer, to look over her shoulder at the dark reality she was uncovering. With so many victims, so many crime scenes, so many years of police investigation, McNamara has to be selective in how she tells this story and what details she includes. She proves adept at slicing away at the chaff and leaving behind the heart of this true story and provides just the details that were needed to follow along and get her readers invested in also hunting down this killer.

 

What she reveals is an unnerving nightmare. The man she was hunting was between the age of eighteen and thirty at the time of the crimes. He was Caucasian, athletic, capable of vaulting tall fences, and always concealed his face behind a mask. He frequently would canvass a neighborhood in the days and weeks before an attack and would break into homes to learn layouts and study family photos in advance of attacks. He targeted suburban couples, waiting until they were asleep for the night to break in and wake them up by shining a flashlight in their faces. He was big on psychological torment as well as physical; in 2001, he called a woman who still lived in the home where he attacked her twenty-four years earlier. She instantly recognized his voice on the other end of the line, whispering, "Remember when we played?" (4).

 

A large part of the terror this unknown killer commands is just because of that: he remains unknown. This search for monsters was an almost obsessive compulsion for McNamara, one she reflects on in this work: "What gripped me was the specter of that question mark where the killer's face should be. The hollow gap of his identity seemed violently powerful to me" (45). Equally chilling to me was the evidence that the killer likely identified multiple potential victims and then chose the best option the night of, depending on circumstances. "He maximized options and laid groundwork; that way, when mission night arrived, his urge never went unfulfilled. That means that women exist who, because of change of schedule, or luck, were never victims, but like the Creature's shapely object of obsession treading in the lagoon, they felt something terrifying brush against them" (183).

 

Of course I wish we could identify this killer but another great tragedy was McNamara's untimely death. Her editor has done an excellent job of piecing together the work McNamara left behind and filling in holes from her notes and articles she wrote, as well as asking others, including fellow investigators and her husband, to write companion sections. The first half of this book, which seems to have been fully the work of McNamara and very polished at the time of her death merits a solid five stars from me. The book does jump around in time significantly, which made it difficult to follow, but I could never determine if that was McNamara chasing the narrative where it took her across time or a consequence of her death before being able to fully complete this book. Either way, this is an excellent work of crime fiction that I thoroughly enjoyed and that both captivated and horrified me.

 

Stars: 5