New Book Follows The Life & Death Of A True Crime Writer Obsessed With A Serial Killer

Michelle McNamara was a true crime fan and writer who channeled her obsession with an unsolved California crime spree into a years-long project and a career. Today sees the release of her book about the case and the serial rapist and murderer, that in a way, took her own life as well —I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer.

In 2010, McNamara read about the elusive serial killer who had raped an estimated 50 victims and killed 10 more throughout the state of California from 1976 to 1986. The murderer, who was described as a 20-something male, wore a ski mask and stalked sleeping women and couples while they slept. Sometimes he would rob his victims; sometimes he would force the women to tie their partners up so that they were helpless as he brutally raped them.

In an article for Vulture, McNamara’s friend Kera Bolonik wrote that McNamara spent the next six years researching and tracking the killer. She turned her findings into a 2013 piece for Los Angeles Magazine — which she she later began developing into her book.

In 2016, when the book was two-thirds complete, McNamara died unexpectedly in her sleep of a prescription drug overdose. She was only 46 years old.

“I was supposed to be writing a different profile of my friend Michelle McNamara, an introduction to a brilliant new true-crime writer who, at 46, put her MFA to excellent use and published our generation’s In Cold Blood,” Bolonik wrote. Instead, Bolonik says that McNamara wrote a “breathtaking, ambitious, and exquisitely written work that comes to an abrupt halt, as if she herself had become an indirect casualty of the man she’d been chasing.”

I’ll Be Gone In The Dark cover art [Amazon]

The last third of the book was completed by McNamara’s lead researcher, Paul Haynes, and her friend, investigative journalist Billy Jensen. Her husband, comedian Patton Oswalt, wrote the afterward.

The Golden State killer was previously known as the East Area Rapist (EAR), and the Original Night Stalker. The attacks took place in Northern California, and moved south to Santa Barbara, Irvine, and Ventura. Eventually, the rapist escalated to murder — and McNamara estimated that he killed 10 victims. In 1986, he struck for a final time, and then the attacks stopped.

In 2001, several of the Northern California rapes were linked by DNA to the murders in Southern California. It was McNamara who came up with the idea of “rebranding” the murderer as the “Golden State Killer.”

Police investigated thousands of suspects and collected DNA from hundreds of them, but the killer has still never been identified or found.

The case did inspire California Proposition 69, passed in 2004, which mandated DNA collection from all felons, and from anyone charged with crimes like sex offenses and murder.

Sketches of the suspect [FBI]

The research took a heavy toll on McNamara’s personal life, according to friends and family. On April 20, 2016, McNamara, who had not been getting enough sleep, took a Xanax and went to bed.

The next morning, Oswalt said that he took their daughter to school, then checked on his wife and put a Starbucks he had bought for her on the bedside table. Later, he discovered that she was not breathing.

Several months later, Oswalt revealed that McNamara had an undiagnosed heart condition that caused blockages in her arteries. Her death was also attributed to an accidental overdose due to the combination of the prescription medications Adderall, Xanax, and Fentanyl.

Oswalt hadn’t even been aware of all the prescriptions she’d been taking. He believes that the nature of her project, and the responsibility she felt to the victims, combined with her frustration at not being able to identify a suspect took its toll. “It’s so clear that the stress led her to make some bad choices in terms of the pharmaceuticals she was using,” he said. “She just took this stuff on, and she didn’t have the years of being a hardened detective to compartmentalize it.”

McNamara and her research assistant believed that they made a breakthrough in the case in January 2016, when they found a room full of files at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office that had been sitting there for years. Criminalist Paul Holes from the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office, who has worked on the case for 20 years, said McNamara had helped make other major breakthroughs on the case.

While McNamara does not identify the killer in her book, critics have said her story — and obsession — is a compelling narrative.

To learn more about this case, watch the “Golden State Killer” episode of Investigation Discovery’s People Magazine Investigates on ID GO now!

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Vulture

The Daily Beast

The New York Times

“In the Footsteps of a Killer” – Los Angeles Magazine

Main photos: Michelle McNamara and Patton Oswalt [Getty Images] I’ll Be Gone In The Dark book cover [Amazon]

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