Gone but not forgotten

McNamara died before finishing her true-crime masterpiece. Its completion and publication, with a blurb from Stephen King and an introduction by bestselling Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, was effected by McNamara’s heartbreakingly devoted husband, comedian and actor Patton Oswalt. HBO’s new documentary adaptation of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark can hardly improve upon the book. McNamara’s work is as readable as anything by Ann Rule or Joe McGinniss, written with an artfulness and restraint unusual in a genre full of Grand Guignol titles like Buried Beneath the Boarding House and Green River Running Red.

That is not to say that the saga of the Golden State Killer is anything less than lurid and terrifying. His geographical range and the evolution over time of his modus operandi were such that it took investigators years to concede the unthinkable: that three different elusive criminals, nicknamed the Visalia Ransacker, the Original Night Stalker, and the East Area Rapist, were all the same man.

He was a prowler in a ski mask, observing and plotting with inexhaustible patience, an eye peering through a broken fence slat or a break in the bushes. He had a fondness for heavy breathing and explicitly threatening phone calls in the mode of a psycho from a Lifetime thriller. He knew where you were and where you were going to be. When his pathology was at its worst, he targeted couples. Meeting some of his survivors — one is loath to call them the lucky ones — face-to-face in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, one marvels that they are not catatonic with trauma.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the story of two tragedies: the lives destroyed by the Golden State Killer and the premature death of the straightforwardly heroic, self-sacrificing woman whose obsession helped bring him to justice. It is the story of two triumphs as well: the capture, using advanced forensic serology and creative DNA analysis, of the killer, the now 74-year-old former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, and the resolution of McNamara’s lifework.

The latter is what makes the book and the show so valuable and so satisfying. It would be misleading to say that McNamara, described warts and all by the husband, relatives, friends, editors, researchers, crime buffs, retired cops, detectives, and survivors who knew her, was in any way “ordinary.” She possessed an intuitive grasp of how to interpret and use evidence. She had a professional’s tolerance for blind alleys and dead ends, in the evidentiary sense and the literal one. One day, she’d be scouring eBay for distinctive cuff links stolen from a victim’s home, another day exploring overgrown paths and drainage ditches with taciturn homicide detective Paul Holes. McNamara was only “ordinary” in that she embodied what we think of as our best, most humane qualities: empathy, cooperation, resilience, and a sense of obligation to truth, justice, and the memory of the dead.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark manages an improbable high-wire act between sentimentality and abject horror. Old footage of McNamara (often with her young daughter), and voice-over (Amy Ryan) about her parents and upbringing, surrender abruptly to the details of vicious crimes. Whenever the contrast threatens to become heavy-handed, the viewer (or reader) remembers that this is entirely the point. “Ordinary” goodness, typified by McNamara, her husband, her fans, and the survivors who worked with her at the risk of their own sanity, is ever circling the wagons against the encroachments of what we can still recognize as extraordinary evil. As the biblical epigraph of Charles Portis’s True Grit reminds us, the wicked flee when none pursueth.

McNamara has in common with Portis’s Mattie Ross a formative encounter with evil: When McNamara was 14, a woman in her hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, was murdered blocks from Michelle’s home. The crime was never solved. Like Mattie, Michelle was a woman and a civilian in a milieu of mostly male professionals. A secondary story of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is true crime and amateur detection’s dramatic shift from the province of nerdy, would-be edgy males — such as, by his own admission, the young Patton Oswalt — to being the work of the women who are most often the victims of sexually violent crime.

For years, the gold standard in media about true crime was Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, by the baseball statistician Bill James. True crime was more like a macabre fandom, with body counts for stats, than a noble cause or calling. Today, it is more closely associated with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark’s podcast My Favorite Murder (Kilgariff appears in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark), which for all its comic relief is never less than scrupulously concerned with respect for victims and the propagation of empowering, potentially lifesaving knowledge. McNamara played an outsize role in bringing this deepened purpose to true crime enthusiasm.

Part of the Golden State Killer’s M.O. was incapacitating men in a manner charged with domestic symbolism. He’d enter a home in the dead of night, awaken a couple with a flashlight beam, and force the woman to tie up the man. Then, he’d mill about the kitchen, eat a snack, drink a beer, and find a stack of plates to put on the man’s back. If he heard these plates rattle or break, he’d say, he’d kill both of them. One husband, David Witthuhn, was unexpectedly in the hospital on the night the Golden State Killer came to call. He wasn’t cleared as a person of interest until 2001, by which time, his life was irrecoverably lost to alcoholism and depression. He died in 2008.

As a detective, Michelle McNamara held her own against the hardest-boiled professionals. As a mother, a wife, a writer, and a crusader, she never lost sight of the blast radius of grief, fear, and rage extending beyond the crime scene tape. Her example has coaxed true crime out of the unwholesome shadows and weaponized it for good. This film begins to honor her memory, but it’s other sleuths who will keep it alive.

Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.