I'll Be Gone In The Dark

I'll Be Gone In The Dark

By Michelle McNamara

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.

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. Utterly original and compelling, it has been hailed as a modern true crime classic—one which fulfilled Michelle's dream: helping unmask the Golden State Killer.

In looking for a posthumous book, it would be hard to find one with an odder story than this one: published in January 2018, two years after Michelle McNamara dies, having spent years on a decades-old cold case, in April 2018 a suspect is arrested and charged for a string of more than 50 rapes and 12 murders stretching over fifteen towns.

I'll Be Gone starts promisingly and thoughfully, as McNamara talks about needing empathy in order to write about true crime without being lurid or morbid or unfairly brutal to its survivors, victims, and their families.  I think that her empathy is strength of the book, and it shines most clearly in the early chapters, which walk us through several of the crimes.  The downside sadly, is the unfinished premise: the lack of finality or cohesiveness saps vitality in the later chapters.  Obviously McNamara knew an open-ended true crime mystery was a hard sell: the last chapter, completed by several others who assisted and worked with her, mentions her planned strategy for resolution.  But without her to actually write it, it comes off only half-formed.

The other issue I had with it is something else which may or may not be the author's fault: the seemingly random and non-chronological order of events and chapters.  It moves from rapes to murders and back without any real rhyme or reason, making the patterns that McNamara talks about harder to pin down or follow.  For example, a discussion about "escalation" (i.e., the idea of moving from solo women to couples and from rapes to murders indicates a committed step into riskier and more brutal crimes) loses potency since we as readers can't follow the escalating steps that the criminal took, switchbacking as we do.  I'm not sure if there was a reason for why the chapters are ordered the way that they are, but a more orderly chronological path would go a long ways towards clarity. And I hate to sound uncaring, but because the crimes did escalate the way they did, there would be constant and maintained tension through the entire book, not just the first half.

This book also comes in the midst of a broader examination of how we, the public, consume these stories: for entertainment, titillation, thrills, satisfaction, or what-have-you.  The recent Ted Bundy films (one a documentary, the other a fictionalized retelling from a bystander's point of view), the Serial podcast and its various offshoots and copycats, all of this implicates us.  What steps are we taking to ensure that these terrible crimes are treated appropriately in their re-tellings?  What is appropriate? Who has the right to these stories? And the popular ethical question right now: what do we owe each other?  I've been reading various true-crime books for years, and while I'm not taking on cold files as a personal hobby, it can become easy to lose sight of the individuals in a blur of faces while the focus falls onto the criminal. 

McNamara wrestled with this idea as well, acknowledging the morbid and macabre side to what was basically a hobby (an obsessive one, clearly) for her.  Even as she acknowledges it though, she's picking up case files from contacts she met in chatrooms, going through old yearbooks and buying strangers' jewelry on ebay, the modern equivalent to peeking in windows and reading other people's mail. At what point is this too much? Does intent matter? Nowadays, the idea of being a thoughtful consumer is gaining more traction. What obligations do we have to avoid exploitative works?

As for the capper to the story, the arrest and identification of a DNA match - it's odd, after reading I'll Be Gone, it seems too easy somehow. After all the evidence, all the manpower, in the end it just took an internet database, and all these (amateur and professional) sleuths changed nothing - time, and scientific advances, accomplished that which hours and years of dedication could not.


13: A Book Published Posthumously