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This is one of those books I found I not only couldn’t put down, but from which I had to share information with my husband as I was reading. And then when I was done, I Googled the case to find out what updates have been revealed about it.
The Golden State Killer, whom investigators now believe to be Joseph James DeAngelo, arrested a mere two months after the publication of this book, didn’t even have that moniker until the work of Michelle McNamara. She was a writer who started a cold-case blog called True Crime Diary and for years obsessively researched any detail that could be related to the rapist and killer who had struck in various cities up and down California. She gained the trust of police investigators and truly collaborated to bring attention to this man who terrorized so many over the course of more than a decade.
His earliest criminal behavior was likely as the Visalia Ransacker, who committed a string of “bizarre burglaries” — about 130 in less than two years (1974-1975) — in the Central Valley town (as I write this, I live in Visalia, decades later, and reading about references to familiar spots and streets can’t help but be particularly fascinating for me). He didn’t take cash or items of great value; he liked to take personal items like photos and jewelry and “had a thing for hand lotion.” He broke things, moved items around, laid out women’s underwear, and generally seemed to have a mean, perverted streak. Then he committed a murder when he was confronted by a father in the middle of an attempted kidnapping of that man’s teenage girl.
Eventually, the burglaries ended. Then, Sacramento endured a long string of rapes. The rapist was named the East Area Rapist, for his choice of the part of the city he terrorized. Rapes eventually escalated to murders. Some occurred in Sacramento, but more were in southern California and near the coast. Since these were in the ‘70s and ‘80s, for a while investigators in these disparate areas did not make the connection, or could not be sure of one. But as time progressed and DNA profiling came into practice, it did become clear that the man perpetrating these vicious crimes had traveled to (or moved to) these different areas.
And then after 10 years of horrific assaults, they stopped. In the decades since, several dogged investigators have made it their mission to find the Golden State Killer.
Michelle McNamara died in her sleep at just age 46, two years before the killer was caught. Her book was not complete. It was finished thanks to the determination of her husband, actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, who made sure others could get the book to publication. It stands as a testament to one woman’s incredible work and persistence, and as a record of the people who suffered at the hands of one terrible criminal and the police investigators who took decades to find him and begin to bring him to justice. It reflects thousands and thousands of hours of tedious and obsessive research, pondering, puzzling, coordinating and collecting of information and evidence, and the product (finalized as well as could be done) shows not just skill in research but in narrative reporting. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is compelling and a story I will not soon forget.
Rated: High. There are right around 8 to 10 instances of strong language, mostly quotes of what the rapist/killer said to victims. Sexual content includes some details about the rapist’s private parts and his typical way of attacking women. Violence includes some description of crime scenes and what was done to murder victims (usually bludgeoned). It’s obviously disturbing. But it’s also somewhat restrained in description; McNamara doesn’t go into more detail than seems strictly necessary to lay out what occurred. She mentions that some police officers and others who were present at some scenes had to go into counseling and were shaken more than they were by other scenes they had witnessed, but it’s still not completely spelled out to readers how horrific the scenes were. The book reports but doesn’t wallow.
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