My book report #1
I'll Be Gone In the Dark, One Woman's Obsessive Search For the Golden State Killer, by Michelle McNamara, HarperCollins, 2016
This might be the saddest true-crime book I have ever read, because the argument can be made that the author was the final victim. Michelle McNamara was only 46 when she died suddenly in 2016, leaving the case unsolved and this book unfinished. As far as I know, no official cause of death was determined. It's probable that she was simply worn out by her obsessive search, too many sleepless nights spent poring over faded evidence, the emotional highs and lows of thinking the case closed and realizing it was not, while coping with the everyday events of raising a daughter, preparing Thanksgiving dinners, and living with a comedian who was chased by his own demons, her husband Patton Oswalt.
A quick visit to Wikipedia will tell you more about this monster than McNamara ever knew: Joseph James DeAngelo, born 1945, arrested April 2018, two months after the book was published. Former police officer in Exeter, California, where he was promoted to sergeant. Known during his crime spree as the Visalia Ransacker, the Original Night Stalker and the East Area Rapist; it was McNamara who named him the Golden State Killer when it became apparent that he (I have to say allegedly) murdered thirteen people and raped more than fifty women and girls all over the state between 1974 and 1986. Reading this book left the distinct impression that California was teeming with serial killers, rapists, burglars, stalkers and peepers in those years; they must have been bumping into one another in the dark on every new subdivision and tree-lined street. She was right about one thing: it was DNA evidence that cornered him. Apparently a relative innocently sent a saliva sample to one of the commercial ancestry-tracing companies, and it raised a red flag with CODIS (the Combined DNA Index System). It also raised some scary Fourth Amendment issues, which the book brushes off but which will no doubt be aired by DeAngelo's lawyers if he ever has a trial.
Completed by Paul Haynes and Billy Jensen from McNamara's notes, the book necessarily feels like a rough draft, with a few sentences that don't quite make sense. An index would be helpful. I'm sure a future edition will bring the story to a more or less satisfactory ending, but damn it, I wish Michelle McNamara were here to write it. She deserves to be.
This might be the saddest true-crime book I have ever read, because the argument can be made that the author was the final victim. Michelle McNamara was only 46 when she died suddenly in 2016, leaving the case unsolved and this book unfinished. As far as I know, no official cause of death was determined. It's probable that she was simply worn out by her obsessive search, too many sleepless nights spent poring over faded evidence, the emotional highs and lows of thinking the case closed and realizing it was not, while coping with the everyday events of raising a daughter, preparing Thanksgiving dinners, and living with a comedian who was chased by his own demons, her husband Patton Oswalt.
A quick visit to Wikipedia will tell you more about this monster than McNamara ever knew: Joseph James DeAngelo, born 1945, arrested April 2018, two months after the book was published. Former police officer in Exeter, California, where he was promoted to sergeant. Known during his crime spree as the Visalia Ransacker, the Original Night Stalker and the East Area Rapist; it was McNamara who named him the Golden State Killer when it became apparent that he (I have to say allegedly) murdered thirteen people and raped more than fifty women and girls all over the state between 1974 and 1986. Reading this book left the distinct impression that California was teeming with serial killers, rapists, burglars, stalkers and peepers in those years; they must have been bumping into one another in the dark on every new subdivision and tree-lined street. She was right about one thing: it was DNA evidence that cornered him. Apparently a relative innocently sent a saliva sample to one of the commercial ancestry-tracing companies, and it raised a red flag with CODIS (the Combined DNA Index System). It also raised some scary Fourth Amendment issues, which the book brushes off but which will no doubt be aired by DeAngelo's lawyers if he ever has a trial.
Completed by Paul Haynes and Billy Jensen from McNamara's notes, the book necessarily feels like a rough draft, with a few sentences that don't quite make sense. An index would be helpful. I'm sure a future edition will bring the story to a more or less satisfactory ending, but damn it, I wish Michelle McNamara were here to write it. She deserves to be.
Labels: books
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 1:59 PM
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