I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
✒️ Author: Michelle McNamara |. 📖 Published: 2018 | 🗓 Read: April 18, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 384
Summary
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.
Why You Should Read
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.
Notable Highlights
I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy.
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Looking back now, it feels as though I was born into a party that had started to wind down.
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She couldn’t take scenes in which someone threw a party and no one came. She avoided movies about salesmen down on their luck. The specificity was what I found peculiar and amusing; I now see it as the mark of a deeply sensitive person.
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We swim or sink against our deficits in life, and she made it a point to encourage me in ways that she had not been.
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Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time.
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My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life.
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Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother. And I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.
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I need to see his face. He loses his power when we know his face.
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“Make one move and you’ll be silent forever and I’ll be gone in the dark.”
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EAR was brazen enough to attend events dedicated to his own capture, that he blended in, observed, remembered, and excelled at a certain kind of malevolent patience.
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The likelihood of any two individuals (except identical twins) having the same human bar code is roughly one in a billion.
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“Well, that’s a way more interesting show than what we’re working on. How ’bout your TV wife is a party planner? Sound good?”
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