Michelle McNamara - I’ll Be Gone In The Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

Contents

Contents

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Crime Club reproduced from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1975, 1962 by the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1960 by John A. Kees. Copyright 1954, 1947, 1943 by Weldon Kees.

Material covered in Ill Be Gone in the Dark was featured in the article In the Footsteps of a Killer, published by Los Angeles magazine.

ILL BE GONE IN THE DARK . Copyright 2018 by Tell Me Productions. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Cover design by Sarah Brody

Cover photographs Ed Freeman/Getty Images (house); Kues/Shutterstock (texture)

FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-231980-7

Version 01042018

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-231978-4

No butler, no second maid, no blood upon the stair.

No eccentric aunt, no gardener, no family friend

Smiling among the bric-a-brac and murder.

Only a suburban house with the front door open

And a dog barking at a squirrel, and the cars

Passing. The corpse quite dead. The wife in Florida.

Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,

The torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,

Scattered with check stubs in the hall;

The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,

The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,

The note: To be killed this way is quite all right with me.

Small wonder that the case remains unsolved,

Or that the sleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane,

And sits alone in a white room in a white gown,

Screaming that all the world is mad, that clues

Lead nowhere, or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen;

Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be solved.

Weldon Kees, Crime Club

VICTIMS

RAPE VICTIMS

Sheila (Sacramento, 1976)

Jane Carson (Sacramento, 1976)

Fiona Williams (South Sacramento, 1977)

Kathy (San Ramon, 1978)

Esther McDonald (Danville, 1978)

MURDER VICTIMS

Claude Snelling (Visalia, 1978)

Katie and Brian Maggiore (Sacramento, 1978)

Debra Alexandria Manning and Robert Offerman (Goleta, 1979)

Charlene and Lyman Smith (Ventura, 1980)

Patrice and Keith Harrington (Dana Point, 1980)

Manuela Witthuhn (Irvine, 1981)

Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez (Goleta, 1981)

Janelle Cruz (Irvine, 1986)

INVESTIGATORS

Jim Bevinsinvestigator, Sacramento County Sheriffs Department

Ken Clarkdetective, Sacramento Sheriffs Office

Carol Dalydetective, Sacramento County Sheriffs Department

Richard Shelbydetective, Sacramento County Sheriffs Department

Larry Cromptondetective, Contra Costa County Sheriffs Office

Paul Holescriminalist, Contra Costa County Sheriffs Office

John Murdockchief, Contra Costa County Sheriffs Crime Lab

Bill McGowendetective, Visalia Police Department

Mary Hongcriminalist, Orange County Crime Lab

Erika Hutchcraftinvestigator, Orange County District Attorneys Office

Larry Poolinvestigator, Countywide Law Enforcement Unsolved Element (CLUE), Orange County Sheriffs Department

Jim Whitecriminalist, Orange County Sheriffs Department

Fred Raydetective, Santa Barbara County Sheriffs Office

BEFORE THE GOLDEN STATE KILLER, THERE WAS THE GIRL. MICHELLE will tell you about her: the girl, dragged into the alley off Pleasant Street, murdered and left like so much trash. The girl, a young twentysomething, was killed in Oak Park, Illinois, a few blocks from where Michelle grew up in a busy, Irish Catholic home.

Michelle, the youngest child of six kids, signed her diary entries Michelle, the Writer. She said the murder ignited her interest in true crime.

We would have made a good (if perhaps strange) pair. At the same time, in my young teens, back in Kansas City, Missouri, I too was an aspiring writer, although I gave myself a slightly loftier moniker in my journal: Gillian the Great. Like Michelle, I grew up in a big Irish family, went to Catholic school, nurtured a fascination with the dark. I read Truman Capotes In Cold Blood at age twelve, a cheap second-hand purchase, and this would launch my lifelong obsession with true crime.

I love reading true crime, but Ive always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone elses tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.

It was inevitable that I would find Michelle.

Ive always thought the least appreciated aspect of a great true-crime writer is humanity. Michelle McNamara had an uncanny ability to get into the minds of not just killers but the cops who hunted them, the victims they destroyed, and the trail of grieving relatives left behind. As an adult, I became a regular visitor of her remarkable blog, True Crime Diary. You should drop her a line, my husband would urge. She was from Chicago; I live in Chicago; both of us were moms who spent unwholesome amounts of time looking under rocks at the dark sides of humanity.

I resisted my husbands urgingI think the closest I came to meeting Michelle was introducing myself to an aunt of hers at a book eventshe loaned me her phone, and I texted Michelle something notably unauthorly, like, You are the coolest!!!

The truth was, I was unsure whether I wanted to meet this writerI felt outmatched by her. I create characters; she had to deal with facts, go where the story took her. She had to earn the trust of wary, weary investigators, brave the mountains of paperwork that may contain that one crucial piece of information, and convince devastated family and friends to needle around in old wounds.

She did all this with a particular sort of grace, writing in the night as her family slept, from a room strewn with her daughters construction paper, scribbling down California penal codes in crayon.

I am a nasty collector of killers, but I wasnt aware of the man Michelle would dub the Golden State Killer until she started writing about this nightmare, who was responsible for fifty sexual assaults and at least ten murders in California during the 1970s and 80s. This was a decades-old cold case; witnesses and victims had moved away or passed away or moved on; the case encompassed multiple jurisdictionsin both Southern and Northern Californiaand involved myriad crime files that lacked the benefits of DNA or lab analysis. There are a very few writers who would take this on, fewer still who would do it well.