I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

by Michelle McNamara

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. 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.

She was both proud of the fact that she had raised a strong-minded daughter and resentful of my sharp opinions.

My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life. 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.

Roy Hazelwood, a former FBI profiler who specializes in sexual predators, talks about it in the book The Evil That Men Do, co-written by Stephen G. Michaud: “‘Most people have no trouble connecting intelligence with a complex robbery. But rape-torture is a depraved act, which they cannot remotely relate to. They therefore resist crediting such offenders with intelligence. This is true even of police officers.’”

The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob behind a door that never opens. But his power evaporates the moment we know him. We learn his banal secrets. We watch as he’s led, shackled and sweaty, into a brightly lit courtroom as someone seated several feet higher peers down unsmiling, raps a gavel, and speaks, at long last, every syllable of his birth name.

In the words of Ken Clark, she “brought attention to one of the least known, yet most prolific serial offenders ever to operate in the United States.

Open the door. Show us your face. Walk into the light.