I'll Be Gone in the Dark

by Michelle McNamara

She took me with her to one of his meets. We hid high up in the bleachers to peek at him. I remember the love-wrecked expression on her face as we watched him explode forth from the starting line. I didn’t realize it then, but I was losing her to the complexities of high school.

I wish now that I’d been kinder to her.

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.

A quote by an anonymous sheriff ’s detective conveyed the brittle weariness setting in: “‘It was exactly the same as all the rest.’”

On The Morning of February 2, 1977, A Thirty-year-old woman in Carmichael lay bound, blindfolded, and gagged on her bed. After listening for a long time and hearing nothing, she worked the gag out of her mouth and called out for her seven-year-old daughter, whom she sensed was in the room. “Are you okay?” she asked. Her daughter shushed her. “Momma, be quiet.” Somebody pushed down on the woman’s bed abruptly and let go, as if to tell her he was still there.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The section that follows was pieced together from Michelle’s notes.]

"The truth was, I was jittery from sugar, hunger, and spending too much time alone in the dark absorbing a fifty-chapter horror story narrated in the kind of dead voice used by desk clerks at the DMV."

One night Shelby followed up on a prowler tip. The woman who called in the tip seemed surprised when Shelby knocked on the front door and announced himself. For the last several minutes she thought an officer was already there, she told him; she could swear she heard the sound of a police radio just outside her house.

Only a madman would strike again.

Another example: an article in the Sacramento Union on May 22, “Two Victims Recall East Area Rapist,” quoted Jane using a pseudonym; there were enough identifying details that the EAR, reading it, would have known who it was, which makes what she said all the more remarkable. “I’d feel cheated if someone blew his head off. I’d ask them to please aim low,” she said.

One image that would continue to nag at Fiona was that of a man at the Realtor’s open house, standing next to her as they looked out at the pool at the same time. She didn’t know why the impression stayed with her. Had he stood too close? Stayed a beat too long? She tried in vain to build a face, but he was blank. A man, that was all.

The action of moving forward, their hands unrestrained, of physically doing something, was all that did.

It might help convey what Sacramento was like in the 1970s, and something about the EAR, to know that whenever I tell an inquiring native that I’m writing about a serial rapist from Sacramento, no one has ever asked which one.

One Sunday morning in 1962, a British paperboy found a dead cat on the side of the road.

As it happens, the boy in question, a budding scientist, would become serial killers’ biggest adversary, the creator of their kryptonite. His name is Alec Jeffreys. In September 1984, Jeffreys discovered DNA fingerprinting; in doing so, he changed forensic science and criminal justice forever.