I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michel
I first became interested in this book due to My Favorite Murder, a podcast I listen to all the time. They have talked about the Golden State Killer and this book and Michelle McNamara a decent amount. So when word got out that he had been caught, I knew I had to read this book immediately.
I'm not going to lie, this was a hard book to read for me. There is plenty of talk about the hideous crimes he committed and the fact that he was captured didn't help me the way I thought it would. I was still terrified. I had to stop reading more than once because I couldn't handle the thought of what his victims went through.
McNamara does a wonderful job exposing the Golden State Killer and her obsession with him without exploiting the victims. It's amazing how harsh she is against him and herself. She seems frustrated with herself and her interest in him. Normally, I wouldn't want to hear about the author and her life, but I really enjoyed the breaks from his trail of horror and seeing the evidence and case from her point of view.
I would say you have to read this book, but be warned that it's not for the faint of heart. There is talk of brutal murders and rapes. But you'll cheer a little at the end, reading what Michelle wishes for the Golden State Killer. You cheer for the fact that this case is solved. It's bittersweet knowing that Michelle wasn't alive to see it happen, but you know the victims' families can sleep easier knowing their loved one's killer isn't lurking in the dark.
Pick it up for $17.02. It's worth the nights you won't be able to sleep.
“One day soon, you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk. Like they did for Edward Wayne Edwards, twenty-nine years after he killed Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, in Sullivan, Wisconsin. Like they did for Kenneth Lee Hicks, thirty years after he killed Lori Billingsley, in Aloha, Oregon. The doorbell rings. No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly toward the insistent bell. This is how it ends for you. 'You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark,' you threatened a victim once. Open the door. Show us your face. Walk into the light.”
“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.”
“He later underscored how tricky suspect assessment is by pointing out that just based on geographic history and physical description a good EAR-ONS suspect would be Tom Hanks. (Who, it should be emphasized, can be eliminated by the shooting schedule of Bosom Buddies alone).”
“It really confirmed for me that inside everyone lurks a Sherlock Holmes that believes that given the right amount of clues they could solve a mystery. If the challenge here, or perceived weakness, is that the unsolved aspect will leave readers unfulfilled, why not turn that on its head and use it as a strength?”
“I’ve now come to realize that getting excited about a suspect is a lot like that first surge of stupid love in a relationship, in which, despite vague alarm bells, you plow forward convinced that he is the One.”
“There's always the question of what to call an unknown perpetrator in police reports. The choice is often "the suspect," occasionally "the offender," or sometimes simply "the man." Whoever wrote the Danville reports elected to use a term that was stark and unambiguous in its charge, its tone of reproach as if a finger were pointing from the very page. The term affected me the moment I read it. It became my private shorthand for the EAR, the simple term I returned to when I lay awake at three a.m. cycling through a hoarder's collection of murky half clues and indistinct facial features. I admired the plainness of its unblinking claim. The responsible.”
"It might help convey what Sacramento was like in the 1970s, and something about the EAR, to know that whenever I tell an inquiring naive that I'm writing about a serial rapist from Sacramento, no one has ever asked which one."
"In the end, Debbie fled abruptly, as she has before, a dark-haired storm of a girl pedaling away with her belongings crammed into a bag."
"One of Pool's colleagues, Larry Montgomery, even drove up there and spent a few days asking elementary-school teachers, active and retired, from the neighborhood around San Jose Creek if they recalled any troubled young boys they caught in the midsixties, boys who worried them in an abusing-small-animals sort of way. He returned with a few names, but they checked out and had grown up okay."
"That's who she was as she slept around two a.m. on a cold night in December: a woman starting over in a state where the covered wagons stopped and storied reinventions began, a woman navigating an unremarkably complicated love life, a woman about to be irrevocably changed."
