We will not stop until we get his name. We’ll be playing the detective as well.
— PAUL HAYNES AND BILLY JENSEN
May 2017
Afterword
MICHELLE WAS BORED BY ANYTHING WITH MAGIC OR SPACESHIPS. “I’m out,” she’d say with a laugh. Ray guns, wands, glowing swords, superhuman abilities, ghosts, time travel, talking animals, superscience, enchanted relics, or ancient curses: “All of that feels like cheating.”
“Is he building another suit of armor?” she asked during a screening of the first Iron Man movie. Twenty minutes into the movie, Tony Stark tweaks and improves his boxy gray Mark I armor into the candy apple red and regal gold supersuit. Michelle chuckled and cut out to go shopping.
Spaghetti Westerns were too long and too violent. Zombies were scientifically implausible. And diabolical serial killers with complex schemes were, as far as she was concerned, unicorns.
Michelle and I were married for ten years, and together for thirteen. There was not a single pop-culture point of connection between the two of us. Oh, wait—The Wire. We both liked The Wire. There you go.
When we met, I was a burbling, fizzing cauldron of obscure ephemera and disjointed facts. Movies, novels, comics, music.
And serial killers.
I knew body counts, and modi operandi, and quotes from interviews. Stockpiling serial-killer lore is a rite of passage for guys in their twenties who want to seem dark and edgy. I was precisely the kind of dork who, in my twenties, would do anything to seem dark and edgy. And there I was, all through the flannel nineties, rattling off minutiae about Henry Lee Lucas and Carl Panzram and Edmund Kemper.
Michelle knew those facts and trivia as well. But for her, it was background noise, as unimportant and ultimately uninteresting as poured cement.
What interested her, what sparked her mind and torqued every neuron and receptor, were people. Specifically, detectives and investigators. Men and women who, armed with a handful of random clues (or, more often than not, too many clues that needed to be sifted through and discarded as red herrings), could build traps to catch monsters.
(Ugh—that was the movie tagline description of what Michelle did. Sorry. It’s hard for me not to spiral upward into hyperbole when I talk about her.)
I was married to a crime fighter for a decade—an emphatically for-real, methodical, “little grey cells,” Great Brain–type crime fighter. I saw her righteous fury when she’d read survivor testimony or interview family members who were still reeling from the wrenching away of a loved one. There were mornings when I’d bring her coffee and she’d be at her laptop, weeping, frustrated and worn flat by another lead she’d chased that left her smashed nose-first against a brick wall. But then she’d have a slug of caffeine, wipe her eyes, and hammer away at the keyboard again. A new window opened, a new link pursued, another run at this murderous, vile creep.
The book you just read was as close as she got. She always said, “I don’t care if I’m the one who captures him. I just want bracelets on his wrists and a cell door slamming behind him.” And she meant it. She was born with a true cop’s heart and mind—she craved justice, not glory.
Michelle was an incredible writer: she was honest—sometimes to a fault—with her readers, with herself, and about herself. You see that in the memoir sections of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. And you see how she was honest about her own obsessions, her own mania, her at times dangerous commitment to the pursuit—often at the expense of sleep and health.
The mind for investigation and logic. The heart for empathy and insight. She combined those two qualities in ways I’d never encountered before. Without even trying, she made me rethink my own path in life, my own way of relating to people, and the things that I valued. She made everything about me and everyone around her better. And she did it by being quietly, effortlessly original.
Let me give you a specific, anecdotal example and then a broader, more universal one.
ANECDOTAL: IN 2011 I WORKED WITH PHIL ROSENTHAL TO DEVELOP a sitcom based on my life. Louie had been on the air for a year, and I was besotted by the new ground it was breaking in terms of how to structure a sitcom and how to present the personal in a comedic way. I basically wanted my own Louie. And so Phil and I sat down and walked through the details of my day-to-day life.
“What does your wife do?” Phil asked during an afternoon writing session.
I told him. I told him that she’d started a blog called True Crime Diary. I said it began as a way for her to write about the numerous cold cases and developing cases she followed online. I explained that she’d incorporate possible suspects’ Myspace entries. Social media is a gold mine for investigators, she realized. The old, pulling-teeth method of getting suspects to talk was nothing compared to the mind-dump these sociopathic narcissists offer daily on their own Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. She used Google Maps and a dozen other new platforms to construct solutions to seemingly dead-end cases. She was especially adept at linking data from an obscure, decade-old case to a seemingly unconnected current crime: “You see how he’s improving his m.o.? Failed kidnapping attempt on a street without easy freeway access has evolved into a clean snatch right near a cloverleaf where he can merge and reverse. He built up his courage and his skills. It’s the same car in each case, and he’s going unnoticed ’cause it’s a different state, and a lot of times different police forces won’t share info.” (That particular monologue, I remembered, was delivered one night in bed, laptop propped up against her knees; this was Michelle’s idea of pillow talk.)
Her blog entries led to interest from cable news shows, then to Dateline NBC, which hired her to reinterview suspects in a Mormon black-widow murder case. The persons of interest had stonewalled when approached by a major network, but they were more than happy to blab to a blogger. They just didn’t realize that the blogger they were talking to had invented a mutant, more expansive form of homicide investigation. They told her everything.
Phil mused over all of this for a minute or so after I finished talking. Then he said, “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?”
Now for the more universal example of Michelle’s uniqueness. We live in a swipe-right, blip-span culture of clickbait, 140-character arguments, and thirty-second viral videos. It’s easy to get someone’s attention, but it’s almost impossible to keep it.
Michelle was dealing with a subject that demands sustained, often unrewarded attention to yield any sort of satisfaction or closure. It requires the attention of not just a single reader but of dozens of cops, data miners, and citizen journalists to spark even a minor breakthrough.
Michelle earned and sustained that attention through flawless, compelling writing and storytelling. You understand everyone’s point of view in her writing, and none of her subjects are characters she invented. They’re people she got to know, cared about, and took the time to really see: the police, the survivors, the bereaved, and, as hard as it is for me to fathom, even a wounded, destructive insect like the Golden State Killer.
I’m still hoping he hears that cell door slam behind him. And I hope she hears it somehow too.
* * *
THIS PAST CHRISTMAS, ALICE, OUR DAUGHTER, OPENED A PRESENT that Santa had left her. She was happy, unwrapping her little digital camera and messing around with the settings. Fun gift. Happy holiday, sweetie.
Later that morning, she asked, out of the blue, “Daddy, why do you and Santa Claus have the same handwriting?”
Michelle Eileen McNamara is gone. But she left behind a little detective.
And a mystery.
— PATTON OSWALT
Herndon, VA
July 2, 2017
Epilogue: Letter to an Old Man
YOU WERE YOUR APPROACH: THE THUMP AGAINST THE FENCE. A temperature dip from a jimmied-open patio door. The odor of aftershave permeating a bedroom at three a.m. A blade at the base of the neck. “Don’t mo
ve, or I’ll kill you.” Their hardwired threat-detection systems flickered meekly through the sledgehammer of sleep. No one had time to sit up. Awakening meant understanding they were under siege. Phone lines had been cut. Bullets emptied from guns. Ligatures prepared and laid out. You forced action from the periphery, a blur of mask and strange, gulping breaths. Your familiarity freaked them. Your hands flew to hard-to-find light switches. You knew names. Number of kids. Hangouts. Your preplanning gave you a crucial advantage, because when your victims awoke to the blinding flashlight and clenched-teeth threats, you were always a stranger to them, but they never were to you.
Hearts drummed. Mouths dried. Your physicality remained unfathomable. You were a hard-soled shoe felt fleetingly. A penis slathered in baby lotion thrust into a pair of bound hands. “Do it good.” No one saw your face. No one felt your full body weight. Blindfolded, the victims relied on smell and hearing. Floral talcum powder. Hint of cinnamon. Chimes on a curtain rod. Zipper opening on a duffel bag. Coins falling to the floor. A whimper, a sob. “Oh, Mom.” A glimpse of royal blue brushed-leather tennis shoes.
The barking of dogs fading away in a westerly direction.
You were what you left behind: a four-inch vertical cut in the window screen at the ranch house on Montclair, in San Ramon. A green-handled hatchet on the hedges. A piece of cord hanging in a birch tree. Foam on an empty Schlitz Malt Liquor bottle in the backyard. Smears of unidentifiable blue paint. Frame 4 of Contra Costa County Sheriff Department’s photo roll 3, of the spot where they believe you came over the fence. A girl’s purpled right hand, which was numb for hours. The outline of a crowbar in dust.
Eight crushed skulls.
You were a voyeur. A patient recorder of habits and routines. The first night a husband working dispatch switched to the graveyard shift, you pounced. There were four-to-seven-day-old herringbone shoe impressions beneath the bathroom window at the scene on the 3800 block of Thornwood, Sacramento. Officers noted that standing there you could stare into the victim’s bedroom. “Fuck me like your old man,” you hissed, like you knew how that was done. You put high heels on one girl, something she did in bed with her boyfriend. You stole bikini Polaroids as keepsakes. You stalked around with your needling flashlight and clipped, repetitive phrases, both director and star of the movie unspooling in your head.
Almost every victim describes the same scene: a time they could sense you return after a period of distracted ransacking in another part of the house. No words. No movement. But they knew you were standing there, could imagine the lifeless gaze coming from the two holes in your ski mask. One victim felt you staring at the scar on her back. After a long while of hearing nothing she thought, He’s gone. She exhaled, just as the knife tip came down and began tracing the end of the scar.
Fantasy adrenalized you. Your imagination compensated for failed reality. Your inadequacies reeked. One victim experimented with reverse psychology and whispered, “You’re good.” You abruptly got off her, amazed. Your tough-guy bravado smelled like a bluff. There was a shakiness to your clenched-teeth whisper, an occasional stutter detected. Another victim described to police how you’d briefly grabbed her left breast. “Like it was a doorknob.”
“Oh, isn’t this good?” you asked one girl as you raped her, and held a knife to her throat until she agreed.
Your fantasies ran deep, but they never tripped you up. Every investigation into an at-large violent offender is a footrace; you always maintained the lead. You were savvy. You knew to park just outside the standard police perimeter, between two houses or on a vacant lot, to avoid suspicion. You punched small holes in the glass panes, used a tool to nudge wooden latches, and opened windows while your victims remained asleep. You turned off the AC so you could hear if someone was coming. You left side gates open and rearranged patio furniture so you had a straight shot out. Pedaling a ten-speed, you escaped an FBI agent in a car. You scuttled across roofs. In Danville on July 6, 1979, a tracker’s dog reacted so strongly to an ivy shrub on Sycamore Hill Court that the tracker believed the scent pool was just moments old.
A neighbor witnessed you escape the scene of one attack. You exited the house the way you entered: without pants.
Helicopters. Roadblocks. Citizen patrols taking down plate numbers. Hypnotists. Psychics. Hundreds of white males chewing on gauze. Nothing.
You were a scent and shoe impressions. Bloodhounds and detectives tracked both. They led away. They led nowhere.
They led into the dark.
For a long time, you have the advantage. Your gait is propulsive. In your wake are the police investigations. The worst episode in a person’s life is recorded in sloppy cursive by an often rushed and sleepy officer. Misspellings abound. Pubic hair texture is described by a doodle in the margin. Investigators follow leads using slowly dialed rotary phones. When no one is home, the phone just continues to ring. If they want to look up an old record, they dig through stacks of paper by hand. The clattering Teletype machine punches messy holes in paper tape. Viable suspects are eliminated based on their mothers’ alibis. Eventually the case report is put in a file, a box, and then a room. The door is shut. Yellowing of paper and fading of memory commence.
The race is yours to win. You’re home free; you can feel it. The victims recede from view. Their rhythm is off, their confidence drained. They’re laden with phobias and made tentative by memory. Divorce and drugs beset them. Statutes of limitations expire. Evidence kits are tossed for lack of room. What happened to them is buried, bright and unmoving, a coin at the bottom of a pool. They do their best to carry on.
So do you.
But the game has lost its edge. The script is repetitive and requires higher stakes. You began at windowsills, then crossed inside. The fear response stirred you. But three years in, grimaces and pleading will no longer suffice. You yield to your darker impulses. Your murder victims are stunners all. Some have complicated love lives. To you, I’m certain, they are “whores.”
It was a different set of rules. You knew you had at least fifteen minutes to flee a neighborhood when your victims were left bound and alive in their homes. But when you walk out of Lyman and Charlene Smith’s in Ventura on March 13, 1980, you feel no need to rush. Their bodies won’t be found for three days.
Fireplace log. Crowbar. Wrench. You kill your victims with objects picked up at their homes—unusual maybe, but then it’s always been your habit to be fleet of foot and unencumbered by very little but rage.
And then, after May 4, 1986, you disappear. Some think you died. Or went to prison. Not me.
I think you bailed when the world began to change. It’s true, age must have slowed you. The testosterone, once a gush, was now a trickle. But the truth is memories fade. Paper decays. But technology improves.
You cut out when you looked over your shoulder and saw your opponents gaining on you.
THE RACE WAS YOURS TO WIN. YOU WERE THE OBSERVER IN POWER, never observed. An initial setback came on September 10, 1984, in a lab at Leicester University, when geneticist Alec Jeffreys developed the first DNA profile. Another came in 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for the World Wide Web. People who weren’t even aware of you or your crimes began devising algorithms that could help find you. In 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated their company, Google. Boxes with your police reports were hauled out, scanned, digitized, and shared. The world hummed with connectivity and speed. Smartphones. Optical character recognition technology. Customizable interactive maps. Familial DNA.
I’ve seen photos of the waffle-stomper boot impressions you left in the dirt beneath a teenage girl’s bedroom on July 17, 1976, in Carmichael, a crude relic from a time when voyeurs had no choice but to physically plant themselves in front of windows. You excelled at the stealth sidle. But your heyday prowess has no value anymore. Your skill set has been phased out. The tables have been turned. Virtual windows are opening all around you. You, the master watcher, are an aging, lumbering target in their crosshairs.
/> A ski mask won’t help you now.
One victim’s phone rang twenty-four years after her rape. “You want to play?” a man whispered. It was you. She was certain. You played nostalgic, like an arthritic former football star running game tape on a VCR. “Remember when we played?”
I imagine you dialing her number, alone in a small, dark room, sitting on the edge of your twin bed, the only weapon left in your arsenal firing up a memory, the ability to trigger terror with your voice.
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.
— MICHELLE McNAMARA
Photo Insert
Manuela Witthuhn, who was murdered on February 5, 1981, in Irvine, California.
Classmates.com
Keith and Patrice Harrington, who were murdered in Dana Point, California on August 19, 1981. The couple had been married for three months when Keith’s father discovered the bodies in his home, where they had been staying.
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