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

by Michelle McNamara

  Thousands of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and only one person knew what it was supposed to look like. That one person wasn’t Michelle. It was the killer himself.

  Michelle’s white whale was not the Black Dahlia Killer, or the Zodiac Killer, or even Jack the Ripper—infamous agents of unsolved crimes whose “bodies of work”—and thus the files of investigative source material—were relatively small.

  No. Michelle was after a monster who had raped upward of fifty women and had murdered at least ten people. There were more than fifty-five crime scenes, with thousands of pieces of evidence.

  We opened Michelle’s main hard drive and began going through

  the chapters she had completed. They reminded us why we were drawn to her writing in the first place.

  Her prose jumps off the page and sits down next to you, weaving tales of Michelle on the streets of Rancho Cordova, Irvine, and Goleta on the trail of a killer. The amount of detail is massive. But her writing, at once dogged and empathetic, works the specifics into a fluent narrative. Just when the average reader might get fatigued by too many facts, she turns a phrase or shows a telling detail that brings it all around again. In the manuscript and on True Crime Diary, Michelle always found the perfect balance between the typical extremes of the genre. She didn’t flinch from evoking key elements of the horror and yet avoided lurid overindulgence in grisly details, as well as sidestepping self-righteous justice crusading or victim hagiography. What her words evoked was the intrigue, the curiosity, the compulsion to solve a puzzle and resolve the soul-chilling blank spots.

  But there were parts of the story that Michelle had not completed. We laid out what she had finished. She had a nuance that one doesn’t normally encounter in true crime (except maybe in Capote—and when he was looking for a hook, he sometimes would just make it up). Michelle was writing a nonfiction book with a style that couldn’t be replicated. We thought about it and even took a brief stab. But it was fruitless. She had told this story in so many forms—in the chapters she had completed, in the story for Los Angeles magazine, and in her numerous blog posts— that there was enough material to fill in many of the gaps.

  That being said, there were topics she would have definitely expanded on had she been able to complete the book. Many of those files or scribbled notes presented a lead she wanted to follow—or a red herring she might have disregarded. Where a friend’s bucket list might be littered with items like “Trip to Paris” and “Try skydiving,” Michelle’s included “Go to Modesto,” “Complete the

  reverse directory of Goleta residents,” and “Figure out way to submit DNA to 23andMe or Ancestry.com.”

  * * *

  BACK IN 2011, AFTER SHE POSTED HER FIRST STORY ON TRUE CRIME Diary about EAR-ONS (she hadn’t yet given him the Golden State Killer moniker), Michelle first became aware of Paul when he posted a link to her piece on the A&E Cold Case Files forum, which at that time was the only place where a dialogue about the case was taking place.

  Michelle wrote him immediately.

  “Hi!” she began. “You’re one of my favorite posters.” She proceeded to describe a rare surname she’d stumbled upon, whose few bearers shared some interesting geography. Maybe they were worth looking into.

  “I struggle with insomnia,” she explained, “and when I can’t sleep, I sleuth around for good EAR suspects. I don’t know what your system is, if any, but I’ve been doing two things—running down names in the Goleta cemetery, and running names gleaned from alumni lists from multiple schools in Irvine, particularly the Northwood neighborhood. Not counting sheep, exactly, but hypnotic in its own way.”

  The results of Michelle’s insomnia were laid bare on her hard drive:

  Old maps and aerial photographs of Goleta, used to compare against the “homework” evidence map

  Images of the soles of shoes and bindings from the crime scenes

  An analysis of the turf-plugger tool, possibly used in the Domingo murder

  A folder bursting at the seams about the Visalia Ransacker, and theories she was putting forth to connect him to EAR-ONS

  There was a list of some specific items taken from the victims of the East Area Rapist:

  Silver Dollar “MISSILE”

  Silver Dollar “M.S.R.” 8.8.72

  Ring with “For my angel” 1.11.70

  One set of cuff links, yellow gold, initial “NR” in script

  Man’s gold ring, 80 pt diamond, square shape, 3 gold nuggets

  Ring “[redacted] Always [redacted]” 2.11.71

  Gold initial ring WSJ

  Antique silver spoon ring by Prelude by International

  Class ring Lycoming College 1965

  As well as a note mentioning that the rapist had a particular penchant for clock radios, having stolen five of them.

  Nestled among the array was a spreadsheet containing the names and addresses of the 1976 Dos Pueblos High School cross country team, a rabbit hole she went down with the thought that the EAR might have been a young runner with muscular legs.

  One document was titled “Possibly Interesting People.” It was a list pasted together over time, with notes and nuggets added as Michelle ran down the names and birth dates of potential suspects. Some of the fragments retained the tag “Sent from my iPhone”—betraying its contents’ origin as a quick note to self while Michelle was killing time at a movie premiere.

  In another notepad, she wrote: “Don’t underestimate the fantasy: not raping in front of men—afraid of male; functional; privacy

  , writhing male not part of his fantasy. Mommy and crying. No remorse. Probably part of fantasy.”

  There were even notes on her own psychology:

  He was a compulsive prowler and searcher. We, who hunt him, suffer from the same affliction. He peered through windows. I tap “return.” Return. Return. Click Mouse click, mouse click.

  Rats search for their own food.

  The hunt is the adrenaline rush, not the catch. He’s the fake shark in Jaws, barely seen so doubly feared.

  Michelle would reach out to witnesses from the old reports if she felt there was some detail left unelaborated or a nagging question the investigators neglected to ask. One of those witnesses was Andrew Marquette.*

  The night of June 10, 1979, was an especially hot one, and Marquette had left his bedroom window open to catch a breeze while he tried to sleep. Around midnight, he heard the crunch of footsteps on the rock path beneath his window. He peered out and saw a stranger creeping slowly alongside his house, his eyes fixed on the window of his neighbors. Marquette looked into the same window and could see the couple that lived there putting their child to bed.

  Marquette continued observing the subject as he slunk toward a pine tree and receded into the grassy darkness. He fetched a .22 pistol he kept near his bed and racked the slide. It was a sound the prowler must have recognized, as he immediately sprang into motion and scrambled over the fence into the front yard. Marquette went to his neighbors’ house and knocked on the front door. No one answered.

  He returned the pistol to his house and began heading back next door to try his neighbors’ again. Midway there, a passing car’s headlights swept across the homes on the north side of the block and briefly illuminated the prowler, who was now on a bike, leaning against a house. As Marquette started to approach, the subject began pedaling furiously across the lawn, fleeing from Marquette and disappearing into the night. Marquette called the police. They cruised up and down the neighborhood, searching for the prowler to no avail.

  Several hours later, the forty-seventh EAR attack occurred half a block away. Investigators reconnected with Marquette during the canvass, and he told the same story.

  The prowler was a white male in his twenties with collar-length hair, wearing Levi’s and a dark-colored T-shirt—consistent with what the latest EAR victim described. The bicycle on which the prowler had fled was found abandoned later that morning, several blocks away, next to an Olympia beer can from the victim’s fridge. Inves
tigators quickly realized that this was the same bike stolen several hours before the attack from an open garage a mile away. Near that garage, detectives found a pair of white, knotted shoelaces.

  Michelle felt that Marquette was someone worth reinterviewing. She contacted him in late 2015.

  She sent him a map she had sketched, along with her understanding of the schematic of that night’s events, and asked him to confirm and amend where appropriate. Paul compiled a seventeen-picture photo lineup, and Michelle asked Marquette which of the individuals most closely resembled the man he saw that night.

  On the phone, she asked Marquette to spit out the first word that came to mind to describe the prowler he observed. Marquette replied without missing a beat: “Schoolboy.”

  In a 2011 file called “EAR CLUES,” Michelle attempted to consolidate many of the known facts about the man into a profile:

  Physically he’s most often described as 5′ 9″ to 5′ 11″, with a swimmer’s build. Lean, but with a muscular chest and noticeably big calves. Very small penis, both narrow and short. 9–9½ shoe size. Dirty blond hair. Bigger than normal nose. Type A blood type, nonsecretor.

  He used the phone to contact his victims, sometimes before an attack, sometimes after. Sometimes just hang-up phone calls. Sometimes with theatrical, scary-movie deep breathing and threats.

  He wore ski masks. He brought guns. He had what looked like a pen style navigator flashlight, and he liked to startle his victims awake by beaming it at them, blinding them. He tore towels into strips, or used shoelaces, to bind victims.

  He had a script, and he stuck to it. Some variation of, “Do what I say, or I’ll kill you.” He alleged he only wanted money and food. Sometimes he said it was for his apartment. Other times he mentioned his van. He would make the woman tie up the man, then separate them. Sometimes he’d stack dishes on the man’s back and tell him if he heard a crash he’d kill the female victim.

  He frequently brought baby lotion to the scene to use as a lubricant.

  He liked to steal neighborhood bicycles and escape on them.

  Some personal items associated with him: a bag with a long zipper, like a doctor’s bag, or duffel bag; blue tennis shoes; motocross gloves; corduroy pants.

  He took driver’s licenses and jewelry, particularly rings.

  Some of the things he said, which may or may not be true but are nevertheless interesting: Killing someone in Bakersfield; moving back to LA; “I hate you, Bonnie”; being thrown out of the Air Force.

  Something may have been going on with him in late October 1977. In two different attacks around then he was described as sobbing.

  Some of the vehicles possibly associated with EAR-ONS: green Chevy van, 1960s yellow sidestep pickup truck, VW bug.

  An e-mail forwarded to Michelle by Patton reveals that she had even enlisted her father-in-law, a career US Marine, to do some research on military bases in the area back then, as there was a theory that the rapist might have been an airman.

  Begin forwarded message:

  From: Larry Oswalt

  Date: April 18, 2011, 2:01:06 PM PDT

  To: Patton

  Subject: Air Force Bases around Sacramento

  Mom said Michelle had some questions about Air Force Bases around

  Sacramento. Here is the list.

  Near Sacramento:

  McLellan closed 2001

  Mather Closed 1993

  Beale still active—40 miles north of Sacramento

  Travis is located in Fairfield, CA sort of north of San Francisco and a good ways from Sacramento.

  Let me know if you need any additional info.

  Dad

  Many have attempted to profile EAR-ONS over the years, but Michelle wanted to go one step further and dive deep into the locations of the rapes to see whether geographic profiling could lead to his identity. Among the pieces she left behind were her musings about EAR-ONS’s geography:

  My feeling is that the two most important locations are Rancho Cordova and Irvine.

  The first and third rapes were only yards apart in Rancho Cordova. He walked away in an unhurried fashion from the third attack without his pants on, suggesting he lived close by.

  He murdered Manuela Witthuhn on February 6, 1981, in Irvine. Five years later he murdered Janelle Cruz. Manuela and Janelle lived in the same subdivision, just two miles apart.

  Interestingly, Manuela’s answering machine tape was stolen in the attack. Was the suspect’s voice on the tape? If so, was he worried it was recognizable as someone in the neighborhood?

  A document Michelle created in August 2014, entitled “Geo-Chapter,” has her rethinking the map after more than three solid years of nonstop research. When you open it, there is just one line: “Carmichael seems like central clearing, like a buffer zone.”

  FINDING THE KILLER WITH GEO-PROFILING

  While his most fundamental characteristics—his name and his face—are unknown, it can be said with reasonable certainty that the East Area Rapist was, among approximately seven hundred thousand other humans, a resident of Sacramento County in the mid-to-late 1970s.

  The EAR’s connection to the many other places in which he struck—Stockton, Modesto, Davis, the East Bay—is less clear.

  The East Area Rapist was a highly prolific offender in Sacramento, exhibiting the familiarity and ubiquity of someone who was undoubtedly local. With places like Stockton, Modesto, and

  Davis, where he struck two or three times apiece, one questions what connection he had to these cities, if any. Perhaps he had family there or had business there. Maybe he was just passing through. Maybe he flung a dart at a map.

  But you’d be hard-pressed to find an investigator who doesn’t believe the EAR lived or at least worked in Sacramento.

  If we accept that the EAR was living in Sacramento from 1976 through 1978 or 1979, which is nearly certain, and then lived in Southern California during the first half of the 1980s, which is highly probable, then the haystack gets considerably smaller. Devise a list of people who lived in both areas during those time periods, and the suspect pool shrinks from nearly a million to maybe ten thousand.

  It would be ideal if the process were as simple as, say, applying filters to a product search on Amazon. With a few clicks, one could filter by gender (male), birth year (1940–1960), race (white), height (5′ 7″ to 5′ 11″), places lived (Carmichael AND Irvine; or Rancho Cordova AND in the 92620 zip code; or Citrus Heights, Goleta, AND Dana Point), and maybe occupation for good measure (real estate agent, construction worker, painter, landscaper, landscape architect, nurse, pharmacist, hospital orderly, cop, security guard, OR serviceman—all of which are among the many occupations that various investigators and armchair sleuths have posited the EAR may have had). Just set all these search parameters and voilà! You’d be left with a manageable yet all-inclusive list of potential suspects.

  But it’s not that easy. The names have to come from somewhere, and there’s no central database of, well, people. It must be either composited or built. And creating such a list is indeed one of the projects Michelle felt most optimistic about.

  He may have come from Visalia. Or perhaps Goleta was his hometown. He may have lived in the 92620 zip code of Irvine. He may have gone to Cordova High School. His name may appear

  in both the 1977 Sacramento phone book and the 1983 Orange County phone book. We didn’t need access to restricted information or an official suspect list to uncover some potential suspects who might otherwise have flown under the radar. All the necessary information and tools that could be used to process it were already available in the form of online public records aggregators, vital records, property records, yearbooks, and yellowed phone directories from the 1970s and ’80s (many of which have fortunately been digitized).

  In the year prior to Michelle’s death, Paul had begun creating master resident lists for Sacramento and Orange Counties for the relevant time periods, which combined names from sources such as Ancestry.com’s marriage and
divorce records, the appropriate county’s registry of deeds (which entailed using a Web scraper), alumni lists, and old crisscross directories and telephone books.†

  Michelle then connected with a computer programmer in Canada who offered to volunteer his help in whatever way he could. Per Paul’s specifications, the programmer built a cross-referencing utility that processes multiple lists and finds matching lines of text. With that application, Paul could begin feeding it two or more lists and then analyze its match results—now numbering over forty thousand.

  Once the list of matches had been generated, Paul would go through it and weed out the false positives (far more likely with

  common names like John Smith) by using public records aggregators. Paul would then collect as much information as possible on each match until he was satisfied that neither he nor any of his male relatives was viable. The names of those he was unable to rule out would be added to a master list of potential suspects.

  IN CASES OF SERIAL BURGLARY, RAPE, OR MURDER, THE SUSPECT lists often swell to several thousand names and beyond. Difficulty in managing a list of this size enforces the need to devise a prioritization system, whereby suspect ranks are determined by factors such as prior criminal offenses and police contacts, availability for all crimes in the series, physical characteristics, and—if a geographic profile has been done—the suspect’s work and home addresses.

  Geographic profiling is a specialized criminal investigative technique—perhaps more useful and scientific than behavioral profiling, which is arguably closer to an art than a science— whereby the key locations in a linked crime series are analyzed for the purpose of determining the likely anchor points (home, work, etc.) of a serial offender. This allows one to focus on isolated bubbles within a much broader suspect pool.