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

Page 31

by Michelle McNamara


  MICHELLE McNAMARA (1970–2016) was the author of the website True Crime Diary. She earned an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Minnesota and had sold television pilots to ABC and Fox and a screenplay to Paramount. She also worked as a consultant for Dateline NBC. She lived in Los Angeles and is survived by her husband, Patton Oswalt, and their daughter, Alice.

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  Copyright

  “Crime Club” reproduced from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1975, 1962 by the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1960 by John A. Kees. Copyright 1954, 1947, 1943 by Weldon Kees.

  Material covered in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was featured in the article “In the Footsteps of a Killer,” published by Los Angeles magazine.

  I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK. Copyright © 2018 by Tell Me Productions. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by Sarah Brody

  Cover photographs © Ed Freeman/Getty Images (house); © Kues/Shutterstock (texture)

  FIRST EDITION

  Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-231980-7

  Version 01042018

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-231978-4

  About the Publisher

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  * Pseudonym

  † Never conclusively linked to the Golden State Killer.

  * Pseudonym

  † Michelle’s understanding concerning the use of overkill in these cases had shifted somewhat after this was written. She had since reached the conclusion that only as much force as was necessary to kill was used in the GSK homicides. This information was gleaned from discussions with active investigators, including Paul Holes (who said he was “unimpressed” by the ferocity of the blows compared to other crime scenes he’s analyzed). The messy/dramatic presentation of a bludgeoning death could initially register as overkill, which is likely what happened in some of the GSK cases.

  * Pseudonym

  * All Moore family names are pseudonyms.

  * All Williams family names are pseudonyms.

  † This was the only known EAR attack in the South Area. The dentist who co founded the EARS Patrol and offered the $10,000 reward—which had been well-publicized in the week leading up to the attack—had a practice less than half a mile away, which may or may not have been purely coincidental.

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  * Pseudonyms

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  † This case inspired California Proposition 69, approved in 2004, which mandated DNA collection from all felons, and from adults and juveniles charged with certain crimes (e.g., sex offenses, murder, arson). Keith Harrington’s brother Bruce sponsored the campaign, pledging nearly $2 million to fund it.

  * Pseudonym

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  † Forensic Genealogy, by Colleen Fitzpatrick, was published in 2005.

  † The text from the directories and phone books was collected by using a software process known as optical character recognition, or OCR, to convert the image of the scanned material into text. Because it’s a digital eye reading analog material of variable print and scan quality, the output is lousy with syntax and transcription errors, ranging from failure to distinguish, say, the letter D from the letter O, to chaotic arrays of punctuation marks, symbols, and other errant nonalphanumeric characters. These issues necessitated hundreds of hours of cleanup in order to turn these scans of decades-old volumes into readable and consistently formatted lists of names.

  * Pseudonym

  * pseudonym

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Time Line Map

  Cast of Characters

  Contents

  Introduction, by Gillian Flynn

  Prologue

  Part One Irvine, 1981

  Dana Point, 1980

  Hollywood, 2009

  Oak Park

  Sacramento, 1976–1977

  Visalia

  Orange County, 1996

  Irvine, 1986

  Ventura, 1980

  Goleta, 1979

  Goleta, 1981

  Orange County, 2000

  Contra Costa, 1997

  Part Two Sacramento, 2012

  East Sacramento, 2012

  The Cuff-Links Coda

  Los Angeles, 2012

  Contra Costa, 2013Concord

  San Ramon

  Danville

  Walnut Creek

  Davis

  Fred Ray

  The One

  Los Angeles, 2014

  Sacramento, 2014

  Sacramento, 1978

  Part Three, by Paul Haynes and Billy Jensen

  Afterword, by Patton Oswalt

  Epilogue: Letter to an Old Man

  Photo Insert

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Guide

  Cover

  Contents

  Chapter 1

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