Last spring, I listened to the Audible edition of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. If you like reading about and/or tend toward obsessive behavior yourself (and don’t mind evocations of gruesome crime), it’s a fun read, as well as an informative glimpse into the grinding, frustrating slog of solving motiveless crimes in general and cold cases of such specifically. There are also some provocative ruminations on what draws us to tales of true crime in general.
McNamara died before seeing GSK unmasked and arrested. Now that we know who he is (at least allegedly), we also know that McNamara uncovered not a single clue pointing in his direction.
That said, she made the not insignificant contribution of providing the name “Golden State Killer” for a criminal who had previously been known variously as EAR/ONS (for “East Area Rapist” and “Original Night Stalker”) and “the Visalia Ransacker.”
The reason McNamara’s renaming is not insignificant is because it helped confront and overcome one of the factors that enabled this fellow to operate undetected for so long (really, for as long as he felt the urge to, apparently, and until the age when serial killers tend to retire anyway): His canniness in choosing many different areas to operate in, combined with the technological, political, and psychological obstacles to information sharing among local police departments and with the public at the time, all of which resulted in significant dilution of investigative efforts and public awareness, both during his crimes and in the years afterward.
Her providing this name, her blog posts, her participation in various online true crime bulletin boards, and her eventual book deserve credit, at least, for helping to keep attention focused on the case, which certainly couldn’t have dissuaded either professional or amateur sleuths .
I’d been noticing previews for the Wondery podcast about the Golden State Killer, called Man in the Window, but resisted clicking on it because some part of me sort of thought I knew everything there was to know about the case. Even if McNamara hadn’t solved it, she’d laid out the history—but then I realized that, because she hadn’t solved it, and because her book was written before GSK was unmasked, of course I really didn’t know a damn thing about it—other than what a lot of the crime scenes looked like and what various victims endured. So, a few days ago, I subscribed and started listening.
It is well worth your time, I think, both if you would call yourself a “true crime fan” and if you are leery of the genre. Deft reporting by host Paige St. John, combined with recent and archival interviews with survivors, investigators, and other bit players elevate this one above the usual lurid fare in this genre and offer a fascinating glimpse into a very different time and place.
St. John does a great job of situating the killer in and connecting his ability to operate so freely to the cultural attitudes toward rape of the early 1970s and 1980s (male detectives resisted investigating rape; there were hardly any sex crimes units; many cases took place in the jurisdiction of that weird category of politician known as sheriffs, who of course need to worry about reelection; a prevalent assumption that raped women deserved it/knew their rapists/needed to just “move on”).
The case resulted in the formation of one of the first rape crisis hotlines (or maybe it was coincidentally getting started at the time; at any rate, its volunteers clashed with some downright primordial police officials about the need to do more, share more information, seek more extended prison sentences for crimes of sexual violence, and so on).
Anyway, as a true crime series with a ton more going for it than the mere voyeurism and titillation that blight so many entries in this genre, I highly recommend this one.
I’ll also note here another notable and related entry in the true crime genre: New Hampshire Public Radio’s Bear Brook podcast. The initiating event of the investigation detailed in this one is the discovery of some bodies in barrels in a NH state park called Bear Brook. But, spoiler alert (I guess), the various associated mysteries in this one are eventually unwound through the first use of the same genetic genealogy technique later used to identify GSK.
Footnote: Those of us who are frequent podcast listeners are used to the come-ons of home security system vendor SimpliSafe. Personally, it’s the rare podcast ad I’m willing to sit through, and they are so easy to skip, that I hardly ever actually listen to any of them. Nonetheless, it can sometimes seem that SimpliSafe must be responsible for something like 80 percent of podcast sponsorships. Which, fine, I get it: it’s one of these “technology companies that happen to offer [home security services, in this case],” so podcast listeners overlap heavily with their desired customer base.
But I have to say, given the company’s tagline of “fear has no place in a place like home,” and given that Man in the Window is definitely not to be listened to at home alone with the lights off, it seems almost unethical of the company to advertise on it. At the least, it is unavoidably manipulative feeling. Just saying.
