Michelle McNamara
Michelle McNamara was born on December 26, 1970, in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and grew up with what she later described as a lifelong obsession with true crime rooted in a specific event: the 1984 murder of a neighborhood girl, Kathleen Lombardo, whose killer was never identified. That unsolved crime lodged itself in McNamara’s imagination and became the origin point of a preoccupation with criminal darkness that she eventually turned into a literary vocation.
McNamara studied literature at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning a master’s degree in English. She moved to Los Angeles and worked as a writer, eventually founding the website TrueCrimeDiary.com in 2006, where she developed a distinctive voice for writing about cold cases and violent crime—analytical but humane, obsessive but self-aware, willing to examine the ethics of her own fascination even as she indulged it. The site attracted a devoted readership and positioned her as a serious figure in true crime culture long before the genre’s explosion into mainstream popularity via podcasts and streaming documentaries.
Her primary obsession in her last years was the so-called Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer who committed at least thirteen murders and more than fifty rapes across California in the 1970s and 1980s and had never been identified. She spent years investigating the case—reviewing evidence, corresponding with detectives, interviewing survivors—and coined the name Golden State Killer that subsequently became the case’s official designation. Her book about the investigation, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, was published posthumously in 2018, two years after her unexpected death from an accidental drug overdose in April 2016 at age 46.
Her husband, the comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, and her research collaborators completed the book from her extensive notes and drafts. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was widely praised not only as gripping true crime journalism but as a piece of literary writing—a meditation on violence, obsession, memory, and the women whose stories disappear from crime narratives. Two years after its publication, in April 2018, investigators used genealogical DNA databases to identify Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, as the Golden State Killer.
Michelle McNamara did not live to see the case she had spent years illuminating finally solved, but her book played a direct role in keeping public attention on it and in shaping how investigators and the public thought about the crimes. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark endures as both a monument to her intelligence and determination and as one of the finest examples of literary true crime ever written.
