Cold Case. Forensics. Jane Doe. Visalia Ransacker. East Area Rapist. The Night Stalker. The Golden State Killer. Joseph James DeAngelo.
While some of these names may sound familiar to you, I’ve heard each of them while growing up in California. As eerie as this may seem, unsolved crimes are a trivial fact, no matter where you live. For California, there was always one case, one criminal, that loomed in the background, the Golder State Killer. To use the word satisfying might be an understatement when an arrest was made on April 24, 2018, for the man who terrorized the state. Forty-four years after his crimes began, 
the survivors and family members who had lost loved ones could finally take a deep breath and put a bit of the past behind them.
This summer, HBO released a 6-part docuseries, “I’ll Be Gone in The Dark,” for this very case. The series is based off, I’ll Be Gone in The Dark: One Women’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara. Her obsession with true crime started at a young age when a murder occurred in her childhood neighborhood. Her blog, True Crime Diary, highlighted and gave her reading community another angel to examine unsolved cases. McNamara delicately wrote articles of these crimes, and within her writing, she gained an extreme following. Her stories were driven to “find a face on an unknown killer,” and she was consumed to find new evidence while looking at these cases.
What makes “I’ll Be Gone in The Dark” so dynamic is it doesn’t just focus on the Golden State Killer; it gives the audience a look into Michelle McNamara’s life. Her death in 2016 shook her True Crime followers, and this series provides a unique look at the madness for the truth that drove Michelle. Her story is told by Husband, Patton Oswald, her researcher, Paul Haynes, various detectives, and other loyal crime bloggers she interacted with while researching the Golden State Killer. Each episode builds off pieces of evidence that Michelle hooked onto and continuously brought up while investigating the case.
There is something so intriguing, and haunting, how HBO managed to intertwine the case against the Golden State Killer with Michelle’s life. The drive she held to find the man behind the mask becomes even more satisfying as the docuseries wraps in episode six. It’s an absolute shame Michelle never witnessed the arrest of Joseph DeAngelo. My hope is that she knew how much her work helped solve the case.