HBO’s new six-part crime documentary, I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, which premieres on June 28, is a mesmerizing blend of two true stories. One is about the hunt for the Golden State Killer, who committed more than 120 burglaries, raped at least 50 women, and murdered 13 known victims between 1974-1986. The other concerns one of the women hunting him, Michelle McNamara. McNamara, the well-known writer of the blog True Crime Diary and a “citizen detective,” became obsessed with the cold case in 2011. She published a seminal and, ultimately, game-changing article about it in Los Angeles Magazine in 2013, entitled “In The Footsteps of a Killer.” The article led to a book deal with Harper Collins, and that book—left unfinished at McNamara’s shocking and untimely death at 46, in 2016—is the eponymous source of the series itself.
Directed by Liz Garbus, who also brought us the Academy Award-nominated The Farm: Angola, USA; There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane, and the brilliant What Happened, Miss Simone, among many others, this documentary has the distinction of receiving my first ever trigger warning. I’ve seen all the Garbus films listed above, but I cried throughout I’ll Be Gone Before Dark, and I’m not easy to upset. My father was a sheriff’s deputy, my brother-in-law of 20 years the owner of three local funeral homes and the county coroner. I’ve seen more crime scene photos than any healthy, non-law-enforcement person should. I’ve attended death scenes, autopsies, and embalmings, and while many unsettled me, nothing has affected me quite the way Garbus did here.
Part of the documentary’s pathos is what’s made clear from the outset: Michelle McNamara—who was not only a brilliant amateur sleuth and a very fine writer, but the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt and the mother of a much wanted and loved little girl—all but solved the mystery of the Golden State Killer’s identity herself (it was she, in fact, who gave him that name), then died suddenly of an accidental overdose, just before she finished her book about the case. Working with a group of other citizen detectives she met on an A&E online message board, as well as with actual criminalists and cold-case detectives, her instincts were unusually good, her obsession unwavering. McNamara was a gifted interviewer, both of surviving victims and law enforcement, a person who demonstrated again and again how much she could be trusted, how deep her compassion went. She was salt-of-the-earth, plain spoken, and utterly uninterested in the glamorous side of the life she lived with Oswalt, a man of great accomplishments, both as a stand-up comedian and on television and in film. They were madly in love, the solid, foundational rock for each other, and then she was dead. It was Oswalt who helped complete McNamara’s book, along with crime writer Paul Haynes and investigative journalist Billy Jensen, and is credited as a producer of the documentary [check this]. His interviews in the film, his open-hearted revelations of love and grief, are almost as hard to watch as the details of the crimes themselves.
And the crimes were horrifying, beginning with the killer’s assumed career as the Visalia Ransacker, the break-ins in which he tore through the homes of his victims like a demented storm, ripping up photos of children, stealing women’s underwear, and leaving with sentimental but otherwise not valuable possessions. Having been nearly caught twice, he left Visalia and turned to Sacramento, where he was dubbed the East Area Rapist, and later moved on to southern California, where he was known as the Original Night Stalker. (Law enforcement combined those names into the initialism EAR/ONS. McNamara, as a writer, knew how important names are, and how critical they are in capturing the attention of the public, and dubbed him the Golden State Killer, the moniker by which he is known now.) Those of us who followed the cold case as McNamara and other crime writers worked on it, and everyone who read her 2013 longform article in Los Angeles Magazine, would agree that there was something profoundly unsettling about the details of these crimes and about this perpetrator, and the series captures that with a scant few crime scene photos and descriptions that are vivid without being exploitative. Nonetheless, I’ve never flinched as often, or stopped a film as repeatedly as I did this one. My philosophy about true crime is if the victims and their families could suffer it, I can most certainly endure hearing about it, and looking at the evidence. It’s a hallmark of Garbus’s direction that in this case, I almost could not.