Author: Eli Rosenberg / Source: Washington Post
She knew his blood type, his build, his habits and the way he breathed. She knew his twisted proclivities, embarrassing faults of his anatomy and exacting details about dozens of rapes and 12 killings that police think he committed.
And after tracking him and the gruesome trail of crimes he left throughout California, for years, she even seemed to know how it would all end.But Michelle McNamara never lived to see the day that a suspect was arrested.
The true-crime writer, who died in 2016, looms large over a case that has captivated the country with the news that former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, has been arrested and charged with two counts of murder in a case that had long gone unsolved.
McNamara is the author of a book about the horrific cold case, “I’ll Be Gone In the Dark,” which was published posthumously this year with help from her husband, comedian Patton Oswalt. The book, the result of years of painstaking research by McNamara, helped bring the case a national prominence it didn’t have before. She even coined the killer’s catchy nickname, disregarding the monikers bestowed on the suspect by police in the many jurisdictions where he struck in favor of a title that sewed the state’s geography together: the Golden State Killer.
[‘Golden State Killer’ suspect, a former police officer, arrested after DNA match, officials say]
But officials have tamped down the suggestion that McNamara’s book played a role in the suspect’s apprehension.
“That’s a question we’ve gotten from all over the world in the last 24 hours, and the answer is no,” Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones told reporters.
Authorities did acknowledge that the work built public interest in the case, which can have the effect of lending an old investigation more urgency and, potentially, more resources.
“It kept interest and tips coming in,” Jones said, but “other than that, there was no information extracted from that book that directly led to the apprehension.”
Many of McNamara’s family members, friends and fans said they think she deserves more credit for the arrest.
“It was pretty amazing,” Sarah Stanard, a longtime friend of McNamara’s, told The Washington Post. “I’m going to try not to be angry, but they’re taking all the credit.”
Oswalt, who spent the day doing interviews and tweeting ecstatically about the news of DeAngelo’s arrest, said that McNamara “didn’t care about getting any shine.”
“She cared about the Golden State Killer being behind bars and the victims getting some relief,”
Still, he said that he thinks the police would be disinclined to credit writers and journalists who helped them with the case.
“But every time they said Golden State Killer, they credited” her work, he said.
McNamara’s long fascination with true-crime stories sprouted from an unsolved killing near her family’s home in Oak Park, Ill., when she was 14. After moving to Los Angeles later, she worked briefly for a private detective, before going on to write…
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