I'll Be Gone in the Dark

I was still the girl in the back of the classroom, watchful, never watched.

love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.

She was both proud of the fact that she had raised a strong-minded daughter and resentful of my sharp opinions.

Michelle earned and sustained that attention through flawless, compelling writing and storytelling. You understand everyone’s point of view in her writing, and none of her subjects are characters she invented. They’re people she got to know, cared about, and took the time to really see: the police, the survivors, the bereaved, and, as hard as it is for me to fathom, even a wounded, destructive insect like the Golden State Killer

Social media is a gold mine for investigators, she realized. The old, pulling-teeth method of getting suspects to talk was nothing compared to the mind-dump these sociopathic narcissists offer daily on their own Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. She used Google Maps and a dozen other new platforms to construct solutions to seemingly dead-end cases. She was especially adept at linking data from an obscure, decade-old case to a seemingly unconnected current crime

The book you just read was as close as she got. She always said, “I don’t care if I’m the one who captures him. I just want bracelets on his wrists and a cell door slamming behind him.” And she meant it. She was born with a true cop’s heart and mind—she craved justice, not glory.

Michelle was an incredible writer: she was honest—sometimes to a fault—with her readers, with herself, and about herself. You see that in the memoir sections of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. And you see how she was honest about her own obsessions, her own mania, her at times dangerous commitment to the pursuit—often at the expense of sleep and health.

The mind for investigation and logic. The heart for empathy and insight. She combined those two qualities in ways I’d never encountered before. Without even trying, she made me rethink my own path in life, my own way of relating to people, and the things that I valued. She made everything about me and everyone around her better. And she did it by being quietly, effortlessly original.

Let me give you a specific, anecdotal example and then a broader, more universal one.

Michelle knew those facts and trivia as well. But for her, it was background noise, as unimportant and ultimately uninteresting as poured cement.

What interested her, what sparked her mind and torqued every neuron and receptor, were people. Specifically, detectives and investigators. Men and women who, armed with a handful of random clues (or, more often than not, too many clues that needed to be sifted through and discarded as red herrings), could build traps to catch monsters

knew body counts, and modi operandi, and quotes from interviews. Stockpiling serial-killer lore is a rite of passage for guys in their twenties who want to seem dark and edgy. I was precisely the kind of dork who, in my twenties, would do anything to seem dark and edgy. And there I was, all through the flannel nineties, rattling off minutiae about Henry Lee Lucas and Carl Panzram and Edmund Kemper.

It really confirmed for me that inside everyone lurks a Sherlock Holmes that believes that given the right amount of clues they could solve a mystery. If the challenge here, or perceived weakness, is that the unsolved aspect will leave readers unfulfilled, why not turn that on its head and use it as a strength?

Her professional research, attention to detail, and sincere desire to identify the suspect allowed her to strike a balance between the privacy of those who suffered while exposing the suspect in a way that someone may recognize