True-crime writer Michelle McNamara didn't live to see April 25, 2018, the day police arrested a suspect in the decades-old investigation into the Golden State Killer, a serial murder-rape case she obsessed over in her book I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer.
But her husband and greatest cheerleader, Emmy-winning actor/comedian Patton Oswalt, who saw her book through to completion and publication in February, did.
McNamara died in her sleep at age 46 almost exactly two years before DNA evidence led Sacramento police to arrest a 72-year-old former cop, Joseph James DeAngelo, for a series of 12 murders and 45 rapes that terrorized California in the 1970s and '80s.
Oswalt, 49, who followed the authorities' press conference with rapt attention, reacted to DeAngelo's arrest in a series of tweets Wednesday.
"The cops will never and have never credited a writer or journalist for helping them solve a case," he pointed out to fans who thought the police should have thanked McNamara. "But every time they said 'Golden State Killer,' they credited (her) work."
Beside, Patton noted that McNamara wouldn't have been concerned with getting credit.
"She didn’t care about getting any shine on herself," he wrote. "She cared about the Golden State Killer being behind bars and the victims getting some relief."
To Oswalt, McNamara was "Marge Gunderson in Fargo, not Chilton in The Silence of the Lambs," referring to Frances McDormand's unceremonious small-town detective who caught a killer, versus the pompous sanitarium director (Anthony Heald) who was jealous of FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) for her ability to get information out of his prisoner, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).
Oswalt added, "If they’ve really caught the Golden State Killer, I hope I get to visit him. Not to gloat or gawk — to ask him the questions that (McNamara) wanted answered in her 'Letter to An Old Man' at the end of I'll Be Gone In the Dark."
In fact, he noted that the account of DeAngelo's arrest went "pretty much exactly" as McNamara imagined at the end of her book, right down to the footsteps and knock on his (car) door.
She had written:
"One day soon, you'll hear a car pull up to your curb, and engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk. Like they did for Edward Wayne Edwards, twenty-nine years after he killed Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, in Sullivan, Wisconsin. Like they did for Kenneth Lee Hicks, thirty years after he killed Lori Billingsley, in Aloha, Oregon.
The doorbell rings.
No side gates are left open. You're long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly toward the insistent bell.
This is how it ends for you.
'You'll be silent forever, and I'll be gone in the dark,' you threatened a victim once.
Open the door. Show us your facce.
Walk into the light."
