Michelle McNamara
American true crime writer (1970–2016)
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Early life
McNamara was born on April 14, 1970, in Oak Park, Illinois, the youngest child of stay-at-home mother Rita (née Rigney) and trial lawyer Thomas W. McNamara. She had four older sisters and one older brother. Her parents were Irish Americans, and she was raised Catholic.
In 1988, she graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School, where she was editor-in-chief of The Trapeze, the student newspaper, during her senior year. In 1992, she graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a BA in English. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota.
In August 1992 she traveled to Northern Ireland, where she would work for one year. As recounted in the documentary adaptation of her book, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, it was during this time that she observed The Troubles. The documentary also reveals that on September 1, 1992, after having lived in Belfast for a month, McNamara was sexually assaulted by a man she worked for, an incident that would influence her drive to investigate the Golden State Killer. In 1997 she moved to Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a writer in the film and TV industry.
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Career
In 2006, McNamara launched her website TrueCrimeDiary. McNamara had a long-standing fascination with true crime originating from the unsolved murder of Kathleen Lombardo that happened two blocks from where she lived when she was young. In 2014, McNamara and true crime investigative journalist Billy Jensen were on a SXSW Interactive panel called "Citizen Dicks: Solving Murders With Social Media". McNamara and Jensen had a long-term friendship based on their shared passion for researching and writing about true crime.
McNamara became interested in the crimes of the unidentified rapist and murderer known as the East Area Rapist, Original Night Stalker and the Visalia Ransacker, among other epithets. Due in large part to McNamara's efforts in tying these crime clusters together in public consciousness after the EAR and ONS crimes were linked by DNA, the murderer was later to be known only as the Golden State Killer (GSK). She penned articles for Los Angeles magazine about the serial killer in 2013 and 2014. Paul Holes, an investigator for the Contra Costa County district attorney's office, stated that McNamara's dogged persistence and trustworthiness with sensitive information about GSK cases earned her an unusual level of cooperation from law enforcement officials. She then signed a book deal with HarperCollins and began to work on a book about the case.
Her book, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, was about two-thirds finished at her death. The manuscript was edited and completed by true crime writers Paul Haynes, Billy Jensen and her widower Patton Oswalt following her death in April 2016. The book, released posthumously on February 27, 2018, reached number 2 of The New York Times Best Seller list for non-fiction and number 1 of combined print and e-book, nonfiction. The book remained on the list for 15 weeks.
On April 9, 2018, HBO announced that it had purchased the rights for her book and was developing it into a documentary series. Filming for the series began on April 24, 2018. The documentary series, also titled I'll Be Gone in the Dark, is directed by Liz Garbus and premiered on June 28, 2020.
On the evening of April 24, 2018, authorities in California identified Joseph James DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer and arrested him at his home. Oswalt stated that authorities' use of the killer's nickname that McNamara coined was "proof of the impact of her work".
Personal life
McNamara met her future husband, Patton Oswalt, one evening in 2002 when she went to a comedy club. She particularly enjoyed his set, in which he described Irish women as "kryptonite". As she left the club, she touched his arm, and said: "Irish girls. Nice." This spurred Oswalt's friend to urge him to pursue her. Oswalt did so, and they began dating shortly afterwards. They married on September 24, 2005. In April 2009 she gave birth to their daughter, Alice. At age nine, Alice made her voiceover debut on the TV series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, as Wind Sprint, which saw Alice working alongside her father, who voices the character of Quibble Pants, and Alice's stepmother, Meredith Salenger, who plays Clear Sky.
Death
On April 21, 2016, McNamara died in her sleep at her family's Los Angeles home, at the age of 46. According to the autopsy report released online by Radar, her death was due to the effects of multiple prescription drugs including Adderall and Xanax. According to the Radar article, several of the medications were not prescribed to her, and other drugs such as cocaine and levamisole and fentanyl were also found in her possession. Previously undiagnosed atherosclerosis and stenosis of coronary arteries was a contributing factor, and the coroner ruled her death an accidental overdose. In June 2020, Oswalt and I'll be Gone in the Dark director Liz Garbus acknowledged that McNamara had been addicted to opioids.