The woman who gave her life to capture the Killer of the Golden State

This story begins already eviscerated. The protagonist is dead and the killer behind bars. She is a Michelle McNamara, a journalist and expert on crimes that are obsessed with the history of this killer and rapist who terrorized the population of northern California since 1976. Thirteen deaths, 50 violations, and 42 years later, James DeAngelo was caught thanks to the DNA of a cousin who was looking for relatives in USA. Retired, he lived with his daughter and his granddaughter in Sacramento. McNamara had died two years before, in his bed, victim of a heart attack. In his blood had Adderall, Fentanillo and Xanax, prescribed drugs with which the journalist tried to control her growing anxiety. “It is a paradox terrible to die without seeing him captured. She didn't want fame or recognition but to see him behind bars,” he says to THE COUNTRY, the actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, widower of McNamara.

A case of a novel, a true crime round McNamara with her husband, Patton Oswald, in 2011. Gregg DeGuire FilmMagic

The case has so many edges that the book of McNamara, finished off to your death by the principal investigator, Paul Haynes, and the journalist Bill Jensen, is a miracle of concreteness which, in addition, it provides other essential information to become an entertaining handbook on the evolution of criminal investigation: profiling, mapping of zones of confluence of crimes, use of DNA, of psychological science, etc “in Addition to reading books like the Killer without a face we discovered that a good part of the clichés of the fictions police in any format are espeluznantemente certain: for example, the rapist and serial killer watched the routines of their victims and came to enter their homes, taking advantage of his absence to seize some object for fetichísticos,” says Antonio Lozano. The result is a true crime that reads like a novel.

“What is not mentioned is how awkward I have found to realize to what extent our frantic search is a reflection of the compulsive behavior of the individual that we seek” says the journalist in The killer without a face (RBA), an account of a sincere, written with a tone very special and great love for the nuances, odyssey investigator of this woman that you have earned during the last five years of his life more than 3,500 files related to the case, written in notebooks yellow that never ended. Fascinated by the crime from his adolescence, when a woman was killed next to his home in Illinois, McNamara was a walking encyclopedia of the crime in the U.S., but when the case of DeAngelo crossed your path because there was nothing more. The brutality of their actions (and in some cases raped women in the presence of the couple and then kill the two) and the fact that outside, above the Assassin of the Zodiac, the criminal in series without capture with more deaths in his having appealed to McNamara, who was the one who baptized him as the Killer of the Golden State. Youwin

For 42 years, a heap of luck, uncoordinated police and a lack of means allowed DeAngelo to continue in freedom, under the radar. Police until 1979, when it is expelled for stealing a hammer and a repellent to dogs in a hardware store, the Killer of the Golden State he killed his last two victims in 1981 and 1986. The FBI has sought-without success-its relationship with other cases. The victims who survived and witnesses of their runaways agreed that he was a large man, of gestures and determined, and white. Nothing more. Why did he do that? Why stop? Who is it? Were the questions that colonized the head of McNamara during five years in which he lied to his family to continue to work to sneak around and help the researchers, took drugs, forgot the birthday of her husband, fell gradually into the hole. “'Always caught the idiots', said the cops. Could make 99 out of every 100 boxes with that kind of detention. That box unchecked, however, could get you riled up to cause the premature death,” writes with overwhelming peace of mind months before his death. “He was great,” recalls his widow, “just that sometimes the obsession took him out of reality. It is impossible to know what he would say now to see him behind bars. It was too complex and intelligent”.

somehow morbidly ironic, we might say that McNamara was the latest victim (although collateral) killer

Antonio Lozano

For decades, the Killer of the Golden State was a black hole that swallowed everything that was coming: the life of their victims, the career and the family life of some of the detectives that investigated it and the health of McNamara. “Somehow morbidly ironic, we might say that McNamara was the latest victim (although collateral) of the assassin with whose identification it is obsessed. Expressed in terms more lofty, in the manner of a detective who goes the limit, he had to sacrifice his life (turning in work that contributed to stop your heart) to trace their catch. Only this is already a deeply romantic,” says Antonio Lozano, editor of the book in Spanish.

When you were excited about a suspect and then failed, McNamara and the researchers that helped him –professional and amateur-level amazing– fell into a depression, a slump in own addicts. The book ends with a letter from the author to the murderer who says: “One day, not too far away, you'll hear that stops a car in front of your sidewalk. The engine is turned off. You will hear steps approaching on the path...” . So it was an April 25, 2018, the day that the world put a face to the beast. But McNamara was not there to enjoy it.