A True Crime Book and a Husband’s Tribute

I don’t usually read true crime – I remember reading a book in middle school which was basically an encyclopedia of famous serial killers but it wasn’t a subject matter that hooked me.  It might because it feels like the focus can too easily be on the serial killer to the detriment of the victims, and it can easily be forgotten that the victims were real living humans with lives and potential and not fictional characters.  I’ve read Capote’s In Cold Blood but that was during a phase when I was trying to read more classics, and The Devil in the White City (because Chicago) but beyond that, this is outside my usual wheelhouse.  If it hadn’t been for the book’s backstory and Patton Oswalt’s work to complete his deceased wife’s book, I probably wouldn’t have picked this up, either. As a result, I am not sure how much of McNamara’s approach is normal for the genre and how much is specific to her. It is also odd to review a book completed after the author’s death, so it is hard to know how much of this reflects what she would have published as a final product herself, and how much was simply her collaborators working around constraints.  Her collaborators do note any time they had to complete parts of a chapter, what was in notes, and where they pulled from previously published material.

The book revolves around the case of the Golden State Killer who started his reign of terror as the East Area Rapist in the mid to late 1970s before moving south with his final confirmed kill taking place in 1986.  One part that was fascinating is how many of the killings weren’t even linked until after DNA evidence was run in the 90’s, though some of the police thought some of the cases might be related. They also had not connected the two separate crime sprees until around the same time. As a result, there were several investigations rather than one big man hunt for one rapist-turned-killer going on. With the linking of the cases, there was initially hope that evidence could be viewed in a new light and through a different context, but so far, the police has not identified the man yet.

McNamara does a very good job of explaining the cases in laymen’s terms, making sure the focus is on the victims, their lost opportunities, and the lives shattered as result of this man while also explaining her interest in serial killers and crime, and providing glimpses into her own life. My main issue with the book was the structure, and I am not sure how much of that is due to her plan for the book and how much due to the choices of the collaborators.  I could certainly see that McNamara may have had an outline in mind that they tried to be loyal to, but I wonder if she may have rearranged her structure after seeing it in its final form to make it more cohesive. McNamara starts the book with one of the later murders. This actually make sense to me as a narrative device since it is a common tool to draw interest and attention before tracking back to the beginning to show how events led to that scene.  Unfortunately, the structure doesn’t quite do that.  McNamara summarizes the Golden State Killer’s activities and movements in her introduction, but the chapters jump between crime scenes in a way that doesn’t necessarily make that much sense to me.  I had to look at a map with a timeline to realize that the murders were discussed completely out of order, and an in depth chapter on the killer’s early activities as the East Area Rapist actually took place much later in the book. Basically, the chapters themselves are all well written but I think the book as a whole would have been a better read if they had been placed in a different order. As it was, it felt more like a series of articles or blog posts about the same topic that were written as she gained information rather than a book with one linear narrative.

Given the community, I am sure this book will have quite a few readers for the same reasons I picked it up, and I absolutely think it is worth the read. I just wish I had been more aware of the structure before I started it so I would have paid a bit more attention to dates to place everything in the proper context.