I'll Be Gone in the Dark(84)
A WEEK AFTER MICHELLE’S DEATH, WE GAINED ACCESS TO HER HARD drives and began exploring her files on the Golden State Killer. All 3,500 of them. That was on top of the dozens of notebooks, the legal pads, the scraps of paper, and thousands of digitized pages of police reports. And the thirty-seven boxes of files she had received from the Orange County prosecutor, which Michelle lovingly dubbed the Mother Lode.
Thousands of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and only one person knew what it was supposed to look like. That one person wasn’t Michelle. It was the killer himself.
Michelle’s white whale was not the Black Dahlia Killer, or the Zodiac Killer, or even Jack the Ripper—infamous agents of unsolved crimes whose “bodies of work”—and thus the files of investigative source material—were relatively small.
No. Michelle was after a monster who had raped upward of fifty women and had murdered at least ten people. There were more than fifty-five crime scenes, with thousands of pieces of evidence.
We opened Michelle’s main hard drive and began going through
the chapters she had completed. They reminded us why we were drawn to her writing in the first place.
Her prose jumps off the page and sits down next to you, weaving tales of Michelle on the streets of Rancho Cordova, Irvine, and Goleta on the trail of a killer. The amount of detail is massive. But her writing, at once dogged and empathetic, works the specifics into a fluent narrative. Just when the average reader might get fatigued by too many facts, she turns a phrase or shows a telling detail that brings it all around again. In the manuscript and on True Crime Diary, Michelle always found the perfect balance between the typical extremes of the genre. She didn’t flinch from evoking key elements of the horror and yet avoided lurid overindulgence in grisly details, as well as sidestepping self-righteous justice crusading or victim hagiography. What her words evoked was the intrigue, the curiosity, the compulsion to solve a puzzle and resolve the soul-chilling blank spots.
But there were parts of the story that Michelle had not completed. We laid out what she had finished. She had a nuance that one doesn’t normally encounter in true crime (except maybe in Capote—and when he was looking for a hook, he sometimes would just make it up). Michelle was writing a nonfiction book with a style that couldn’t be replicated. We thought about it and even took a brief stab. But it was fruitless. She had told this story in so many forms—in the chapters she had completed, in the story for Los Angeles magazine, and in her numerous blog posts— that there was enough material to fill in many of the gaps.
That being said, there were topics she would have definitely expanded on had she been able to complete the book. Many of those files or scribbled notes presented a lead she wanted to follow—or a red herring she might have disregarded. Where a friend’s bucket list might be littered with items like “Trip to Paris” and “Try skydiving,” Michelle’s included “Go to Modesto,” “Complete the
reverse directory of Goleta residents,” and “Figure out way to submit DNA to 23andMe or Ancestry.com.”
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BACK IN 2011, AFTER SHE POSTED HER FIRST STORY ON TRUE CRIME Diary about EAR-ONS (she hadn’t yet given him the Golden State Killer moniker), Michelle first became aware of Paul when he posted a link to her piece on the A&E Cold Case Files forum, which at that time was the only place where a dialogue about the case was taking place.
Michelle wrote him immediately.
“Hi!” she began. “You’re one of my favorite posters.” She proceeded to describe a rare surname she’d stumbled upon, whose few bearers shared some interesting geography. Maybe they were worth looking into.
“I struggle with insomnia,” she explained, “and when I can’t sleep, I sleuth around for good EAR suspects. I don’t know what your system is, if any, but I’ve been doing two things—running down names in the Goleta cemetery, and running names gleaned from alumni lists from multiple schools in Irvine, particularly the Northwood neighborhood. Not counting sheep, exactly, but hypnotic in its own way.”
The results of Michelle’s insomnia were laid bare on her hard drive:
Old maps and aerial photographs of Goleta, used to compare against the “homework” evidence map
Images of the soles of shoes and bindings from the crime scenes
An analysis of the turf-plugger tool, possibly used in the Domingo murder
A folder bursting at the seams about the Visalia Ransacker, and theories she was putting forth to connect him to EAR-ONS
There was a list of some specific items taken from the victims of the East Area Rapist:
Silver Dollar “MISSILE”
Silver Dollar “M.S.R.” 8.8.72
Ring with “For my angel” 1.11.70
One set of cuff links, yellow gold, initial “NR” in script
Man’s gold ring, 80 pt diamond, square shape, 3 gold nuggets
Ring “[redacted] Always [redacted]” 2.11.71
Gold initial ring WSJ
Antique silver spoon ring by Prelude by International
Class ring Lycoming College 1965
As well as a note mentioning that the rapist had a particular penchant for clock radios, having stolen five of them.
Nestled among the array was a spreadsheet containing the names and addresses of the 1976 Dos Pueblos High School cross country team, a rabbit hole she went down with the thought that the EAR might have been a young runner with muscular legs.