McNamara communicated with investigators, including Paul Holes, and was an engaged participant in the informal community of people following the case. She expressed genuine urgency about the case’s resolution and wrote about the difficulty of living with the knowledge that the person responsible was still unidentified and probably still alive.
She died in April 2016, in her sleep, of accidental causes related to prescription medication and an undiagnosed heart condition. She was forty-six years old. She was still working on the book that would be published posthumously.
“I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer” was published by HarperCollins in February 2018, completed from McNamara’s notes and drafts by her colleague Billy Jensen and her husband Patton Oswalt. The book appeared in the same month as DeAngelo’s arrest and was on bestseller lists when the case resolved. McNamara did not live to see the resolution she had worked toward.
Her contribution to the case’s public profile matters in the historical record because it illustrates how public attention functions in cold case investigations. The FBI’s 2016 campaign, which offered the fifty-thousand-dollar reward and generated national news coverage, came during the period of renewed attention that McNamara’s work had helped stimulate. The campaign generated tips. Tips generated investigative work. Not all of that work produced useful leads, but the renewed public profile of the case contributed to the environment in which Holes contacted Rae-Venter in March 2017.
At the time of DeAngelo’s arrest in April 2018, the book was in final production stages and its publisher had planned a spring release. The coincidence of the arrest and the book’s publication was exactly that — a coincidence that no one had planned and that the publisher had no advance knowledge of. The book’s treatment of the case was necessarily incomplete: McNamara had worked on it for years without knowing the identity of the person she was writing about. The book’s final chapter contains her speculations about who the Golden State Killer might be. She was wrong about the specific identity. She was right about many of the characteristics.