I read Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer knowing something that, tragically, she didn’t live to learn: the name of the man she was looking for. More than three decades had passed since the death of 18-year-old Janelle Cruz, the last known victim in his horrific tally of 13 murders and 50-plus rapes, but investigators had never given up. Just as McNamara had predicted, a familial DNA link on an ancestry database had, finally, closed the case.
As a faceless bogeyman, the Golden State Killer had had many names. The Visalia Ransacker. The East Area Rapist. The Original Night Stalker. “The responsible”, one detective called him. But his given name was Joseph James DeAngelo. Joe. He was now in his mid-70s, divorced and living in the suburbs in a house of beige and browns. He told arresting officers he had a roast in the oven.
Knowing his identity meant readers just coming to McNamara’s book were in a position to solve many of its mysteries. The East Area Rapist had seemed unusually familiar with police procedure and had once ordered a victim to ‘Freeze!’ Was he a police officer? Yes—or at least he had been until he was fired following a shoplifting charge. In the midst of a July 1978 attack he’d paused to weep, ‘I hate you, Bonnie!’; DeAngelo had an ex-fiancée named Bonnie Colwell. Investigators had used geo-profiling in an attempt to narrow down their search parameters, leading criminalist Paul Holes to tell McNamara, “It wouldn’t surprise me if he was still living in Sacramento.” DeAngelo had been arrested there.
But when I reached the end of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, I still had a question no one could answer. DeAngelo must have known about the book. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and headline news in the area where the crimes had occurred. We know the Golden State Killer paid very close attention to his own press. I wondered if, in the two months between the book’s publication and DeAngelo’s arrest… Had he read it?
I think I heard the great Irish writer Edna O’Brien say in an interview that she writes as a way to grieve for what she reads in the headlines, despite the fact that I’ve never been able to confirm it since. I write as a way to solve the mysteries I read in them. I started plotting a novel that would be half a (fictitious) true-crime memoir and half the killer’s reaction to it as he read. The entire “memoir” would sit inside my novel, complete with its own copyright notice and title page, the idea being that both my killer and my readers would turn its pages together, at the same time.
But before I could begin, my killer needed a name. A fellow crime writer (and Pearl Jam fan) suggested “The Nothing Man”. It passed the creepy test, it made a good book title (Jim Thompson also thought so back in 1953) and I could think of a fitting reason, plot-wise, for my killer to be called that. The investigation into his crimes would never had had any viable leads, no forensic evidence, no useful physical descriptions. Two decades after his last crime, the Gardaí (Irish police) would still have nothing on him. I commenced my usual first-draft routine of doing everything except going to my desk and writing, including scrolling mindlessly through my phone. One such procrastination got me thinking if the “nothing” in my Nothing Man couldn’t take on a different, far more interesting significance.
One afternoon, I found myself watching a YouTube video entitled “What power did the Golden State Killer have over dogs?” It was clipped from a tabloid true-crime show produced before DeAngelo’s arrest. In it, a retired law enforcement officer told someone off-camera, “He did have some power over dogs but I don’t know what it was… He put fear in those dogs. Dogs would cower when he’d come around. Now I’m not sure about all of them, but most of them did.” Tense music played over this last line while sepia footage of cute dogs moved in slow motion across the screen. Okay, yeah. In some of the attacks, victims’ pets had not reacted to DeAngelo the way they’d normally react to an intruder. But… Among the items he’d shoplifted was a can of dog repellant and at least one victim had described DeAngelo as having an unpleasant and unusual body odor, something she just couldn’t place. He didn’t have any magical power over dogs, he’d just doused himself in a scent they didn’t like.
But I knew that because I knew who the killer was. If, like the show’s talking heads, I didn’t yet have that information, I might have been tempted to make a dark magician of him too.
***
My introduction to true crime was the “TRUE LIFE” section of a small video-rental store in a suburb of Cork, Ireland, where new releases ate up too much pocket money so I opted for trashy made-for-American-TV movies instead. They had cheesy dialogue, low production values and, I’d later learn, a tenuous relationship with the facts, but 12-year-old me was obsessed. I knew Drew Barrymore not as the cute little girl in ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, but Amy Fisher. When I saw the actor Arliss Howard in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, I recognized him as the pedophile from I Know My First Name is Steven. The Menendez brothers, Diane Downs, David Koresh—I worked my way an entire VHS library of evil. Then I started reading.
Ted Bundy was my first serial killer, by way of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me. The jacket copy on my grubby paperback describes him as “everyone’s picture of a natural ‘winner’—handsome, caring, brilliant in law school, successful with women, on the verge of a dazzling career”. He also had an insatiable appetite for the destruction of women’s lives. Two in one afternoon at Lake Sammamish, four at a Florida State University sorority house in the space of half an hour, thirty in total—that we know of. He could snatch them from crowded public places in the middle of the day and soundlessly vanish them from their own beds at night. He’d escaped custody twice. And he was so good at hiding his true nature that Rule had been writing stories about the early murders oblivious to the fact that the man responsible was her “brilliant, handsome” former colleague and friend, Ted, who “might well have been the Governor of Washington in the foreseeable future”. Here, then, was another dark magician. But as with DeAngelo, the facts lay waiting like sticks of dynamite at the base of these myths.
There’s a very different Bundy on the pages of Elizabeth Kendall’s newly updated memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy, and in the Amazon Original documentary centered on her experience, Falling for a Killer. He’s not especially charming or at all brilliant. The man Kendall spent six years with may have been those things initially, briefly, but his true self soon emerged: cruel, immature and emotionally manipulative. I’d always thought Bundy had only taken off his mask for his victims, but Kendall’s account proves this isn’t the case.
His college grades were mediocre. He applied to six law schools and was only accepted into his last choice, which he would ultimately drop out of. He was a habitual shoplifter, despite his planning to become an attorney. He was always broke; Kendall paid for everything. He wasn’t a very good criminal either. When he travelled to kill, he left credit card receipts at gas stations like a trail of incriminating breadcrumbs. He got himself pulled over with a standard Serial Killer Kit in the car. His escape from a Colorado jail was hailed as “Houdini-like” by the press when, in reality, his jailers had been asleep at the wheel. As for magicking women away from the face of the earth, we know his typical method was to approach a woman for help while wearing a plaster cast, trick her into sitting into the passenger seat of his car and then knocking her unconscious with a blow to the head. He wasn’t skilled or smart, he was violent, and his plans relied on his victims’ good natures and kind hearts. The rest of the time, he preyed on women who were sleeping.
He was also a pedophile, even though this detail always seems to get elbowed aside by “serial killer”. In a new afterword to The Phantom Prince, Kendall’s daughter Molly reveals an incident that took place when she was seven years old in which a naked Bundy got into bed with her and ejaculated. His youngest victim, Kimberley Leech, was only 12. Bundy is also suspected of being involved in the death of Ann Marie Burr, who disappeared from a neighborhood where Bundy was working as a paperboy when he was 14 and she was eight.
Bundy is a serial murderer, but he is also just a man. He’s notorious for being not as good as the rest of us, not for possessing superpowers the rest of us don’t have. Those of us who consume true crime must do so knowing that we are feasting on the very worst day of other people’s lives. Let’s not make it worse by mythologizing the men responsible. Patton Oswalt, McNamara’s widower, put it best on a podcast released to coincide with the publication of his late wife’s book. Paraphrasing James Ellroy, he pointed out that in real life, serial killers have nothing in common with Hannibal Lecter. They aren’t evil geniuses who cunningly outwit law enforcement, manipulate events beyond their cell walls and stage daring, theatrical escapes. “When serial killers are operating,” Oswalt said, “they are these grey, zero zilches … The only thing they can do is prey on the weak. The minute they’re locked up in jail, they get fat, they jerk off to pornography and they find Jesus. They don’t do anything [else].”
We’ll never know just how much Bundy and DeAngelo stole from the world when they took the lives of their victims. We do know what, aside from their fathering children, they contributed to it: nothing much of anything at all.
***
We know their names because they got caught. And yet, the serial killer trope that just won’t die is their uncanny ability to outsmart the authorities who chase them.
Bundy and DeAngelo have something in common: the when of their crimes helped both men to avoid detection. In the 70s and 80s, there were almost none of the tools law enforcement rely on to detect criminals today. No centralized computer systems, CCTV, DNA testing, cell-phone data, dedicated divisions or specially-trained officers. Back then, police departments in neighboring jurisdictions didn’t exchange information, let alone those divided by state lines. Some of the victims wouldn’t even have had the option of calling 9-1-1; if they wanted the police, they would have had to call the local station or reach it through an operator. Moreover, these men hunted in a land of unlocked doors. Neighbors would tell police they’d heard what sounded like a gunshot or a woman’s scream in the middle of the previous night, but didn’t act upon it because the possibility that a murder was in motion was so unlikely it never even entered their heads. As one detective told McNamara, “People say [DeAngelo] was so smart. But he didn’t always need to be.”
Off the pages of crime novels, serial killers seem to be a dying breed. Perhaps this is because detection has evolved to the point where killers don’t get to the serial bit anymore, defined by the FBI as at least three murders with a distinct “cooling off” period in between. In August 2012, 36-year-old Elaine O’Hara disappeared from her home here in Dublin. The childcare worker had endured a lifelong struggle with her mental health that included three suicide attempts and more than a dozen hospitalizations. The most recent stay had only ended two days earlier. After extensive searches turned up nothing but her abandoned car, Gardaí concluded that O’Hara had taken her own life. Her loved ones accepted this explanation. There was nothing to suggest otherwise and plenty to support it being true.
A full year passed. Then, within 72 hours of each other, two things happened that changed everything. In the foothills of the Dublin mountains, a dog off her leash returned to her walker with what looked like a human bone in her mouth. Then in the neighboring county of Wicklow, fishermen spotted something they thought might be lost property on the bed of a reservoir. A spell of unusually dry, hot weather had caused its levels to drop drastically, leaving items lying in one foot of water that had previously been hidden by 20. One of these was set of keys with a supermarket loyalty card registered to Elaine O’Hara. There were also two burner phones that had only been in communication with each other, via text. The users referred to themselves as “master” and “slave”. A typical message read, “My urge to rape, stab or kill is huge.” The last one told the “slave” to, “Go down to the shore and wait.” O’Hara hadn’t taken her own life. She’d been murdered by a man she’d met on a BDSM website. His name was Graham Dwyer and the story of how Gardaí established that shows just what the likes of Bundy and DeAngelo would be up against today.
The Gardaí didn’t know who had been using the “master” phone, but they could track where it had been. Cell site analysis revealed that the “master” phone had pinged off masts most often in two locations: an area of the city center classed as Dublin 2 and a particular southside suburb. It also travelled frequently between those two points. Whoever the “master” was, Gardaí concluded, he worked in one spot and lived in the other. The model of phone recovered from the reservoir only held a limited number of text messages in its memory, and it had been damaged by its year in the water. But intentionally or otherwise, O’Hara had backed up nearly 3,000 text messages to her laptop computer. Now, officers trawled through them for clues.
One referred to going “flying on Sunday” while another reported coming “fifth in flying”. A list of events on the website of the Model Aeronautics Council of Ireland fit the times and dates, and the published results of a competition named a Graham Dwyer has having placed fifth. When Gardaí ran his name through their central PULSE system, they got a hit. A Graham Dwyer had reported his bike stolen from outside his workplace: the offices of A&D Wejchert, an architectural firm in Dublin 2. His home address was listed as Foxrock, a southside suburb.
On the very same day—around the same time, in fact—Dwyer’s name appeared at the end of yet another digital trail. A civilian analyst had noticed that the “master” phone had pinged off a mast in Galway City one morning and then off a mast back in Dublin that afternoon. The times suggested the user had driven between the two cities, which meant he’d likely passed through a motorway toll-booth within a particular window of time. The analyst requested the toll-booth data and then painstakingly checked the registration information of each and every vehicle. Only one was registered to a south Dublin address: Graham Dwyer’s Audi. Gardaí had got their man twice over.
Up until the moment uniformed officers knocked on the door of the house he shared with his wife and two young children, Dwyer must have thought he’d got away with it. By the time the trial commenced, Gardaí had found numerous videos of Dwyer stabbing and cutting women during sex. In another clip, he knocked himself out with chloroform and recorded the results. He had told O’Hara about his plans to murder a real-estate agent by making an appointment to view a house she was selling; the would-be victim was named in the texts. After the guilty verdict was handed down, it emerged that Dwyer had sent a card to the home address of an American woman he’d communicated with online who was due to testify against him, just one month before the trial began. In it, he protested his innocence and wished her and her dog a Happy Christmas. A man came forward to say that, when they were both children, Dwyer had pushed him off the roof of a house and then attacked him a second time before he’d recovered. It all sounded a lot like the history of a serial killer-in-waiting, but the Gardaí had got there first.
I was in court for two days of Dwyer’s trial, elbow-to-elbow with other rubberneckers in the public gallery. I won’t make any excuses – it was plain old morbid curiosity that sent me there. I wanted to get a look at him, to see if I could tell. Would I know what he was if I’d passed him on the street? Of course not. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about Dwyer. The only thing that revealed what he’d done was the mountain of evidence against him.
I watched DeAngelo’s most recent court appearance on TV. Due to COVID-19, the session was being held in a hotel ballroom. The Golden State Killer—Joe—looks like an old, frail man now (although I do wonder how much of that frailness is performance), with age-spots, only the odd tuft of hair left on his head and a slack face devoid of expression. In every picture I’ve seen, his mouth is small and open, like a gasping fish.
I rolled my eyes when, speaking to the press afterwards, a Contra Costa County official said they had captured “a real-life Hannibal Lecter.” No, they haven’t. There is no such thing. DeAngelo is like all the others, just another nothing man.
***
