True-crime fans who come to the HBO documentary “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” should know in advance that it is not, strictly speaking, a true-crime series about the decades-long hunt for the serial rapist and murderer known as the Golden State Killer.
Instead it’s an adaptation of the book of the same title, which was published, with astonishing serendipity, two months before the sudden identification and arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. in April 2018. And while it does cover the crimes and the seemingly futile efforts of California law enforcement agencies, over more than 40 years, to solve them, its six episodes (beginning Sunday) are focused mainly on the book’s author, Michelle McNamara, and her own progressively more obsessive effort to track the killer down.
The McNamara story is heartbreaking in its own right (and well known, in part because of her marriage to the actor and comedian Patton Oswalt). After years of work on the case of the man she named the Golden State Killer (also known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker), she died in her sleep in 2016 with the book unfinished. Oswalt, her publisher and several of her peers in the true-crime community finished it, and it was a best seller when it was published two years later, just before DeAngelo’s arrest.
This presents several challenges to Liz Garbus, the distinguished documentarian (“What Happened, Miss Simone?,” “The Farm: Angola, USA”) who took on the management of the mini-series and directed two episodes.
One was to keep McNamara present in the story, and on that count Garbus succeeds beyond any expectation. She not only makes McNamara a presence, she also makes her the primary storyteller, through a host of ingenious — if not always wholly transparent — strategies.
The most obvious was to have the actress Amy Ryan read excerpts from McNamara’s writing — not just the book but also her true-crime blog, magazine articles and emails — as a form of narration in McNamara’s authorial voice.
But the series makes copious use of McNamara’s actual voice, too, and not only in interviews she filmed during her lifetime. As a blogger and investigator, she recorded her conversations with many people involved in the case, and Garbus uses snippets of those recordings to put McNamara into the flow of the story.
A scene will begin with McNamara on the soundtrack asking a question of a rape survivor or detective and then segue seamlessly into Garbus’s present-tense interview with the same person. In spectral recreations, people who drove to crime scenes or examined documents with McNamara do so again, alone, while we hear them discussing the case with her, as if she were in the room or the car.
It’s an impressive feat of direction and editing (Myles Kane, Josh Koury and Elizabeth Wolff shared the directing with Garbus; Erin Barnett, Alyse Ardell Spiegel and Jawad Metni are the editors). The show’s larger challenge, though, is the balancing of two different dramatic arcs — the story of the criminal and his victims, and the story of McNamara and her crusade — that aren’t as easy to connect as you might expect.
Here the documentary isn’t as successful. There are cursory attempts both to portray McNamara as another victim of the killer and to liken her sometimes maniacal efforts to the killer’s behavior, but neither has much impact. The idea that an obsessive need to solve crimes — to make sense of an irrational reality — was a way for McNamara to cope with her own traumas is more convincing, but not particularly revealing. A visual motif in which McNamara and Oswalt’s favorite film, “The Creature From the Black Lagoon,” is used to represent submerged menace is employed three or four too many times.
There is, finally, an unknowability to McNamara — or a failure on the series’s part to give her real dimension — that results in a flattening, and a sentimentalization, of the sections devoted to her. If McNamara’s ultimate goal was to make sense of her own life, it hasn’t been realized here.
What makes that especially unfortunate is that the other side of the series — the more straightforward account of the crimes, their victims and the marathon investigation — is excellent. The show seems to snap to attention when the survivors and the retired detectives come onscreen, solo, for traditionally staged interviews. The tone tightens up, and you feel the rigor and the dignity that Garbus has brought to tragic stories like “Who Killed Garrett Phillips?” and “There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane.”
It’s also too bad that McNamara’s fellow “citizen detectives,” the bloggers and amateur investigators who share her obsession with unsolved crimes, don’t get more sustained attention. The inner hunger that their work feeds is probably more interesting as a societal phenomenon than an individual study is, and McNamara’s real role in the Golden State Killer story was as a rallying point for a shared mission.
The uncomfortable truth is that McNamara’s story doesn’t give Garbus the elements she needs to make the larger tapestry she’s weaving come together. McNamara’s long, exhausting effort didn’t have any role in the arrest of DeAngelo, which was enabled by developments in DNA forensics, and she and her colleagues never knew of him. (DeAngelo, suspected in more than 50 rapes and charged in 13 murders, is on trial in Sacramento and expected to take a plea deal.)
A few stray remarks McNamara made about DNA are dropped into the soundtrack, and the famous final passage of her book, predicting his capture, is invoked. But the connection isn’t direct, and working so hard to strengthen it has the effect of diminishing the power of the scenes involving the actual solution of the case.
It’s unfair, perhaps, not to mention unrealistic, to wonder what Garbus would have made of a documentary about DeAngelo that didn’t incorporate “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.” (In an interview with The New York Times, she said: “What intrigued me was Michelle’s voice as a writer. I didn’t want to make a series about the Golden State Killer.”)
But it’s not unreasonable. Her best material — the startling interviews with DeAngelo’s relatives and former girlfriend, the brave testimonies of the survivors, the evocation of the period in the 1970s and ’80s when the crimes took place — isn’t connected to the book, and it would fit smoothly in a more traditional true-crime structure. Less might have been more.
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