Michelle McNamara

McNamara ran a crime blog called True Crime Diary and spent years pursuing an unidentified serial attacker and killer who was active in California through the seventies and eighties, giving him the name that stuck: the Golden State Killer. She died in her sleep in 2016, at forty-six, of an undiagnosed heart condition combined with prescription medication. I'll Be Gone in the Dark was finished from her files by a researcher and a journalist, with her husband Patton Oswalt pushing it through, and published in 2018. A suspect was arrested two months later. She did not identify him, and the book says so.