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Michelle McNamara

Michelle McNamara Helped Solve The 40-Year-Old Golden State Serial Murder Case But Headlines Still Just Call Her "Patton Oswalt's Wife"

McNamara's posthumously published book about the Golden State Killer kept the cold case in the headlines, but some media outlets don't use her name because she was married to a famous guy.

Michelle McNamara wrote one of the best true crime books in recent memory – and her work it may have lead directly to her death. Now police have made an arrest that is unlikely to have happened without her contribution.

The serial murderer and rapist known as the Golden State Killer was so prolific that police originally assumed he was two different people with two different nicknames of distinctly different badass levels – the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker.

He terrorised the Sacramento area of California in the late 70s and early 80s, preparing his victims’ homes ahead of time by disabling porch lights, unloading their guns, and hiding things around that he could use to tie them up. He’d then break in, wake people up by shining a torch in their faces, and attack women while their tied-up partners slept beside them.

The GSK is thought to be responsible for 12 murders, 45 rapes, and 120 home burglaries. This guy was terrifying.

McNamara delved into the cold case a few years ago, including talking cops into letting her take dozens of boxes of police records related to the case home so she and her research assistant could go through them.

She coined the more instantly compelling name “Golden State Killer” for the criminal previously known by the awkward combo “EAR/ONS”.

She was working on the case while also writing a book about it, and it was taking a toll on her health and mental state She died suddenly in her sleep in April 2016 of an undiagnosed heart condition, possibly exacerbated by a number of medications including a Xanax she took to help her sleep.

Her husband teamed up with a private investigator and her research assistant to finish the book, I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, and it was published at the beginning of this year to huge acclaim from the likes of Stephen King, with a foreword from Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn.

Now, just a few months later, police have arrested Joseph James DeAngelo – a former cop – after a DNA test linked him to evidence collected at the time of the spree.

As her husband points out, the cops are unlikely to acknowledge citizen investigators’ contributions in the resolution of a huge case like this, but McNamara put together pieces of the puzzle nobody else could.

Her husband, as you may notice there, is famous comedian Patton Oswalt. So of course, after all this, McNamara is being referred to as “Patton Oswald’s (late) wife” in plenty of headlines.

Don’t f**king do this.

I know people have headlines to write and clicks to get, but reducing women to their family relationships when you’re writing about their work is disrespectful as hell.

You see the same thing happening whenever a woman who was attached to a famous man is in the headlines for any reason – she gets left out of the headlines. Especially if she’s no longer alive to stand up for herself.

When Oscar Pistorius was on trial for killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, a campaign started to encourage media outlets to use her full name rather than just calling her “girlfriend” or worse, “model girlfriend”.

And when legendary comedienne Anne Meara died in 2015, plenty of outlets reported on her death as though the most important thing about her was that she was Ben Stiller’s mother.

Those relationships add context and that’s important, but it’s not crucial to have it in the headline.

Everyone deserves the dignity of being their own person, even in death. Let’s make sure they’re acknowledged for the people they were, not the people they were married to.