I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: Feminism and the Adaptation of True Crime in the #Me-Too Era

Following the emergence of the viral #MeToo movement in 2017, and wider public acknowledgement of the need to reframe assumptions around gender-based sexual violence (Alcoff 2018, 34), a new wave of women-centred, victim-survivor focused true crime TV and film has emerged.1 American documentary film director and producer Liz Garbus’s 2020 HBO miniseries I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a striking example of this new trend. Adapted from the best-selling book by Michelle McNamara, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a six-part series, (with a seventh follow up episode released in 2021), which tells the story of how true crime blogger McNamara investigated the case of the East Area Rapist (EAR) (also known as the Original Night Stalker), who committed 50 home-invasion rapes and 13 murders in California between 1974 and 1986. McNamara died before her book was published and before retired police officer Joseph DeAngelo, the man she dubbed ‘The Golden State Killer’, was identified and convicted of his crimes at age 72 in 2018, through DNA evidence and genetic genealogy (St. John 2020).

Significantly, even before it was transformed into an HBO television miniseries, McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (2018) was a work of adaptation, refracted through many voices. Published posthumously, after McNamara’s sudden death in 2016, the book was assembled by a team that included McNamara’s husband – the comedian and actor Patton Oswalt – and her colleagues, citizen detective Paul Haynes, and true crime journalist Billy Jensen. Additionally, there is an introduction to the book written by the author Gillian Flynn, and an afterword written by Oswalt. Thus, by the time the Oscar nominated Garbus came to develop her version of the story through the HBO miniseries – the first episode of which was released on June 28, 2020 – Michelle McNamara’s voice as the dead woman whose ‘obsessive search’ gives shape to the story, had already been subject to significant re-framing.

According to Garbus, the HBO series came from her reading of McNamara’s book about the Golden State Killer and learning about ‘the story through her eyes’ (cited in Seitz 2020). But while the TV version of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is an adaptation of McNamara’s book, the series is also more fundamentally about the theme of adaptation. If adaptation can be generally defined as a ‘way of looking at texts’ (Cutchins cited in Kaklamanidou 2020, p. 6), then I’ll Be Gone in the Dark could be said to offer a critical reflection on how true crime is approached as subject matter, especially regarding rape and gender-based violence. As director-producer Elizabeth Wolff suggests, the HBO series ruminates on the ‘cultural fascination with true crime’ through the story of McNamara’s personal preoccupation with it, which forms the ‘story within the story’ of the Golden State Killer (Wolff cited in Blickley 2020).

And yet, this focus on McNamara’s voice and perspective is not without its problems, and in this article, I want to reflect on the series’ invitation to viewers to identify with the figure of the dead white woman as both true crime investigator and victim. In what follows, I will explore the documentary mechanisms and strategies used by the HBO series to adapt the story of the Golden State Killer through the voice of the dead McNamara, concluding with some thoughts on the limitations of its white feminist approach to narrating gender-based violence.2 Bearing in mind the ethical complexities of adapting true crime stories for the screen, this article takes I’ll Be Gone in the Dark as a case study for reflecting on the critical possibilities as well as the challenges involved in a feminist reframing of true crime for the purposes of elucidating gendered violence and its long-term harms.