Patton Oswalt on Golden State Killer suspect arrest: ‘this is bittersweet’

April 27, 2018

I was glued to my computer all day Wednesday after it was announced that an arrest had been made in the Golden State Killer case. For the briefest of backstories: In various parts of California, from about 1976 to 1986, there were a serious of horrendous crimes attributed to several serial offenders. After years of investigation, DNA linked one man as the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the East Bay Rapist, the Original Night Stalker and the Diamond Knot Killer. This individual killed 12 people, raped 50 and burglarized 120 homes – all of those numbers could prove to be much higher when all is said and done. One of his signatures was to shine a flashlight in his victims’ eyes before he attacked them. Another sadistic move he’d pull is to call his victims both before and after he’d attacked them, just to continue to torture them. I was terrified. The whole state was terrified.

True crime writer Michelle McNamara wrote an article for LA Magazine in 2013 called In the Footsteps of a Killer, in which she called the the Golden State Killer. Her passion about this case led her to write the novel I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. Unfortunately, Michelle died before the book was released. Her research partners, Billy Jensen and Paul Haynes, teamed up with Michelle’s widower, Patton Oswalt, to finish the book. The book was released two months ago. The suspect, Joseph James DeAngelo, Jr. was arrested two days ago, 32 years after his last known crime.

You can only imagine what Patton was going through. Patton was in New York promoting his new show, AP Bio, when the news broke.

I haven’t read Michelle’s book yet, I’m on the waitlist at the library for it, but everyone on my Twitter feed was crediting her for it. And like everyone else, my heart sank a little when Sheriff Scott Jones denied that the book led to the arrest during the press conference. Not as much as Patton’s, I’m sure:

I get it, after everything Patton has been through, losing and grieving Michelle, the success of her book and now the arrest, he’s processing this all at once. But at the same time, there have been 40 years of police work put into this case – that has to be acknowledged. And Patton did bring up a very good point in his next tweet- simply by calling the criminal by the name Michelle assigned him, she was being acknowledged:

By the time Patton appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers as scheduled, he’d obviously run the gamut of emotions. During his segment, he admitted he did not want to take anything away from the police who had worked the case and said the book had “amped up all the interest and in the case and put a lot of focus on this.” I don’t know if he was asked to say that or if he came to that on his own but either way, it was gracious and respectful. He also gave credit to the co-writers who finished the book while he was, “neck deep in grief”. Lastly, he said that Michelle “would be beyond excited about this. I think is the definition of ‘bittersweet.’”

I don’t exactly believe in an afterlife but when things like this happen, I want to. I want Michelle to look down and watch this killer being led off in handcuffs. But even if she isn’t, it sounds like she knew it would happen anyway. The epilogue of her book was a letter she’d written to the suspect in which she described the scene when the arrest was finally made:

Of course, the most important people are the victims and their families who finally have justice.

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