This true crime author stalked the Golden State Killer until she died

But Michelle McNamara never lived to see the day that a suspect was arrested. She died in 2016.

Michelle McNamara is the author of a book, "I’ll Be Gone In the Dark,” about the Golden State Killer. It was published posthumously this year with help from her husband, comedian Patton Oswalt.

The book, the result of years of painstaking research by McNamara, helped bring the case a national prominence it didn’t have before. She even coined the killer’s catchy nickname, disregarding the monikers bestowed on the suspect by police in the many jurisdictions where he struck in favor of a title that sewed the state’s geography together: the Golden State Killer.

The suspect

Former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, has been arrested and charged with two counts of murder in a case that had long gone unsolved. He was arrested after a recent DNA match, after 40 years of terrorizing California.

McNamara’s role in the case

Officials have played down the suggestion that McNamara’s book played a role in the suspect’s apprehension.

“That’s a question we’ve gotten from all over the world in the last 24 hours, and the answer is no,” Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones told reporters.

Authorities did acknowledge that the work built public interest in the case, which can have the effect of lending an old investigation more urgency and, potentially, more resources.

“It kept interest and tips coming in,” Jones said, but “other than that there was no information extracted from that book that directly led to the apprehension.”

Many of McNamara’s family, friends and fans said they believed she deserved more credit for the arrest in the case.

“It was pretty amazing,” Sarah Stanard, a longtime friend of McNamara’s, told The Washington Post. “I’m going to try not to be angry, but they’re taking all the credit.”

Oswalt, who spent the day doing interviews and tweeting ecstatically about the news of DeAngelo’s arrest, said that McNamara “didn’t care about getting any shine.”

“She cared about the Golden State Killer being behind bars and the victims getting some relief,” he wrote on Twitter.

Still, he said that he believed the police would be disinclined to credit writers and journalists who helped them with the case.

“But every time they said Golden State Killer, they credited” her work, he said.

Her writing

“To zero in on a victim he often entered the home beforehand when no one was there, learning the layout, studying family pictures, and memorizing names,” McNamara wrote. “Victims received hang-up or disturbing phone calls before and after they were attacked. He disabled porch lights and unlocked windows. He emptied bullets from guns. He hid shoelaces or rope under cushions to use as ligatures. These maneuvers gave him a crucial advantage because when you woke from a deep sleep to the blinding flashlight and ski-masked presence, he was always a stranger to you, but you were not to him.”

For her, the case had become a fixation. She joined with other amateur sleuths in online message boards, met with survivors of the killer’s victims, pored over decades-old files, autopsy reports, maps and mug shots.

“I’m obsessed,” she wrote on her blog in 2011. “It’s not healthy.”

She wrote a long narrative about the case and her obsession with it for Los Angeles Magazine in 2013, which led to a book deal with HarperCollins.

But the work began to take a toll. McNamara, who would often work at night after her daughter and husband went to bed, began to develop anxiety and sleep issues, Oswalt said. He has spoken about the panic the case created for her, including one time she mistook him for an intruder in the middle of the night and swung a lamp at his head.

“I think that is what led her down this road of using Xanax. And I know she was taking Adderall in the mornings to get up and some — you know, before she died, the three days before she died, she really didn’t sleep because there was all this new breaking stuff on the case,” Oswalt said. “I’m not going to be glib and say that’s the cause of death. The cause of death was a lot of things. But that certainly held the door open for the other causes.”

She died in her sleep from what NPR host Terry Gross said was an undiagnosed heart problem along with Xanax, Adderall and fentanyl in her system on April 21, 2016. She was 46.

Oswalt helped steward the book’s completion, with the help of a journalist, Billy Jensen, and a researcher, Paul Haynes. The bestseller has been hailed by critics, writers such as Stephen King and Gillian Flynn and readers.

’Transcends coincidence’

Family and friends said they had just done a reading at a Chicago-area bookstore around the time they believe DeAngelo was arrested.

“On the night when all of Michelle’s collaborators were together for the first time, in Michelle’s hometown, with Michelle’s family present, the monster we sought is simultaneously taken into custody,” Haynes, the book researcher, wrote. “I’m a rational man, but I can’t help but feel this transcends coincidence.”