True-crime fans who come to the HBO documentary “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” should know in advance that it is not, strictly speaking, a true-crime series about the decades-long hunt for the serial rapist and murderer known as the Golden State Killer. The McNamara story is heartbreaking in its own right (and well known, in part because of her marriage to the actor and comedian Patton Oswalt). After years of work on the case of the man she named the Golden State Killer (also known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker), she died in her sleep in 2016 with the book unfinished. Oswalt, her publisher and several of her peers in the true-crime community finished it, and it was a best seller when it was published two years later, just before DeAngelo’s arrest. This presents several challenges to Liz Garbus, the distinguished documentarian (“What Happened, Miss Simone?,” “The Farm: Angola, USA”) who took on the management of the mini-series and directed two episodes.

Source: New York Times June 25, 2020 17:37 UTC