After the Diary: Michelle McNamara and the Cases Nobody Else Was Watching

My copy of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is still on my true crime bookshelf. Michelle McNamara’s writing was part of my master’s work. I was heartbroken when she died, and I remember when the Golden State Killer case was finally solved. She had helped coin the name “Golden State Killer” and brought sustained attention to the case, but she did not live to see the answer.

My own interest in true crime began when I was a little kid, watching the white Bronco chase and then the O.J. Simpson trial. I was about eight years old that summer. This was not exactly typical childhood viewing, but I remember being drawn to it. Later, I stumbled into Ann Rule’s books and fell in love with the genre. I read every book of hers I could find.

As a teenager, I devoured episodes of CSI. My family joked around and called me “Grissom,” after the show’s lead forensic scientist. I didn’t go out on Saturday nights. I stayed in to watch The Saturday Night Solution on Court TV.

I went to work as a data analyst, but eventually I realized that my heart was pulling me toward the work I felt meant to do. In 2020, I earned my bachelor’s degree in Crime Scene Investigation and quickly moved into a master’s program in criminal justice. In 2022, I took my first steps toward becoming a true crime writer myself by starting Clutch Justice.

Michelle’s writing was part of that journey. As my own investigative journalism developed, I began to recognize how similar we were in some ways and how different we were in others. My work at Clutch Justice often centers on institutional accountability: what the records reveal, how decisions were made, and who lives with the consequences. Our methods and focus were not identical, but I recognized the determination to keep asking questions about cases other people had stopped watching.

It wasn’t until this week, during a conversation with a mutual friend, that I realized Michelle’s path and mine had been quietly criss-crossing. Through the Oakland County Child Killer case. Through the Colonial Parkway murders. The overlap extended beyond the investigations themselves into circles of friends and colleagues. Work she had done years earlier was intersecting with work I was doing now, and someone whose writing had already meant so much to me began to feel closer through those connections.

It hit me that I wanted to honor a woman who had helped pave the way for me. Michelle left a lasting legacy on so many people. I was one of them: a reader, a graduate student, and an investigative journalist finding my own way.

After the Diary grew from that realization. This series returns to the cases Michelle wrote about to ask what happened next, what remains unanswered, and who is still waiting. It is my way of paying tribute to Michelle by doing the work we both love: following the records, asking questions, and giving these stories the attention they deserve.

Who She Was

Michelle Eileen McNamara was born April 14, 1970, in Oak Park, Illinois, and died April 21, 2016, in Los Angeles at the age of 46. As a teenager, her fascination with unsolved crime took root close to home. In 1984, a young woman named Kathleen “Kathy” Lombardo was murdered a few blocks from the McNamara family house. The case was never solved. McNamara later described it as the origin point for everything she went on to do.

In 2006 she started a blog called True Crime Diary. Over roughly the next decade she wrote about more than a hundred unsolved or under-covered crimes, deliberately gravitating toward cases that were not already drawing national attention. She combined narrative writing with public-records digging and pattern recognition across cases, and she talked directly to investigators, victims’ families, and the online communities of amateur researchers who had formed around specific cold cases.

The Case That Started it All

Kathleen Lombardo’s murder is where this series begins, in the next installment, and for a reason beyond chronology. It is the case that turned a teenager in Oak Park into someone who spent the rest of her life asking who did this and why nobody had answered yet. Forty-two years later, that question still has no answer. It is worth asking again what has and has not changed since McNamara first asked it.

What Made Her Approach Different

McNamara did not work inside a newsroom, and that mattered. It meant she could follow a case before an editor or an institution decided it was worth following, and she could keep working a story long after most outlets would have moved on. Her reporting on the East Area Rapist and Original Night Stalker case, beginning around 2013 in Los Angeles Magazine, is what popularized the name Golden State Killer, years before the case was solved. She married actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, and the two had one daughter together. She died in April 2016 while still writing the book that would become I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which researcher Paul Haynes and journalist Billy Jensen helped complete for posthumous publication in February 2018 and which was later adapted into an HBO documentary series. Two months after the book’s release, Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested using investigative genetic genealogy. McNamara did not identify him. Genetic genealogy did. But reducing her role to a writer who happened to cover the case before it broke would miss what she actually did: she kept a fragmented, multi-jurisdictional case in public view long enough for the technology to catch up to it.

Why I’m Revisiting Her Work Now

I know what it is to sit with a case that institutions have quietly stopped working while the public record keeps insisting someone should still be looking. That is most of what I do at Clutch Justice. When I laid my own reporting beside what McNamara had written on some of the same subjects, the differences in method were real, but the underlying instinct was not. Both of us kept returning to the thing that did not reconcile.

The editorial rule for this series is simple. We are not only revisiting the cases that got solved, the ones with a tidy DNA arrest and a clean ending. We are revisiting the cases McNamara thought deserved to be remembered, and documenting whatever happened next, including nothing. A case that is still unsolved today is not a less interesting installment. It is the whole point of what she was doing in the first place.

What This Series Will Do

To my knowledge, After the Diary is the first case-by-case journalistic retrospective devoted to revisiting Michelle McNamara’s True Crime Diary investigations and documenting what happened after she wrote about them. I also have the unique honor of comparing how Michelle covered certain cases with how I have covered them: where our questions overlap, where our approaches differ, and what the intervening years have added to the record.

The series opens with Kathleen Lombardo, McNamara’s own starting point. From there it moves through cases where the public record has changed substantially since she wrote about them, including the Colonial Parkway murders and the Oakland County Child Killer investigation, where I bring my own prior reporting into direct conversation with hers. It also revisits cases that remain frozen exactly where she left them, because those deserve documentation too. The series closes with the Golden State Killer investigation and what happened to the book she never got to finish, the case that turned her private obsession into a name the entire country would come to recognize.

One special installment, Beyond the Diary, will bring together Michelle’s reporting that appeared outside True Crime Diary, beginning with her Los Angeles Magazine piece on Melanie Howell. Those stories belong in this tribute too, with their original publications clearly identified.