'I'll Be Gone In The Dark' Episode 2 Review: A raw, unnerving account of Golden State Killer's rape survivors
Leaves rustle through the dark. A therapist asks a young lady, whose voice is trembling with fear, "See anything unusual?" She replies, "I saw a man." When she is quizzed, "What would you describe his face as?" she says, "mean." With the raw, unnerving and hard-hitting beginning, HBO's new documentary ‘I'll Be Gone In The Dark’ brilliantly focuses on the terror that the Golden State Killer had spread.
Titled ‘Reign of Terror’, the second episode delves deeper into crime-writer Michelle McNamara's childhood. "When I was 14, a neighbor was murdered. It is still unsolved," she says. In 2006, she launched her website True Crime Diary but it was an incident from her early years that piqued her interest in the dark underbelly of crime. She reflects on the 1984 murder of her childhood neighbor Kathy Lombardo, which she credits for planting the seed for her lifelong fascination with unsolved crimes.
What hooked McNamara to the case? It may have been complex and puzzling, but for her it was solvable. She feels that people "underestimated his productivity". She then added, "He just got better at it. It became a number game for him. At some point it becomes successful." Nancy Miller, the editor of Los Angeles magazine sheds light on McNamara's first draft and said how it had "one of the most difficult, disturbing, violent collection of terrible things happened to people". She confesses, "I was like. 'Oh s**t, this is real.'" The first paragraph gave her nightmares and she said she just couldn't get past that number: 50 rapes!
As the episode chortles ahead, it shows how local detectives who worked the East Area Rapist (EAR) case in the '70s and citizen detectives who picked up where they left off discuss the proliferation of serial rape cases in Northern California at the time, discussing an era when victims were often too ashamed to speak out and sexual crime was minimized in the press and the courtroom.
Rape in the 1970s was passed off as just another thing women had to abide by. The documentary shows how women were lectured on how their gestures were too inviting, dresses too short, or them stepping out late at night was considered provocative. Shedding light on the shame, survivor #22 Fiona Williams recounted how she asked the rapist, "Why are you doing this?" He said shut up and then she said, "I am sorry." Twitching in her seat, she begins to explain how women were apologetic in those times.
Following a rush of media coverage in 1977, EAR's boldness escalated as he shifted his focus from single women and teenagers to include couples as well. Today, several survivors describe these attacks and their aftermath in chilling details.
The media reported two things about the EAR/ONS rapist. He had never been in a house where there was a man or where there was a big dog. No sooner did the news air on TV, he started attacking couples. Linda O'Dell, one of the survivors, shared her account and it will send shivers down your spine. Gay and Bob Hardwick, a smitten couple, recalled the horror of the incident that destroyed them forever. Directed by Elizabeth Wolff, the spellbinding episode leaves viewers with the mystery of gold cufflinks that McNamara found while searching continually for nights on a 10-inch screen.
‘I'll Be Gone In The Dark’ airs every Sunday at 10 pm ET on HBO.