22 Quotes by Michelle McNamara

He loses his power when we know his face.

Looking back now, it feels like I was born into a party that had started to wind down.

The truth, of course, was much weirder: I was foregoing a fancy Hollywood party to return not to my sleeping infant but my laptop, to excavate through the night in search of information about a man I'd never met, who'd murdered people I didn't know.

Yet he was still out there blending in, a man whose ordinariness was his mask.

They both had enormous eyes, my father’s blue, my mother’s green, that expressed with great feeling what they frequently could not.

The victims recede from view. Their rhythm is off, their confidence drained. They’re laden with phobias and made tentative by memory. Divorce and drugs beset them. Statutes of limitations expire. Evidence kits are tossed for lack of room. What happened to them is buried, bright and unmoving, a coin at the bottom of a pool. They do their best to carry on.

Kool and the Gang’s 'Celebration' wasn’t the soundtrack for my frame of mind.

I’ve now come to realize that getting excited about a suspect is a lot like that first surge of stupid love in a relationship, in which, despite vague alarm bells, you plow forward convinced that he is the One.

Twenty-five years is a long time in cop years.