Kathleen Lombardo’s Walkman

Kathleen Lombardo’s Walkman is the small, broken object through which a local killing becomes a lasting point of departure for Michelle McNamara’s pursuit of an unknown assailant. Its significance lies not in solving the crime, but in how its shattered pieces make the absence of the killer’s identity concrete and unforgettable.

From Everyday Object to Crime-Scene Remnant

On the night she was killed, twenty-four-year-old Kathleen Lombardo was jogging along Pleasant Street with her Walkman. Two days later, McNamara walked to the nearby attack site without telling anyone. There she found pieces of the shattered player on the ground and picked them up. The device, ordinarily part of a routine run, had become a remnant of a crime that remained unexplained.

The Encounter That Stayed

McNamara recalled feeling no fear as she gathered the fragments; what held her attention was the unanswered question of the killer’s identity. She later returned to the Walkman when explaining her interest in crime, locating the origin of that fascination in the moment she held pieces of a dead girl’s player. The object thus anchors an abstract absence—the unknown face of the killer—in a specific encounter and a tangible thing.

A Motif of Unresolved Identity

Decades later, as McNamara drove toward Rancho Cordova, she described the Walkman fragments as still jangling in her mind. The book uses that return to connect the childhood crime scene with her later investigation: the object is no longer physically present in the account, but its remembered fragments continue to carry the question that drew her toward unsolved cases. The Walkman’s narrative importance is therefore both material and mnemonic: its brokenness marks the crime, while its persistence in memory keeps the unresolved identity in view.