Paul Haynes

Paul Haynes, known by the alias the Kid, was Michelle McNamara’s lead researcher on the Golden State Killer case and a close collaborator in the investigation. After McNamara died while writing I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Haynes and Billy Jensen helped organize the immense body of research she left behind, completed work for the book, and committed themselves to continuing the search for the killer’s name.

Identity and Investigative Role

Haynes is identified as McNamara’s lead researcher, and as the Kid, in the account of how the book was prepared after her death. His role extended beyond assisting with a manuscript: he worked within a large investigative archive, helped process newly acquired case materials, and shared McNamara’s determination to turn accumulated records into leads.

The scale of that archive was striking. A week after McNamara died on April 21, 2016, Haynes and Jensen gained access to her hard drives and began exploring 3,500 files about the Golden State Killer. Those files joined dozens of notebooks, legal pads, scraps of paper, thousands of digitized pages of police reports, and thirty-seven boxes of records from the Orange County prosecutor, which McNamara had called the Mother Lode case files. The task was not simply to preserve a finished investigation: the materials contained thousands of pieces whose overall pattern was still unresolved.

Collaboration with Michelle McNamara

McNamara’s research combined close reading of official records with the systematic organization of names, places, and events. She built an index to help locate investigative details, distinguish people who might otherwise be confused, trace possible geographic movement, and identify names or connections that recurred among victims. She also cultivated relationships with active and retired investigators, exchanging information and passing findings and a Master List to active investigators. Haynes’s work took place within this collaborative effort to make dispersed information usable across the investigation.

In January 2016, McNamara and Haynes were allowed, under supervision, to examine and borrow selected materials from sixty-five Bankers Boxes of case files in a narrow closet at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Back in Los Angeles, the boxes were moved into a second-floor room in McNamara’s house; the former playroom became the Box Room. The location and the volume of the files gave their collaboration a concrete working center: overlooked reports and supplemental materials could be brought together rather than left scattered among case folders.

McNamara and Haynes were especially interested in these supplemental reports, which gathered orphaned or peripheral incidents that had drifted to the margins of the filing system. They considered that such records might preserve a forgotten suspect, a witness account that had been overlooked, a vehicle that was never pursued, or a prowler whose explanation had seemed plausible at the time. The investigative value lay partly in attending to material that had not acquired a clear place in the main case files.

Organizing and Preserving the Case Files

McNamara bought two high-volume digital scanners, and she and Haynes began digitizing the newly accessed material. Scanning made the files easier to retrieve and their text searchable, while also allowing the researchers to share material with investigators. Some of the records had not been seen by active investigators, including Paul Holes, Ken Clark, and Erika Hutchcraft. The work therefore served both as an extension of McNamara’s research and as a practical contribution to the broader investigation.

McNamara believed there was about an 80 percent chance that the offender’s name appeared somewhere in the boxes. That was her estimate, not a discovery attributed to Haynes; its significance was the confidence it placed in the overlooked record. Their scanning and indexing offered a way to test that possibility by making a vast archive more accessible and searchable, rather than relying on memory or on files already prominent in the investigation.

Completing the Book and Continuing the Search

After McNamara’s death, Haynes and Jensen worked together to tie up loose ends and organize the materials she had left. The chapter describing this work was collaboratively written by the two men, making their editorial role visible within the book itself. Their task was shaped by an unfinished investigation as well as an unfinished manuscript: McNamara’s files preserved a great deal of work, but no single person could simply supply the definitive pattern that the evidence had not yet revealed.

In a December 2013 email to her editor, McNamara had considered how a book about an unsolved case might involve its readers rather than treat the absence of a solution only as a weakness. She proposed including analyses—among them geographic profiles, footwear analysis, and examinations of the days on which the offender attacked—so readers could try to play detective. The book’s afterword carries that invitation forward in Haynes and Jensen’s joint voice: “We will not stop until we get his name. We’ll be playing the detective as well.” The statement presents Haynes not as the person who solved the case, but as a researcher and co-author continuing a collective pursuit whose evidence remained open to scrutiny.