The power of a face and an identity

The power of a face and an identity is the promise that recognition can change the balance between an unknown perpetrator and the people left searching for answers. In the book, an unidentified figure can occupy an immense space: clues accumulate, families revisit old losses, and a crime remains present precisely because its meaning has not been settled. To see a face or attach a name seems to offer an ending. Yet the pursuit also exposes the limits of that promise. Identification can puncture a mystery’s aura, but it cannot reverse what happened or guarantee that those who suffered will find the explanation they need.

The Face Behind the Question

For Michelle McNamara, the force of this idea began with the unsolved murder of Kathleen Lombardo. Two days after Kathleen was killed, McNamara went alone to the place where she had been attacked. There she found pieces of Kathleen Lombardo’s Walkman. The broken object connected an ordinary young woman to a crime whose perpetrator remained unseen; McNamara later traced her fascination with crime to that encounter and to the unanswered question of who had committed the killing.

That question became a lasting orientation rather than a passing curiosity. McNamara described how unsolved crimes came to organize her associations: places people had lived could summon other disappearances and murders in her mind. In her midthirties, she made her interest public through True Crime Diary, the do-it-yourself detective website she began after internet technology made such work possible. The unresolved face was no longer only a gap in a case file. It was a compelling absence that could draw a writer into years of research.

An Absence That Seems Solvable

The search for the Golden State Killer sharpened the appeal of identification. McNamara believed the case could be solved: there were many victims and clues, but the crimes had occurred in relatively contained communities, making it possible to compare information and potential suspects. She did not treat the perpetrator as a ghost. Her working faith was that he had made a mistake somewhere, even if investigators had not yet found it.

The investigation was sustained by both formal inquiry and collective attention. McNamara followed an online message board where committed researchers exchanged theories and clues across tens of thousands of posts. One item discussed there was an image of a decal on a suspicious vehicle reported near an attack. Such contributions could complement the work of overburdened detectives still trying to solve the case. The prospect of a face therefore depended not on a sudden revelation alone, but on gathering and testing scattered details until an overlooked connection might become legible.

This conviction also shaped McNamara’s working habits. Nearly a year into her involvement, she had filled yellow legal pads with lines of inquiry that started hopefully and then stalled. She sought advice from retired detectives who had worked the case and whom she had come to regard as friends. Their encouragement did not remove the difficulty of the search; it gave her a method for enduring it. When she worried that she was grasping at straws, one advised her to take a straw and work it until it was exhausted. The image captures the labor between an unknown identity and a provable one: a small lead must be pursued, not merely admired as a possible answer.

Recognition and Its Limits

The book holds two attitudes toward identification in tension. McNamara insisted on the importance of seeing the perpetrator’s face, because recognition would diminish the power of an unseen figure. The account of DNA evidence gives that hope a concrete form: a biological trace can lead investigators toward a person, and a known identity can replace the blankness surrounding a crime with verifiable facts. In this sense, naming is not just symbolic. It is an investigative result that can direct legal action and alter what families know about their losses.

At the same time, a name is not the same thing as a satisfying explanation. One of the book’s reflections rejects the idea that discovering a killer’s identity would necessarily reveal a profound inner truth. A perpetrator’s personal history might offer only banal fragments, while the lives of the people harmed remain more substantial than the explanation sought in the killer. The contrast prevents identification from becoming a cure-all: knowing who acted may answer a central question without making the answer emotionally adequate.

Roger Harrington’s search for the person who killed his son, Keith Harrington, and daughter-in-law, Patty Harrington, shows how an unknown identity can occupy years of family life. Roger repeatedly examined the case, hired a private investigator, offered a large reward, and revisited friends and coworkers. Nothing produced the necessary answer. In desperation, he consulted a clairvoyant, but that attempt did not clear the uncertainty. He even formed an explanation for why the couple’s heads had been covered, interpreting it as remorse. Later evidence corrected that belief: the killer had covered them to avoid getting blood on himself. An explanation had seemed to fill the gap, but the evidence showed that it was wrong.

Answers Arriving Too Late

The eventual investigative break came not as the long-awaited phone call but through three glass tubes preserved in manila envelopes. Investigators opened and tested them in October and November 1996; by December, they had results and were ready to contact families. Roger had died on March 8, 1995, before those calls could reach him. The preserved evidence moved the case closer to an answer, but it could not deliver that knowledge to the person who had spent years seeking it. The timing makes the power of identification painfully conditional: evidence may survive, and investigators may advance, while a family member’s chance to learn the result has already passed.

The book also distinguishes uncertainty about a perpetrator from the consequences of a death already known. After her mother’s death, fifteen-year-old Debbi moved to San Diego, and her mother’s family gradually receded from her life. She overheard her grandmother express relief that another relative, rather than her mother, had not been killed; the remark haunted her. In later years Debbi tried to reconnect with her grandmother and aunt, but neither responded. The account does not present this estrangement as a mystery solved by identifying a killer. Instead, it shows that confirmed loss can leave other questions—about family, recognition, and belonging—unanswered.

Across these cases, a face and a name mark a threshold, not a universal conclusion. They can turn an invisible suspect into a person investigators can pursue, correct imagined explanations, and give relatives facts that years of searching could not supply. But the delayed evidence, the mistaken interpretation, and the unanswered family appeals all resist a simple ending. The book grants identification real force while insisting that no discovery can return the dead, restore lost time, or settle every meaning carried by an unresolved past.