Los Angeles is both Michelle McNamara’s home and the principal setting for the private, increasingly extensive work through which she investigates the Golden State Killer. The city frames a striking contrast: a quiet family neighborhood and a daughter’s playroom become the setting for years of research into crimes committed elsewhere, while public appearances and domestic rituals continue around the investigation.

A home transformed into a workspace

McNamara describes a neighborhood northwest of downtown Los Angeles that grows remarkably quiet at night. After her husband, Patton Oswalt, and their daughter, Alice, have gone to sleep, she returns to a makeshift workspace in the playroom. The room is furnished for a child, with stuffed animals and miniature pink bongos, but the laptop on her desk opens onto a sprawling investigation: she searches through yearbooks, marriage certificates, mug shots, police files, and autopsy reports, and uses Google Street View to examine the driveways of men she does not know. Her notes include California penal codes written on coloring paper. The child’s room is not simply adjacent to her work; it becomes the place where that work takes shape.

One night, around midnight on July 3, 2012, McNamara opens a document listing the distinctive items stolen by the offender. More than half the entries have already been marked as dead ends. The next lead is a pair of cuff links taken in Stockton in September 1977. From this Los Angeles room, she moves between present-day searches and a crime series that began decades earlier, tracing the East Area Rapist’s attacks from Sacramento County into the Central Valley and the East Bay. The distance between the researcher's home and the crimes does not lessen the work’s intensity: the laptop allows her to cross years and locations while remaining physically in the same domestic space.

Public life and private preoccupation

At the Hollywood premiere of Funny People on July 20, 2009, Los Angeles appears as a crowded public stage. Paparazzi and microphones press around Patton Oswalt and the film’s other guests. McNamara, dressed for the event, looks at her iPhone and learns that a fugitive she has been pursuing in her research has been found. She steps behind a concrete column to call Pete King, a longtime reporter for the Los Angeles Times who had moved into media relations at the University of California. The discovery interrupts the premiere, but the scene also makes clear how the investigation travels with her into the city’s social world.

The same divide appears in a smaller domestic exchange. When Alice is three months old, an acquaintance assumes McNamara is returning to the baby; the truth is that she is going back to her laptop to search for information about a man she has never met. The episode places the demands of motherhood beside an obsession that has occupied her mind since before she learned about this particular offender. In McNamara’s account, Los Angeles is not a refuge from the case. It is where family life continues while the case claims hours that would otherwise belong to sleep, socializing, or rest.

In 2012, the city also supplies the setting for a Thanksgiving gathering that McNamara hosts with Patton: about a dozen adults and four children. She is trying to finish the second draft of a seven-thousand-word story, and the deadline shapes her attention even at the holiday table. Her impatience surfaces over an undersized turkey; when the guests share what they are thankful for, her thoughts turn briefly to a wish. Later, while the children watch The Wizard of Oz, she stays out of the room, aware that her own emotions need to be reined in. This domestic scene shows the investigation exerting pressure not through a new clue, but through the strain of trying to keep a deadline and an inward fixation within ordinary family life.

Research networks and material records

Los Angeles is also a base for McNamara’s contact with the broader community investigating the case. She encounters the online researchers of A&E’s Cold Case Files message board, whose extensive discussions include maps, witness sightings, possible connections, and a drawing of a decal seen on a suspicious vehicle. The board has more than a thousand topics and twenty thousand posts. Its contributors work under pseudonyms, and disagreements arise over the sharing of information, but McNamara recognizes that their collective attention can surface details and organize material that might otherwise remain scattered. She also meets a computer-science graduate student at a Los Angeles Starbucks to discuss a person of interest; before the meeting, he sends her a dossier with footnotes, maps, and yearbook photographs. The city thus connects her home research to a distributed network of amateur researchers and investigators.

As work on her Los Angeles magazine feature begins, official case files start reaching her. She creates an index of people, places, and things named in the reports, intending to make investigative details easier to locate, distinguish people who might be of interest because of their later movements, and identify possible overlaps among victims. Her relationships with active and retired investigators develop into exchanges of information. She passes her findings and a master list to active investigators, making the research a collaboration rather than a private archive alone.

In January 2016, McNamara and Paul Holes are allowed to examine sixty-five boxes of case files at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. The boxes are moved to the second floor of her Los Angeles home, and the daughter’s playroom becomes the Box Room. The change gives the domestic setting a new physical scale: files that had been stored in an agency closet now occupy the family house. Among the materials are supplemental reports and overlooked or peripheral records that McNamara and Holes consider potentially important. McNamara buys two high-volume scanners so the documents can be digitized, searched, and shared more easily with investigators, including Paul Holes, Ken Clark, and Erika Hutchcraft. She estimates that the offender’s name might be somewhere in the boxes with an 80 percent probability. Los Angeles is consequently not just the location of her writing desk; it becomes a working archive for a large-scale review of the case.

A domestic frame for crimes elsewhere

The book’s investigative geography repeatedly reaches beyond Los Angeles. McNamara studies reports describing how the East Area Rapist selected neighborhoods, watched residents’ routines, and used features of the built environment, while the cited attacks and reconnaissance took place in Sacramento-area communities and elsewhere in California. Her work also brings her to Sacramento, where she receives digitized police reports through an exchange involving a videotaped interview. These places should not be conflated: Los Angeles is the center of McNamara’s home life and research, not the general location of the attacks she investigates.

That distinction gives the city its narrative importance. Los Angeles is where the search is performed at night, where a case discovery intrudes on a movie premiere, where a deadline competes with Thanksgiving, and where boxes of old reports are brought into a family home. Patton’s gifts make the overlap visible: one anniversary present is a custom-bound copy of McNamara’s article, and earlier gifts had also incorporated her true-crime work. Her biography identifies Los Angeles as her home, and the book repeatedly returns to it as the place where the investigation becomes part of daily life. The city’s role is therefore less that of a crime-scene backdrop than of a sustained working environment, holding family routines and an ever-growing body of evidence in the same frame.