The Golden State Killer Case

William Thorp

California. 13 murders, 50 assaults, 42 years of investigation.

In 2018, US police announced that they arrested the “Golden State Killer”, charged with over 140 burglaries, 50 rapes and at least 13 murders in the 70's and 80's. Two years before, the book I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara was published. She was an author and a sleuth, who spent the last years of her life tracking the killer, until she died from this obsession.
William Thorp dives into an investigation with the sunny background of California, mixing seventies, forensic innovation (the killer was the first big criminal to be arrested thanks to progress made in the field of DNA research), and a story inside the story, the one of an amateur sleuth, who tried to understand how a man was able to spend all these years unpunished.

In partnership with the French magazine Society, this collection aims at painting a picture of the United States through their biggest criminal cases, with - approximately - one book per state. Society met a massive success with a special editions in two volumes about the Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès case, which sold 400,000 copies.
The stories are written by French journalists from Society, who were sent to the USA to investigate. Our goal is to offer highly documented and short true crime books that could be read as thrillers, and the result is stunning. The tone is incisive, and straight-to-the-point - as journalists know how to do - and the stories are at the same time as gripping as a thriller, with cliff-hangers at the end of chapters.