A New Book Might Just Explain Why So Many Serial Killers Came From One Part of the Country
Growing up on Washington state's Mercer Island in the 1960s and '70s, the writer Caroline Fraser got used to hearing people puzzle over why the Pacific Northwest was such a hotbed of infamous serial killers. From Ted Bundy to Gary Ridgway, aka the Green River Killer, these criminals seemed to be a mysterious product of a particular place and time, but why? Fraser—who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder —had her own reasons for discontent with her hometown, foremost among them a dominant Christian Scientist father whom she herself fantasized about eliminating. When, during the pandemic, she finally settled down to investigate this regional anomaly—part of an astonishing boom in serial killers nationwide between 1970 and 1990—she encountered an alternate explanation, one that she learned was especially relevant to the Seattle and Tacoma area. Fraser's new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers , explores this theory of why her girlhood home was so notably rife with strange and extravagant crimes. I spoke with her about what she discovered. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Laura Miller: There's a lot swirling around in Murderland. You've got the history of Tacoma, Seattle, and the greater Pacific Northwest. There's your personal history, and then there are the stories of these many criminals and murderers. But there is also an argument underlying it that I wasn't familiar with, the lead-crime hypothesis. Could you explain that?
Caroline Fraser: I didn't realize when I started this book that crime in the United States was at its worst in this period that I'm talking about—the late '60s, the '70s, the '80s. Violent crime reached heights that had not been seen before. And then there was this abrupt drop-off in the 1990s.
One of the theories that recently emerged to explain that drop-off was the lead-crime hypothesis. Lead exposure, especially in childhood, really affects the development of the brain, and in particular, the male brain. What can happen is that if you're exposed to lead as a young child, then you are more likely to exhibit, later, in young adulthood, impulsivity and aggression. You're more likely to commit violent crime.
How were people exposed to lead, and how was that exposure diminished later?
In the '70s, lead was removed from paint, but the major way that most people were being exposed to lead was through leaded gasoline. It had existed since the 1920s, but when you think about, especially in this country, the rise in commuting and in car ownership that came about after World War II—you had more people driving, and driving longer distance. I mean, virtually everyone from the late 1940s and early 1950s to the 1980s was exposed to a lot of leaded gas.
When was it removed?
They started talking about removing it in the mid-'70s with the creation of the EPA, but it doesn't really get completely removed until about 1986.
And then on top of the led gas, in certain parts of the country—you focus mainly on Tacoma—there were these metal smelters emitting lead and all kinds of other chemicals.
These are called primary smelters, which were basically factories or plants to produce metal. There used to be so many of these that somebody once said that at one time, everybody in the country lived within 10 miles of a smelter.
They were very common in cities. They were taking metal ores, the products of mining, and burning them. The smelter in Tacoma was first a lead smelter, then it changed pretty early on to a copper smelter. The issue with burning these ores is that they contain all these different kinds of metal, some of which are desirable, like silver and gold and copper, and others which are less so, like lead and arsenic. The Tacoma smelter was one of the dirtiest smelters in the country in terms of how much arsenic it produced. It also produced a lot of lead, and it was open and operating for decades, and over those decades, it polluted 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound region.
The lead-crime hypothesis connects the general rise in crime with lead exposure, but has it been connected to the rise in the bizarre, unusual crimes that you're writing about in this book?
I don't think that anybody has written a general-interest book that makes the connection between serial killers and the lead-crime hypothesis. What we are starting to see, though, are some scientific papers exploring the connection between lead exposure and psychopathy. But while it isn't completely unknown in the scientific record, I wanted to make this connection in a subjective way.
I mean, I can't prove, for example, that Ted Bundy committed his crimes because of lead exposure. But what I can do is show you how much lead exposure he got, because there's now this extraordinary map, this Geographic Information System map that was produced by the Washington State Department of Ecology, that maps out the lead exposure, especially in Tacoma, but also the whole plume of it as it goes up into Seattle and Mercer Island and south of Tacoma. Now you can actually see how much lead was in Ted Bundy's front yard and his backyard, and how much arsenic.
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When did you learn about the lead exposure aspect, both its link to crime and the amount of metals the smelter was dumping in the area? Because you grew up there! You yourself were also exposed to all of that lead.
Yeah, and draw whatever conclusion you like about that. I became aware of the smelter because we'd been thinking of possibly moving back to the Northwest and were looking at property. There was a piece of property on Vashon Island, which is right across from Tacoma, and the real estate agent had said that arsenic remediation was necessary, or something like that. I thought, how could there be arsenic on Vashon Island? It's this beautiful little island that was very agricultural. They grew strawberries there. But of course, because of its location right across from Tacoma, it got exposed to emissions from the smelter. So it has had arsenic and also lead.
You make it very clear in your book that there's a long history of the danger of lead exposure being minimized by industry. ASARCO, the company that owned and operated the smelter, had this horribly compromised doctor on staff who kept insisting it was just fine. The government at the time seemed so docile in the face of those assertions. It just took forever for them to really recognize what a hazard it was.
And by the time they were ready to recognize it, most of the smelters were going out of business anyway, which of course is not accidental timing. I think there are only three lead smelters or primary smelters left operating in the US now. It's so much cheaper to go somewhere like Mexico or Peru, countries that don't have the regulations that we have. So now those are the places that are being polluted.
This is very disturbing. You make a connection between the whole femicide epidemic in Ciudad Juárez and the smelter emissions down there.
The thing that we're still facing here is not the primary smelters like the one they had in Tacoma, but all this recycling. Your car battery has got lead in it.
Let's talk more about these serial killers you cover. There's a lot of detail about the crimes in this book, and also there has been a lot written about at least some of these people. I'm not going to say that I'm not interested in reading it, because I do love true crime, but a lot of people might complain that it has already been covered extensively. How did you come to the decision to examine the crimes themselves in some depth?
One of the things that I was hoping to do by looking at some of these very overfamiliar characters like Ted Bundy, for example, is to put him in a historical context. Because I think that really changes the way we see who he is and what he did. I love true crime too, and Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me was a real gateway drug for me, but the thing that most true crime does is to take just one of these killers—Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, the BTK Killer—and they look just at that one guy. I wanted to do something different, to look at a selection of them over time and how that makes us see what they're doing differently in terms of history. It begins to seem more like a social phenomenon.
It's really striking in Murderland how much the culture of true crime, especially lurid magazines like True Detective, fascinated killers like Bundy, and then how subsequent killers were obsessed with Bundy in turn—were basically fans who aspired to be like him, after reading about him in books.
And they're all learning things from reading about what other serial killers have done. They're learning techniques for how to hide what they're doing and how to evade detection, and how to conceal their victims so that they're not found until there's very little forensic evidence left.
Was there anything you found out researching this book that really surprised you?
The Tacoma connection was a surprise to me, for starters, because I had always associated Ted Bundy with Seattle, where he committed some of his more notable crimes. And the connection between Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who's not that far from Tacoma. And then when I discovered that Charles Manson had been in the area in the '60s…
I was really surprised to learn that the first victim of the DC sniper duo was in Tacoma! But then do you worry that you're getting into a certain amount of confirmation bias? Surely you must have come across serial killers with no major lead connection?
Sure. I hope I present enough of the attempt quality about this so that people can kind of make up their own mind. There are definitely other serial killers. I looked at Son of Sam pretty closely, trying to find some sort of explanation for his behavior, but couldn't really do it. Then again, the whole problem with this era is that everyone was exposed to led gas.
Everyone was exposed. It's striking that you include your own fairly cold-blooded thoughts about getting rid of your dad as a child.
I think we all have moments of… not of wanting to kill somebody, but just frustration and anger and rage, potentially. These feelings are particularly pronounced when you're a kid, when you feel that you have no autonomy, when you feel powerless.
The behavior of the serial killers is just so monstrous that there's always the temptation to think that there's nothing about them that could have ever been normal.
They come to seem, I think—especially when you see this whole series of them, and the repetitiveness of their behavior—like automatons. Almost like robots that are in this kind of cycle, and they can't really control it. But I'm not trying to let them off the hook or anything.
One of the most striking parts of the book is when you quote from a newspaper story covering the demolition of the smelter. One woman actually says, “Even if it kills me, I’m still gonna miss it.” There's something so resonant about that now, at a time when a lot of people want to “bring back” terribly dangerous industries like mining that destroy the health of the people who work in them.
The community of Ruston that was right around the smokestack had developed the sense of, Oh, this is a wonderful thing, and the jobs are so well-paying . And the smelter officials had done such a good job of quashing any investigation that would have exposed how deadly it was. People were forced to choose between jobs and health. They just shouldn't have been put in that position.
