Review of Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

I shuddered as I read (during daylight hours only) Caroline Fraser's painstaking accounts of the shockingly numerous serial killers who emerged from the Pacific Northwest and the proposal that extensive heavy metal industrial pollution in the region contributed to their flawed development, horrifying impulses, and killing sprees.

File my reading of this nonfiction book under Why Didn't I Listen to My Inner Voice...and Not Read This?

I was intrigued by the environmental factors Fraser tied to developmental disruptions and the emergence of a large number of eventual serial killers in heavily polluted portions of the Pacific Northwest. I was overly ambitious and thought I could handle any nonfiction book topic. I lied to myself about how much horrifying material I could stomach--and how much more disturbing I would find it because the content is all exhaustively researched and true. I forgot that getting frightened when I read at night disrupts my sleep. I didn't think about how I don't actually like to take in extensive information about murder and psychopaths.

"I mean, there are so many people," [Ted Bundy] reasoned. "It shouldn't be a problem."

Anyhoo! In Murderland, Caroline Fraser puts forth a fascinating link (she's not the first to do so, but her painstakingly detailed account offers a cohesive, extensive argument) between the numerous mass-murderers who took shape in the 1970s and 1980s and grew up to terrorize the Pacific Northwest--and, in some cases, other areas of the country--and an era in which devastating amounts of toxic pollutants were pumped into the air, water, and soil there.

In the humble pages of pulp magazines, Ann Rule is cataloging a tide of inconceivable deviance. One thing she never asks herself is, Why here? Why now?

Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma?

Children exposed to lead in utero or during their first years of life might display a dizzying array of symptoms...some are impulsive, some violent....

"If you listen to parents with lead-poisoned kids, they tell you that the biggest thing is that the kids' behavior changes--they become dangerous."

Fraser grew up in the Pacific Northwest with firsthand memories of arsenic, lead, and copper contamination: far-flung poisonous airborne particles, large-scale toxic waste dumped into bodies of water, long-term industry denials, and, eventually, dire warnings about safety hazards. In 1974, researchers determined that just one source of heavy-metal pollution, the Ruston smelter, pumped 25 pounds of lead dust and 58 pounds of arsenic into the air every hour.

In Murderland, we learn that "the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports for 1974 reveals that crime in Washington state [was] up 29.2 percent, nearly three times the national average." In Tacoma, where Ted Bundy grew up, where Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer) lived, and where Charles Manson was imprisoned for five years before starting his Family and embarking on his killing spree, murder was up 62%.

Fraser's detailed accounts march through mindboggling horrors, tracking all of the relevant known actions of killers like Ted Bundy--their public selves and private proclivities; their secrets, lies, and base drives to hurt and destroy; and their rapes, dismemberments, torture, terrorizing, murders, and body disposals.

Murderland focuses on Ted Bundy and other serial killers of his era (for example, the I-5 Killer, the Green River Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, John Wayne Gacy, and the B.T.K. [Bind, Torture, Kill] murderer in Wichita--some of whom grew up in polluted areas of the country other than the Pacific Northwest). Fraser notes that serial killers in the US grew from 40 in the 1940s to 300 or more in the 1980s.

But Fraser takes time for significant asides, giving the book somewhat of a jumpy feel--not inappropriate to the fear-inducing topic at hand, after all. She repeatedly checks in on years of multiple violent vehicular deaths due to a negligently designed and maintained floating bridge connecting Seattle to Fraser's childhood home on Mercer Island, and she traces pivotal moments in her childhood living with a violent, oppressive Christian Scientist father--as well as her seemingly fervent and earnest wish that she had killed him when she had the chance, before he inflicted more cruelties and abuse in later years.

Murderland doesn't address the question of why certain (few, in the scheme of things, although even one is too many) people exposed to heavy metals and toxic waste would become remorseless, insatiable murderers and why so many millions of others with the same environmental exposures would not--nor why serial killers emerge from areas where such pollution is not evident.

I could have been satisfied with a long Atlantic-style article on these topics, but Fraser's writing is lovely and her turns of phrase are insightful and often poetic, which helped me continue reading the difficult material and atrocities here.

More Nonfiction Reads--and More by Caroline Fraser

Carolina Fraser is also the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

For nonfiction reads I've loved, check out the titles at this link.