SERIAL KILLERSWhat Warped the Minds of Serial Killers? Lead Pollution, a New Book Argues.
Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and others terrorized the Pacific Northwest. “Murderland” asks what role polluters played.
When Ted Bundy was a child in the 1950s, he hunted for frogs in the nearby swamps in Tacoma, Washington. The young Gary Ridgway, the future Green River Killer, grew up just a short drive north. Both men went on to become prolific serial killers, raping and mutilating dozens of women, starting in the 1970s and ’80s. These types of sociopaths are exceedingly rare, representing less than a tenth of 1 percent of all murderers by some accounts. Yet in Tacoma, they were surprisingly common — and there were more than just Bundy and Ridgway.
In her new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser maps the rise of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest to the proliferation of pollution. In this case, the lead- and arsenic-poisoned plume that flowed from Asarco’s metal smelter northwest of Tacoma, which operated for almost a century and polluted more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound area, the source of the famous “aroma of Tacoma.”
Fraser grew up in the 1970s on Mercer Island, connected to Seattle by a floating bridge with a deadly design, not far from a terrifying lineup of serial killers. George Waterfield Russell Jr., who went on to murder three women, lived just down the street, a few years ahead of Fraser at Mercer Island High School. (No surprise, his family once lived in Tacoma.) She had always thought the idea that the Pacific Northwest was a breeding ground for serial killers was “some kind of urban legend,” she told Grist.
