SERIAL KILLERSWhy Was Pacific Northwest Home to So Many Serial Killers?
Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, George Russell, Israel Keyes, and Robert Lee Yates were serial killers who grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the shadow of smelters which spewed plumes of lead, arsenic, and cadmium into the air. As a young man, Charles Manson spent ten years at a nearby prison, where lead has seeped into the soil. The idea of a correlation between early exposure to lead and higher crime rates is not new. Fraser doesn’t explicitly support the lead-crime hypothesis, but in a nimble, haunting narrative, she argues that the connections between an unfettered pollution and violent crime warrant scrutiny.
In Murderland:Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Caroline Fraser explores lead-crime theory through lens of her own memories growing up there.
Fraser, Harvard Ph.D. ’87, in her first book since Prairie Fires, her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder, explores the proliferation of serial killers in the 1970s — weaving together ecological and social history, memoir, and disturbing scenes of predation and violence. The resulting narrative shifts the conventional focus on the psychology of serial killers to the environment around them. As the Pacific Northwest reels from a slew of serial murderers, Fraser turns toward the nearby smelters that shoot plumes of lead, arsenic, and cadmium into the air and the companies, government officials, and even citizens who are happy to overlook the pollution.
Of the Pacific Northwest’s most notorious killers, Fraser ties many to these smokestacks. Ted Bundy, whose crimes and background are discussed more than any other character, grew up in the shadows of the ASARCO copper smelter in Tacoma, Washington. Gary Ridgway grew up in Tacoma, too, and Charles Manson spent 10 years at a nearby prison, where lead has seeped into the soil. Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker, grew up next to a different ASARCO smokestack in El Paso, Texas, long before committing murders in Los Angeles.
Fraser’s own experiences growing up in Mercer Island, Washington, add another eerie dimension. A classmate’s father blows up his home with the family inside. Another classmate becomes a serial killer. Her Christian Scientist father is menacing and abusive, and Fraser, as a child, considers ways to get rid of him, possibly by pushing him off a boat. The darkness is unrelenting; something is in the air.
To what extent environmental degradation directly led to the killings described in the book, Fraser leaves up to readers. “There are many things that probably contribute to somebody who commits these kinds of crimes,” she said in an interview. “I did not conceive of it as a work of criminology or an academic treatise on the lead-crime hypothesis. I really just wanted to tell a history about the history of the area — what I remember of it — and create a narrative that took all these things into account.”
