In 1974, the year Caroline Fraser turned 13, Ted Bundy committed his first confirmed murders. Bundy was handsome, charming, extremely intelligent and sociopathic – “a sexual virus masquerading as a person”. There is persuasive evidence that he began killing much earlier but never this gluttonously. Almost all of his victims had long brown hair, parted in the middle. Sometimes he broke into the women’s houses while they slept, or snatched them off the street. Sometimes he would put on a sling or plaster cast and lure them into his car to help with some fabricated task. If one refused, he tried another, convinced that he would never be caught because they would never be missed. “I mean, there are so many people,” he reasoned. “It shouldn’t be a problem.” Fraser lived on Mercer Island, Washington, near Bundy’s first hunting grounds. Recalling the moment he was first charged with murder in October 1976, she writes: “Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.”
Bundy was one of at least half a dozen serial killers active in Washington in 1974. Within a few years, the state would produce the similarly prolific Randall Woodfield, known as the I-5 Killer, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Its murder rate rose by more than 30% in 1974 – almost six times the national average. In Tacoma, the city where Bundy grew up, Ridgway lived and Charles Manson was incarcerated for five years before starting his Family, murder was up 62%. It was as if a malevolent cloud had enveloped the region.
Fraser argues that the epidemic was related to a real cloud, containing sulphur dioxide, arsenic and lead, which emanated from the smokestack of a smelting facility in Ruston, outside Tacoma. Nobody knows what cursed constellation of genes, upbringing, social circumstances, brain chemistry and plain old evil makes serial killers do what they do, but Fraser advances the lead-crime hypothesis. Lead in the blood has been shown to deplete brain volume in the part of the prefrontal cortex that regulates behaviour, especially in men. Today, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) defines more than 3.5 micrograms of lead per decilitre in a child’s blood as a cause for concern; the CDC’s first “safe” threshold, in 1960, was 60 micrograms. Yet as far back as the 1920s, doctors observed that lead poisoning from paint made children “crazy-like”. Fifty years later, the Ecologist asked “Does lead create criminals?” and the CDC connected lead to “functional derangements”.
It was also connected to money. The Guggenheim dynasty built its fortune on mining and smelting metal – its company Asarco was once responsible for 90% of US lead production. Asarco acquired the Ruston smelter in 1905 and converted it to refine copper, bleeding waste metals into the sky through what was for a while the world’s tallest smokestack. “The unwitting populace breathes [lead], eats it, and becomes it,” Fraser writes. In 1974, researchers found that the Ruston smelter was pumping 25lbs of lead dust and 58lbs of arsenic into the air every hour. That same year, Asarco celebrated its 75th anniversary by reporting record profits.
Murderland sets its sights much higher than true crime. Like Prairie Fires, Fraser’s Pulitzer prize-winning 2017 biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s a big, ambitious story about the United States and the people it breeds. Then again, wasn’t it a work of true crime, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, that kickstarted literary nonfiction 60 years ago? Two recent tales of money and murder – Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain and David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon – also border Murderland. It is as hauntingly compulsive a nonfiction book as I have read in a long time. It gets into your blood.
The occasional overripe passage and portentous epigram (Dante, Dostoevsky) is a small price to pay. Fraser’s lyrical present-tense prose is urgent yet tightly controlled as she digs into newspaper archives to create a pin-studded map of a country losing its mind. The bravura section about 1974, that annus horribilis, uses immersive day-by-day storytelling to braid the killings with the unravelling of President Nixon, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and Fraser’s own coming of age on Mercer Island, where she dreams of killing her father, a violent, autocratic Christian Scientist. By evoking the victims’ lives and treading lightly around their grisly deaths, she avoids the clammy voyeurism that makes so many serial killer histories feel sordid.
Fraser’s narrative map is criss-crossed with red threads. She pulls in erstwhile Tacoma residents such as Dune creator Frank Herbert, who said that his home town’s air was “so thick you can chew it”, and Dashiell Hammett, who fictionalised the city as “Poisonville” in Red Harvest. We meet Thomas Midgley Jr, the “one-man environmental disaster” responsible for both leaded gasoline and ozone-shredding chlorofluorocarbons, and Clair Patterson, the former Manhattan Project geochemist who used lead levels to accurately calculate the age of the Earth and then successfully campaigned to undo Midgley’s sin. We jump back to the second world war, whose ravenous appetite for lead and copper fuelled an environmental catastrophe. I wasn’t quite persuaded by the subplot about the Lake Washington Floating Bridge, an engineering atrocity whose careless design killed more people than Bundy, but I was never bored.
Fraser evokes the fear and vulnerability of the age of serial killers – a time of unguarded hitchhikers, unlocked windows and police officers who have no idea who they’re dealing with. Most perpetrators of sexual violence are known to their victims, but in the US during the 1970s, almost 300 men were compulsively trolling for strangers to abuse and kill. That number plummeted, along with the overall crime rate, during the 1990s, which happened to be after lead was removed from gasoline and most of the big smelters closed down. The one at Ruston fell silent in 1985, thanks more to market forces than to regulation: the price of copper had crashed.
Can the serial killers’ crimes be solely explained by the air they breathed, the water they drank and the metal in their brains? Surely not, but Fraser demonstrates enough correlation to make lead pollution a likely contributing factor. Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who terrorised California in the mid-80s, grew up near Asarco’s smelter in El Paso, Texas. Gary Ridgway was exposed to lead paint for three decades in his job spray-painting trucks. James Oliver Huberty, who shot dead 22 people in a McDonald’s in California in 1984, was riddled with cadmium from his work as a welder. He had complained that the fumes were “making me crazy”.
Murderland is full of mirrors. The incompetence of law enforcers is twinned with the weakness of environmental regulators. The killers’ contempt for individual human lives finds an echo in the ruthless amorality of the corporations. In 1973, a fire destroyed the filtering system at the smelter at Bunker Hill, Idaho, octupling its emissions. An executive weighed the costs of temporary closure against the maximum likely settlement to affected families and kept it going.
“They’re doing the devil’s business, which is no different from what Ted does,” Fraser writes, hot with indignation. “Like Ted, Bunker Hill has been killing people for years. It’s second nature.” In Murderland, some killers get caught, tried and punished. Others just get rich. For both, it’s a numbers game.
• Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser is published by Fleet (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
