The Los Angeles Times Review: Murderland
What does smelting have to do with Ted Bundy? A lot, argues Murderland author.
By Hamilton Cain
Caroline Fraser’s scorching, seductive “Murderland” chronicles the serial-killer epidemic that swept the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s, focusing on her native Seattle and neighboring Tacoma, where Ted Bundy was raised. He drove a Beetle, hunting for prey. She underscores the striking associations between VWs and high-yield predators (Bundy’s vehicle is now displayed in a Tennessee museum). The book’s a meld of true crime, memoir and social commentary, but with a mission: to shock readers into a deeper understanding of the American Nightmare, ecological devastation entwined with senseless sadism. “Murderland” is not for the faint of heart, yet we can’t look away: Fraser’s writing is that vivid and dynamic.
She structures her narrative chronologically, conveyed in present tense, newsreel-style, evoking the Pacific Northwest’s woodsy tang and bland suburbia. Fraser came of age on Mercer Island, adjacent to Lake Washington’s eastern shore, across a heavily-trafficked pontoon bridge notorious for fatal crashes. Like the VW Beetle, the dangerous bridge threads throughout “Murderland,” braiding the author’s personal story with those of her cast. A “Star Trek” geek stuck in a rigid Christian Science family, she loathed her father and longed to escape.
In Tacoma, 35 miles to the south, Ted Bundy grew up near the American Smelting and Refining Co., which disgorged obscene levels of lead and arsenic into the air while netting millions for the Guggenheim dynasty before its 1986 closure. Bundy is the book’s charismatic centerpiece, a handsome, well-dressed sociopath in shiny patent-leather shoes, flitting from college to college, job to job, corpse to corpse. During the 1970s, he abducted dozens of young women, raping and strangling them on sprees across the country, often engaging in postmortem sex before disposing of their bodies. He escaped custody twice in Colorado — once from a courthouse and another time from a jail — before he was finally locked up for good after his brutal attacks on Chi Omega sorority sisters at Florida State University.
Fraser depicts his bloody brotherhood with similar flair. Israel Keyes claimed Bundy as a hero. Gary Ridgway, the prolific “Green River Killer,” inhaled the same Puget Sound toxins. Randy Woodfield trawled I-5 in his 1974 Champagne Edition Beetle. As she observes of Richard Ramirez, Los Angeles’ “Night Stalker”: “He’s six foot one, wears black, and never smiles. He has a dead stare, like a shark. He doesn’t bathe. He has bad teeth. He’s about to go beserk.” But the archvillain is ASARCO, the mining corporation that dodged regulations, putting profitability over people. Fraser reveals an uncanny pattern of polluting smelters and the men brought up in their shadows, prone to mood swings and erratic tantrums. The science seems speculative until the book’s conclusion, where she highlights recent data, explicitly mapping links.
“Murderland” deploys a mocking tone to draw us in, scattering deadpan jokes among chapters: “In 1974 there are at least a half a dozen serial killers operating in Washington. Nobody can see the forest for the trees.” Fraser delivers a brimstone sermon worthy of a Baptist preacher at a tent revival, raging at plutocrats who ravage those with less (or nothing at all).
Her fury blazes beyond balance sheets and into curated spaces of elites. She singles out Roger W. Straus Jr., publisher and patron of the arts and grandson of Daniel Guggenheim, whose Tacoma smelter may have scrambled Bundy’s brain. She mentions Straus’ penchant for ascots and cashmere jackets. She laments the lack of accountability. “Roger W. Straus Jr. completes the process of whitewashing the family name,” she writes. “Whatever the Sackler family is trying to do by collecting art and endowing museums, lifting their skirts away from the hundreds of thousands addicted and killed by prescription opioids manufactured and sold by their company — Purdue Pharma — the Guggenheims have already stealthily and handily accomplished.” Has Fraser met a sacred cow she wouldn’t skewer?
Those beautiful Cézannes and Picassos in the Guggenheim Museum can’t paper over the atrocities; the gilded myths of American optimism, our upward mobility and welcoming shores won’t mask the demons. “The furniture of the past is permanent,” she notes. “The cuckoo clock, the Dutch door, the daylight basement — humble horsemen of the domestic Apocalypse. The VWs, parked in the driveway.” “Murderland” is a superb and disturbing vivisection of our darkest urges, this summer’s premier nonfiction read.
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The Kirkus Review: Murderland
A provocative, eerily lyrical study of the heyday of American serial killers.
From the 1940s through the 1980s, the number of serial killers in the U.S. rose precipitously, and the Pacific Northwest was, disproportionately, home for them; Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway (aka the Green River Killer), Jack Spillman (aka the Werewolf Butcher), and more hailed from the region. Observers attributed this to mere coincidence, or perhaps a side effect of the gloomy climate. Fraser (Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, etc.), a Pulitzer Prize winner and Northwest native, suggests a more direct culprit: the region’s high concentration of smelters, which released damagingly high levels of arsenic and lead into the atmosphere. (Notable serial killers elsewhere in the country had similar backgrounds; Dennis Rader, aka BTK, grew up near a smelter in Kansas’ “lead belt.”)
Fraser’s book layers the evidence for this argument (known as the lead-crime hypothesis) precisely but with a novelistic structure, braiding together biographies of the killers (Bundy most prominently and prolifically), the growth of firms like mining and smelting companies ASARCO (controlled by the Guggenheim family), tragic incidents on a precarious floating bridge connecting Seattle and Mercer Island, and Fraser’s own recollections of growing up in a time and place when young women were inordinately targeted and killed.
She depicts a lot of death; Fraser is determined to make the reader see the worst of the killers’ actions, in vivid but unsensationalistic detail, to underscore the ever-escalating crises that mining and smelting businesses tried to underplay, pay off, or ignore. By the ’90s, as bans on leaded gasoline took effect, smelters closed, and the EPA set stricter pollution standards, the number of serial killers dissipated. Fraser’s book is an engrossing and disturbing portrait of decades of carnage that required decades to confront.
A true-crime story written with compassion, fury, and scientific sense.
Good Talk in Conversation with Caroline Fraser
Leah Sottile: I'm very excited to talk about Murderland. This book is a masterpiece about serial killers, the culture of the Northwest, violence, land, the air we breathe, and also you. Talk about where this book started for you, but also how you went from writing about Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ted Bundy. I am very curious about that connection.
Caroline Fraser: They're really very similar [laughs]. In Prairie Fires, it was the whole white settlement of the West and what a disaster that was in so many ways. This book, Murderland, I took kind of a sharp left turn into ecological history and environmental history. On the cover you can see there's a picture of Ted Bundy with his face kind of superimposed on an industrial landscape, which is in Tacoma — the old Asarco smelter in Tacoma. And so that really, I think, is the connective tissue between the two. This didn't feel like it was completely out of left field entirely to me, but I can see how people might think that way.
LS: What did your research and writing process look like? Did you know when you went in that you would be writing just as much about corporations as killers? And we can kind of talk about that definition of a killer here too?
CF: No, the whole thing kind of evolved organically in a way, because I started by writing some of the personal memoir pieces. There’s a thing about the guy who lived down the street from me and blew up his house when I was eight. And that always kind of stuck with me.
So, I started writing about some of these things and thinking about what a violent time the 1970s was. The news was constantly full of murders and bombings and assassinations and protests, so we were being told that that was unusual. But it felt kind of normalized in a way while you were living through it. So, I think that was sort of what started it off, was thinking about how violent a time it was, and also this whole question of why are there so many serial killers in the Northwest?
That had been something I was always curious about — like, is that a real thing? Is it just an urban myth? Is it something that can actually be investigated? And so I started down that trail and then somehow happened across this piece about the smelter, which I had never really understood what that was. I mean, I knew there was all this industrial waste in Tacoma. I mean, everybody who's ever been there, back in the day, knew the aroma of Tacoma. It smelled very, very bad. The smell was mainly, I think, from the pulp mill. But there were more than fifty plants and refineries down there.
But when I discovered that there was a real arsenic problem on Vashon Island through a real estate ad, that was the kind of thing that I started looking at that, and the arsenic pollution, which came from the ASARCO smelter — the American Smelting and Refining Company. And lead. And I started to wonder, ‘well, could any of this stuff have had any effect on the people? Knowing that Bundy grew up in Tacoma, that Gary Ridgeway grew up just north of Tacoma by Sea Tac. And then somehow this other little tidbit came my way about Charles Manson — that he had spent five years incarcerated on McNeil Island at the same time that those other two were growing up there. McNeil Island is very close to Tacoma as well. I learned about the whole smelter plume and what that had done to the Pacific Northwest.
LS: And just to be clear, this book doesn't stop at Bundy, Ridgeway, Manson. It goes into Israel Keyes, which was a very surprising thing for me to see, and Robert Yates over in Eastern Washington. It is extensive in the way it covers serial killers, but also their victims. Every victim in this book, no matter who they are or what they were killed by, gets a lot of space. And I wanted to talk to you about this choice.
CF: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I hoped to do by explaining what these guys did in some detail, but also who they were doing it to, was to kind of reorganize the true crime tropes. I think a lot of true crime ends up sort of glamorizing the killer. They're the star of the show. But a lot of these guys, particularly Bundy, come off as almost like these evil geniuses, you know? But the thing about lead is that it really sort of reorganizes your brain if you are exposed to it as a kid. All the things about controlling your behavior and your impulses are affected. Kids who have been exposed seriously to lead can become much more aggressive and much more violent. And so, in describing what, say, Bundy or some of these other guys did in a matter-of-fact kind of way really corrects the impression that these guys were geniuses. Because they were not geniuses. They were cunning in many ways, but they certainly were not some incredible level of criminal capacity. And in fact, almost all of these guys were pre-DNA, and that's mainly the reason why most of them didn't get caught. But to your point, yeah, I mean, I think that the, the women who got murdered in many cases were far more interesting and valuable as people. And so it just seemed natural to kind of describe who they were and what was lost.
LS: It's really effective. And I found myself getting nervous every time a new person was introduced into the plot, where I was like, ‘is this person going to get killed or are they going to get away?’ But I felt like that was very appropriate — like perhaps I should always be nervous reading a book about murder and murderers. But there are shows out there about picking your favorite murderer. So, I’d like to talk to you about the ethics around true crime. Did you worry that this book would be shelved as true crime? What were your thoughts around being a part of the genre?
CF: It actually turned into kind of a tussle with the publisher because they were really nervous about having this labeled as true crime. I didn't mind it in a way. I mean, everything you're saying about true crime is true. The origins of true crime are incredibly sleazy. It essentially began as this kind of soft-core porn for men that was sold in drug stores and was illustrated with these horrible color illustrations of women being strangled or stabbed. But the more I looked at the evolution of true crime, especially in the last 25, 30 years since Ann Rule's book about Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, I think there's been a lot of movement to make true crime, really, the history of crime and the history of crimes against women.
So I think it's evolving and I didn't mind being tagged with that, because what I wanted to do in the book was to present a kind of whole history of this topic: all the stuff that happened with serial killers and the history of violence in this period. Crime in the US went up quite sharply in the 1970s and ’80s along with the fruition of leaded gas and smelters. Those heights of the crime rate have never been exceeded since. It went up, up, up, then it leveled off when leaded gas was removed from the market, and it abruptly fell off.
The smelters closed down. We now have far less crime, violent crime, than we used to have.
LS: As I read this, I started to wonder or pick up an argument you were making, that the serial killers maybe we've all been focused on are not actually the biggest serial killers. Talk about this environmental research that you did and where you landed on the effects that these corporations, multinational corporations have had on people's health.
CF: I think it's inescapable that when you look at the behavior of, say, ASARCO, which was owned by the Guggenheim family, and some of these other entities, like the company that was running the smelter in Kellogg, Idaho — Bunker Hill. The similarity between their behavior and the behavior of the serial killers is really so inescapable that it's almost funny. You can't even believe what these guys did. In the Bunker Hill case, they lost control of their filtration system in 1973 when a fire broke out and destroyed a lot of the filters that were keeping lead — or some of the lead — out of the environment. They just decided because the price of lead was so high, they were just going to keep running their lead smelter full blast for months and months. And they did this ‘back of the napkin calculation’ of how much they would have to pay for killing or crippling all these kids in the town of Kellogg. And they decided, ‘well, that's worth it because it's going to cost us more to shut the plant down.’
They were murderers. They were liars and murderers. And it's the lying that I'm really fascinated by, because it's so calculated and furtive and they just can't control themselves.
LS: After reading your book. I was surprised to learn how many of these communities, specifically like Kellogg and Wallace and in North Idaho, the people there knew about a lot of the pollution that was falling on them and their children, but chose to stay. I thought that was an interesting thing to point out about the culture.
CF: I think it's an illustration of the desperation of a lot of these towns that they were the only jobs. And so people were being forced to choose between being destitute and not having a job or having to go somewhere else to find a job and surviving. And they took a risk. A lot of the guys who worked in the Tacoma smelter, those jobs were just the most horrible. Dangerous. You're working with these giant vats of molten metal, moving them from place to place and pouring molten metal. Guys got their eyes put out by chunks of hot metal flying through the air. Just really hellacious circumstances. This is why none of these places can reopen now, because the OSHA regulations and the EPA.
LS: So much of this book is also about you and growing up on Mercer Island. There are so many fantastic essays in this book. There's mentions of Twin Peaks and David Lynch and all these things that I love. But talk about this essay component a little bit more. Obviously you talked about how a house blew up down the street — that's a notable childhood event to write about. But there's a lot more essay here about your family.
CF: I sort of wanted to recreate what it was like in the 1970s. Domestically, it was a very different environment and there were a lot of different expectations and there was a lot of violence in the home, domestic violence, there was corporal punishment in schools. All kinds of stuff was subtly different. And there was a real male prerogative at work. And I think that's why I brought in some of the descriptions of my father who was kind of a scary guy. It was not to say that he was a serial killer, but just to show that there's kind of a range of behavior — that even things that seem fairly mild or not that malevolent can be threatening in a home environment or at school.
I sort of wanted to give a sense of what it was like to grow up then for girls to hear about all the kind of the stuff that was happening around us. With Bundy, I do remember the weekend of Lake Sammamish in July of 1974. I was 13 years old. And just hearing about these women who had disappeared and just thinking, ‘what does that mean? Where are they? What happened to them?’ And not even being able to conceptualize what that was all about.
LS: What was the most surprising thing you learned in the process of writing this book?
CF: Well, I was pretty surprised that that entire generations of people in the Northwest were deliberately poisoned with arsenic and lead by the decision of this corporate actor. I mean, you go to the Guggenheim Museum now, and you could talk to a hundred people who are in that museum and ask them, ‘how did the Guggenheim's make their money?’ And I bet nobody would know the answer to that, but that's how they made their money. And I have to say, it was something that made me really, really angry to learn about that. So if that counts as surprising, I think that was probably the most surprising thing to me.
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Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year. She is also the author of God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in New Mexico.