In Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser takes true crime to a new, disturbing depth. It’s not just another book about serial killers. It’s a genre-bending eco-investigation — part environmental exposé, part psychological study and big part non-fiction thriller — that asks a bigger question: “Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps deliveries, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect. 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?”
Fraser, best known for Prairie Fires, her extraordinary biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, brings the same meticulous research and narrative clarity to Murderland. As someone who loved Prairie Fires, I found this book just as ambitious, but darker and more personal. Where Prairie Fires unpicked the myths of American pioneer life, Murderland urges us to look beyond individual psychopaths and outward at the systems, cities and smelters that may have poisoned entire generations.
The lead-crime hypothesis
In the US during the 1970s, there was a sharp rise in violent crime and active serial killers. As Fraser read more, she was struck by how many of them operated in the Pacific Northwest, including Mercer Island, where she grew up.
She traces the idea for the book back to a 1974 cover story in The Ecologist titled “Does Lead Create Criminals?” The piece, and subsequent research, suggested a potential correlation between elevated lead exposure and increased aggression and violent crime. That same year, an FBI report revealed that Washington State’s crime rate was nearly three times the national average.
At that time, Tacoma, Washington, was home to the Asarco smelter, one of the most toxic industrial sites in the country. Founded in 1888 as the American Smelting and Refining Company, Asarco contaminated the area for decades. These men grew up in neighbourhoods where lead, arsenic and other neurotoxins polluted the air, soil and drinking water. These included mercury, cadmium and volatile organic compounds, all known to impair brain development, memory, learning and behaviour, particularly in children. Fraser doesn’t claim a direct causal link, but she builds a persuasive case for environmental influence.
Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer) and Kenneth Bianchi (the Hillside Strangler) all lived or operated in Washington State during overlapping decades. Some were raised in working-class homes where emotional repression, strict religion, abuse and neglect were common. Others exhibited classic signs of early trauma and personality disorders. Yet Fraser’s point is not to pathologise each man in isolation but to ask what might happen when vulnerable people grow up in a region saturated with invisible poisons.
Her book is both a personal reckoning and a scathing indictment of corporate crime. In her telling, the murderers are matched, even eclipsed, by white-collar villains in suits.
Executives knew their smelters were emitting catastrophic levels of toxins. In 1974, Frank Woodruff of Gulf Resources kept the Bunker Hill smelter running despite knowing the damage it was causing. He calculated the cost of compensating poisoned children, up to $12,000/child, and decided it was cheaper to keep polluting. His decision made the company up to $11m in profits. Dr Sherman Pinto, medical director at Asarco, misled workers and the public, blaming excess cancer deaths on pneumonia instead of lead and arsenic exposure. These are, Fraser argues, profit-driven mass murders.
What makes Murderland so compelling is how Fraser threads her own childhood into the wider narrative. As a baby, she lived in Tacoma at the same time Charles Manson was imprisoned on nearby McNeil Island. Eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr vanished from her home in Tacoma, Washington, in the early hours of August 31 1961. Despite a huge search, no trace of her was ever found. Though he always denied it, some investigators believe she may have been Bundy’s first victim. He was 14 at the time and lived just blocks away.
Fraser’s father, a rigid Christian Scientist, looms large. He once drained the oil from her mother’s car to stop her from leaving, blamed his own mother’s stroke on a lack of prayer, refused medicine when anyone in the family was ill and ruled the household through fear. These personal memories reinforce Fraser’s broader argument that the violence of the time was not only in the headlines, but also in the home.
Beyond the lead hypothesis, Fraser describes the Pacific Northwest in the language of American gothic — a landscape of dense pine forests, mist-covered mountains, constant rain, and a trail of brutal killings. “The lush yet desolate typography of the Pacific Northwest,” she writes, “makes it an ideal dumping ground for dead bodies.” Her descriptions of the notorious “Suicide Lane” on the floating bridge from Tacoma to Mercer Island are chilling. Poorly planned and badly lit, the reversible middle lane killed more people in a single year than Bundy. She argues that this uneasy mix of natural beauty, industrial pollution, eerie weather and crumbling infrastructure reveals how place itself can be a factor in the making of monsters.
Disturbing and brilliantly written, Murderland is one of the most original and thought-provoking additions to the true crime genre in years.
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