Murderland

Caroline Fraser grew up on the beautiful Mercer Island in Washington State. But despite the seemingly peaceful landscape, her memories of the area were long haunted by an inexplicable amount of death. In the 1970s, when Caroline was a teenager, the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy committed his first confirmed murders, not far from where Caroline lived.

Over the following years, Caroline would learn of more deaths by murder, suicide, and car accidents while driving on the poorly designed Mercer Island Bridge. For years, Caroline yearned for some sort of explanation.

Then one day, Caroline discovered a map which documented the amount of arsenic in the soil in the Tacoma region. The map was the first of many clues she used to try to make sense of what plagued the Pacific Northwest of her childhood. What Caroline found was this: the 70s and 80s were the heyday of the mining and smelting of heavy metals in America—metals like copper, lead, and zinc, which all released huge amounts of toxic fumes like lead, arsenic, and asbestos into the air. The same time period saw another awful trend: a massive spike in serial killing.

These are two seemingly unrelated histories. But Caroline set out on a quest to see if there was some kind of connection here, between environmental pollution and serial killing.

In her new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Caroline argues that the wave of serial killing of the 70s and 80s might be related to the smelting industry’s environmental pollution, an idea that builds on the existing theory connecting lead toxicity and crime. Caroline makes the case that all those toxic fumes in the Pacific Northwest possibly fueled a generation of serial killers.

Caroline has written about a wide variety of subjects. Her first book, God’s Perfect Child, was a biography about the woman who founded the Christian Science Church. And her Pulitzer-prize winning book, Prairie Fires, was about Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author who wrote the children’s book series Little House on the Prairie. One thing that all these books, including Murderland, have in common is that they’re all actually about the environment.

Murderland is a book with a rotating cast of villains. There’s ASARCO, the company that’s operated giant smokestacks across the country since the late 1800s. There’s the deadly Mercer Island Floating Bridge and the engineers behind it. And then, of course, there are the serial killers of the Pacific Northwest. The book is a blend of true crime, memoir, and environmental history, and it’s available right now in bookstores near you.