Murderland

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 

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. Then there was the man who lived down the street, who blew up his house with his family inside. 

CAROLINE FRASER: I mean, it was just this horrific and inexplicable thing, which I think just stayed with me because I didn’t understand it. 

ROMAN MARS: Over the following years, Caroline would learn of more deaths–some by murder and suicide, others from car accidents while driving on the poorly designed Mercer Island Bridge. To Caroline, it felt as if there was a dark cloud looming above her corner of the world. And in fact, there was. The cloud was coming from a giant smokestack just outside of Tacoma, Washington, and it was made up of lead, arsenic, and asbestos. 

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 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. She remembers seeing a specific article in a local paper that gave her this nagging feeling. 

CAROLINE FRASER: And it was basically a kind of encyclopedia of all the serial killers who were associated with Seattle or the region. And there were so many, and I just thought, “Wow, that’s really bizarre–you know–just a list that just went on and on. It just cried out for some kind of explanation.”

ROMAN MARS: In her new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in a Time of Serial Killers, Caroline argues that the wave of serial killing in the 1970s and ’80s might be related to the smelting industry’s environmental pollution, and that all those toxic fumes in the Pacific Northwest possibly fueled a generation of serial killers. 

Caroline has written books about a lot of different things. Her first book was a biography of 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. 

CAROLINE FRASER: People have used the term “Trojan horse”–that I’m using serial killers to sell an environmental story or something–which, I think, is maybe a little too programmatic or something. But these things do occur to me just because, I think, I’m just sort of hyper aware of what has happened to the environment, what we’ve done to it, and how we’ve carved it up. You know, we think that we’re safe in the environments that we have created, when I think that’s not true at all. 

ROMAN MARS: 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, all woven together. And it also features a lot of intriguing design elements, so I invited her into the studio to talk with me. 

So, Caroline, one of the things that struck me about this book is that… I think all of us are main characters of our own story, but it struck me that you began to research this place that you’re from and, in many ways, you discovered that it actually is kind of special. Like, it’s the center of something that is different and alarming. And that difference can be attributed to design decisions made by people, like decisions about where the Asarco smelter is placed and decisions about the design of the bridge and all that sort of stuff. 

CAROLINE FRASER: Yeah. 

ROMAN MARS: And so we’ll get to the serial killers, I promise, if people are tuning in for serial killer talk. But first I wanted to talk about maps because you seem to use maps a lot to make sense of how all these different things fit together. And in fact, your book opens with the discovery of a specific map. And this is a map that actually led you to start seeing this connection between Asarco’s impact on the environment and serial killing. So, tell me about this map. 

CAROLINE FRASER: Yes. And the Asarco map was something that really inspired this book in a lot of ways. The map is put out by the Department of Ecology in Washington State. They published this GIS map that showed the whole plume of pollution that was caused by a smelter in Tacoma, which I relate to various incidents in the book. And that plume map is so fascinating to me. And the minute that I saw it, I just was kind of overwhelmed by the possibilities that it presented because you can plug in your address or any address in the Seattle area or Tacoma area and see how much pollution it may have received from the smokestack at the lead smelter in Tacoma. 

ROMAN MARS: And so how did you first learn of the company Asarco and discover this GIS map? Like, was there this aha moment that led you down the path of research for this book? 

CAROLINE FRASER: Yeah, there definitely was a moment, which occurred because my husband and I decided that we wanted to maybe look for some property up in the Northwest because I still have family up there. And this was around 2014. We went up there to look at some pieces of property, and one of these pieces was on Vashon Island, which is an island in Puget Sound just across from West Seattle. And one of the real estate ads said… And this is at a point where I knew nothing about the smelter. I knew nothing about any of the pollution. The real estate ad said, “Arsenic remediation necessary.” And I read that, and I thought, “What the… What could possibly have caused enough arsenic on Vashon Island that it needed to be remediated?” I was familiar with Vashon, which is a beautiful kind of rural island where we used to go when I was a kid because my mom had a friend there, who had a beautiful garden. And we ate strawberries out of her garden. After this visit, I looked up the arsenic–I was trying to figure out what caused this–and, of course, immediately found references to Asarco because Vashon was one of the areas that was heavily slimed by the stuff that was coming out of the smokestack because it was right across the water. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Okay, so in Murderland, you trace the rise and fall of this company, Asarco. And on top of that timeline and geography, the book weaves in and out stories from your own life and memory and the rise and fall of the Mercer Island Bridge. And you write in great detail about the personal histories and activities of various serial killers. You once gave this interview where you said that you had a box in your office labeled “serial killers.” Like, how long have serial killers been an interest of yours? Where do you think that began for you? 

CAROLINE FRASER: Oh, I know exactly when it began. It began, you know, in July of 1974, when two women disappeared from a beach at Lake Sammamish, which is right next to Lake Washington; it’s only a few miles away. And they were the two victims of Ted Bundy who really– I think because they disappeared at the same time, their disappearances made it clear that this sporadic series of abductions of women that had been taking place in Seattle and other cities nearby were all tied together. And I think you have to realize that the whole phenomenon of serial killers had not really gelled at that point. I mean, it may have gelled for people in the FBI, who were working on a profiling program. But for the general public, we just weren’t really aware that that was something that even existed. And so the idea that there was somebody out there plucking women out of their dorm rooms or off of streets and they just vanished was just profoundly strange and frightening. And so that, I think, was the moment when I became aware of the whole issue of this kind of crime, especially its connection to the Pacific Northwest. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I found the cover of your book really striking. You have this Asarco smelting plant in the background and Ted Bundy’s face in the foreground. And the images kind of blend into each other. And Ted Bundy’s head is also the cloud of pollution coming out of the smokestack behind him. It’s this great visual representation for the way you lay out the book–you know–sort of overlapping these histories onto each other to point out how they might be connected. So at what point did you personally start to see a connection between the serial killing type of violence and the kind of environmental violence? 

CAROLINE FRASER: I think it was around the time that I began to learn about the connection between lead and crime. Lead is associated with increased violence. If you’re exposed to it as a child, you may, 20 years later, as a young person, be more inclined to juvenile delinquency or to aggression or to impulsivity. And when I learned about that and, around the same time, learned about the presence of the smelter in Tacoma, these little light bulbs went off in my head, connecting the fact that a couple of these very notable serial killers, namely Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, both grew up in the Tacoma area. And I thought, “Wow, that’s an interesting coincidence. I wonder if there could be any reason for that.” I didn’t really think that I could prove that, you know, these men did what they did because they grew up where they were in the Tacoma region. But I just thought it was a really interesting coincidence that was ripe for exploration. 

ROMAN MARS: Let’s explore this connection a little bit more. So, first of all, the lead crime theory–like you said–it centers around this idea that lead exposure in early childhood can lead to altered or stunted brain development, which in turn can lead to a whole host of things, like a lack of impulse control or increased aggression. And the point your book is making about serial killing builds on this existing lead crime theory. You know, I remember a time when lead was everywhere. It was in everything, like gasoline and paint and kids’ toys. And so I imagine that lead toxicity was everywhere, too. So I’m wondering why you think the Pacific Northwest specifically had this crop of serial killers in the ’70s and ’80s. 

CAROLINE FRASER: Yeah, well, it is true that all of us who grew up between the 1940s and the 1980s were exposed to more lead than we should have been exposed to because of leaded gas. But there were certain parts of the country and certain cities where you had smelters or other industrial plants that were emitting lots more lead into the atmosphere and other pollutants. The notorious thing about the Tacoma smelter was that it was releasing extraordinary amounts of lead particulates, but it was also releasing arsenic. They’re emitting, you know, thousands of tons of this stuff in essentially an urban area. And a lot of this lead and arsenic were falling on Tacoma–on neighborhoods–especially the neighborhoods of North Tacoma and this neighborhood called Skyline, which is where a young Ted Bundy is growing up in a house that is not only receiving lead from the smelter, but also it’s right next to Highway 16, which is a heavily traveled highway. And so he’s getting it coming and going. So is Gary Ridgway, who lives near a couple of highways and just a couple miles east of Sea–Tac Airport. And of course, jets are also flying on leaded fuel at that time. So, the more I looked into this and the more I was finding out about lead and how prevalent it was in certain parts of the country–in certain cities–the more I became interested in what that might suggest. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so all these environmental factors are so complicated. How do you begin to tease apart what is causing a problem and what isn’t? You know, there’s a ton of research that you cite that people who become serial killers often experience neglect and abuse. They often come from communities with little economic power. And those are also the places where factories are often built because people don’t have the economic power to complain about them. So how do you begin to sort of, like, make sense of the complexity of the thing? How do you paint the picture that you’re painting? 

CAROLINE FRASER: Yeah, I think that, for starters, you do have to acknowledge that there’s a whole host of problems or deficits or disasters that can happen to a person that lead them down that path. It’s not just lead exposure, but there could be genetic factors. There are now certain genes that may be associated with increased aggression. There’s, as you say, violence in the home, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, head trauma… So, yes, there are many, many things that go into this. And I think that what appealed to me was telling the facts that I knew about Asarco–how Asarco behaved to follow their history of lying about what they were doing, you know, as communities became more and more concerned about the health effects that they were seeing. Asthma, all kinds of respiratory problems… Pets were dying, you know? They couldn’t grow things in their neighborhoods because they’re being killed by arsenic. There just was an increasing sense, throughout the ’60s and into the ’70s, that these industrial plumes were really dangerous. And people were really struggling to try and get a hold of the facts about how worried we should be. And yet the companies were incredibly dishonest, and even the research that they were doing behind the scenes they were keeping from the public. So, the behavior of the companies eventually came to me to sort of mirror the behavior of the serial killers in a way that I thought was important and worth paying attention to. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I mean, the thing that’s so fascinating when I read it is, like, there’s lots of psychopathy on display and it’s not just serial killers. 

CAROLINE FRASER: It’s astonishing. It really is. The lengths to which these companies would go to protect themselves–protect their institutions. They actually did, you know, have conversations about how much they were gonna have to pay the families of the kids who were lead poisoned. And they were comparing those payouts that they might have to make as a result of lawsuits to the amount of profit that they were gonna make. They weren’t questioning their behavior in any way. They were just simply saying, “Well, you know, if it costs us eleven million dollars per kid, we can still make a profit.”

ROMAN MARS: Coming up, we’ll talk more about deadly infrastructure and how the Mercer Island floating bridge fits into Caroline’s book about serial killers. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: I’m back with Caroline Fraser. So, Caroline, we’ve talked about Asarco and how its smokestacks are releasing all these toxins. We’ve talked about serial killers, and you write about how many of them grew up in neighborhoods with higher environmental toxicity. And there’s something else I want to talk about. You have many recurring metaphors and themes in your book, and my favorite is a bridge. It’s called the Mercer Island Floating Bridge. I did not expect a bridge and its design to be featured so heavily in your book about serial killers. But in a way, you present the bridge as a kind of serial killer because of how many people died while driving across it. What’s also interesting is that it’s a very unusual bridge. It’s a floating bridge. It’s like a pontoon that’s on the water. It’s like driving over the floor of a bouncy house. It’s a very peculiar thing. 

CAROLINE FRASER: Yes, it is. I looked up this morning how many floating bridges there were in the world. And there’s only, like, twenty. And the majority of them are in Washington State. 

ROMAN MARS: So why did you include the bridge in your book? Like, what is its significance to you? 

CAROLINE FRASER: The bridge–that became a kind of metaphor for me of engineering mistakes and the hubris of engineers because they weren’t satisfied just to have a floating bridge. They introduced this element into it, which was always called the “bulge.”

ROMAN MARS: So, right, you talk about the bulge and this other feature, the reversible lane, as these two, like, uniquely dangerous design elements of this bridge. The idea behind having a bulge in the middle of the bridge is to allow part of the bridge to open and close to make it possible for boat traffic to go through. But it also meant that drivers had to navigate this curve of the bulge at really high speeds, and it caused a lot of collisions. And then the reversible lane was meant so that the traffic could change directions based on a system of lights, and that also caused a lot of accidents. 

CAROLINE FRASER: I mean, it was kind of a terrifying aspect of the whole experience of driving there. And so there’s all these accidents on the bridge at this time. And people are complaining, but nothing is really done. Nothing really happens for 20 something years because the bridge was mired in all this litigation about how to cope with these issues. 

ROMAN MARS: I love the metaphor of the bridge because, on the one hand, the bridge represents this engineering marvel. I mean, at the time it was built, the bridge was the largest floating structure to exist. It was this massive undertaking. And on the other hand, there was so much human error in the design of the bridge that led to all these fatalities and also to the bridge’s eventual destruction. I mean, it’s similar in a way to how you detail Asarco’s lack of accountability for the damage they caused to the neighborhoods surrounding the smokestacks. And in your book, you detail the victims of who died at the hands of the bridge, much like you do the victims of Ted Bundy. I mean, for both of them, there’s a kind of dismissiveness. Like, people weren’t really connecting all these deaths to any one cause. 

CAROLINE FRASER: Yeah, that attitude–the sort of shrugging of the shoulders about these terrible accidents–it was really striking to me. To read about this in the newspaper accounts–it inflamed the editor of the Mercer Island Reporter such that she began featuring photographs of these terrible crashes on the cover of the newspaper, which is why the newspaper got banned in my house. So that, I think, is one of the things that implanted those accidents in my mind. The fact that we couldn’t talk about them made them all the more interesting to me. To this day, I still have dreams about the bridge–of being on it, often on foot, and trying to get off of it.

ROMAN MARS: So I want to talk about the various endings that you detail in the book: the end of the Asarco smokestack in the Pacific Northwest, the end of the bridge, and the end of peak serial killer activity in the Pacific Northwest. So let’s start with the bridge. How did it end up going away? 

CAROLINE FRASER: They finally removed the bulge in– I’m thinking it was the mid ’80s at some point. Then they had a major rainstorm–surprise, surprise–in Seattle, in Thanksgiving of– I think it’s ’89 or ’90. And when there was the storm, it filled up with water and sank. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so what about the Asarco plant near Tacoma? What ended up happening with that? 

CAROLINE FRASER: The Asarco smelter in Tacoma was becoming more and more controversial in the community throughout the ’70s at the same time that the economic situation was changing radically for smelters because of the creation of the EPA and the passage of the Clean Air Act. It was becoming almost impossible to operate a smelter legally. And so the company kept having to go and apply for variances, which they were inevitably granted because of the economic importance of Asarco in the Tacoma economy. But by the ’80s, they were not going to be able to do business the way they had been doing it. They weren’t going to be able to make a profit. And so Asarco closes that plant in 1986 and, at the same time, begins closing all their other facilities in the West, in Montana and Utah, such that there are now, I believe, only three primary smelters still operating in the United States. 

ROMAN MARS: So Asarco starts facing all these lawsuits. They’re looking at bankruptcy. And another major thing that happens around the same time is that the EPA finally takes a position on leaded gasoline. And leaded gas starts to slowly phase out across the country. 

CAROLINE FRASER: It’s a very interesting graph that this creates because there’s a rise in violent crime–a rise in the number of serial killers throughout the ’70s and ’80s. And then with the completion of this movement to close smelters and remove leaded gas, by the mid to late ’90s, you start to see violent crime drop off a cliff in the United States and other developed economies around the world. 

ROMAN MARS: Do you feel like you’ve cracked the code on serial killers? 

CAROLINE FRASER: I don’t know that I have discovered the unified field theory of serial killers, but I do think that it was a time in history when this kind of activity became endemic for some reason. And I really yearned for some way to explain it. Whether it’s true or not, we’ll see. But to me it made for a fascinating if tragic story of an era that fortunately seems to be over. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I mean, if we can’t come to any definitive, provable conclusion about serial killers, I’m curious if you’ve arrived at some kind of conclusion. This book is a culmination of a lot of open questions that you seem to have had throughout your entire life. Do you feel like there’s some kind of closure there? 

CAROLINE FRASER: Wow. That’s not something I’d really thought about before. I think in some ways, yes, the urge to know more about serial killers is not there anymore. I think I’ve spent enough time with the serial killers. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, I really enjoyed the book so much. Thanks for coming on the show. 

CAROLINE FRASER: Thank you. It’s been great talking to you. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Lasha Madan. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. 

Our executive producer is Kathy Tu. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Joe Rosenberg, Christopher Johnson, Emmett FitzGerald, Vivian Le, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. 

We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find us on Bluesky, as well as our own Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.