While growing up on Mercer Island, Washington, Caroline Fraser was careful to hide many of her emerging viewpoints from her strict Christian Scientist parents, especially her angry, abusive father, whom she despised. As she devoured Reader’s Digest’s heart-stopping Drama in Real Life stories, she realized that she liked ones “about bad things happening to other people.” In high school, she hid forbidden titles—like Harlan Ellison’s postapocalyptic short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”—behind Little House on the Prairie “and other things with a higher parental acceptance value.” That bookshelf foretold an intriguing trajectory of her writing career.
Fraser wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder to meld the classic children’s author’s life with American history. Now, with Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, she creates a distinctive true crime offering, melding accounts of notorious murderers with historical and cultural happenings, including brief encapsulations of events from her childhood. Her fascination is hardly surprising, since in 1966, one young woman was murdered and another nearly beaten to death in an attack that took place little more than a mile from her widowed grandmother’s home.
Fraser offers an impassioned argument that rampant lead and arsenic pollution may be to blame for the notable concentration of horrendous serial killers in the Pacific Northwest—Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, the BTK Killer and others—who committed crimes of “monstrous proportions, as if someone had scratched through to the underworld and released a savage wave of sulfur.” Literally.
In detailed, mesmerizing prose, Fraser delineates unchecked pollution from lead, gasoline and arsenic, especially from the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), whose deadly smelters spewed out poisons for decades in areas where many of these murderers lived. “It takes two great American family fortunes to build a city of serial killers,” she writes, “the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims.” The former established ASARCO, “but the Guggenheims fight them for it,” writes Fraser, “and, in the way of Gilded Age oligarchs, the two families eventually divide the world between them.” The Guggenheims controlled ASARCO for nearly a century. Fraser likens their public endowments to the Sackler family’s philanthropic attempts to distract the public from the damage done by opioids peddled by Purdue Pharma.
Murderland leaves no doubt that these serial killers lived and roamed in heavily polluted areas. However, more discussion of Fraser’s theory from outside experts would have added weight to the book’s premise; coexistence doesn’t necessarily equal causation. In any event, Fraser tackles mountains of information in an efficient, straightforward and continuously riveting manner.
Despite the heaviness and bleakness of her subject, Fraser manages to be humorous from time to time—punctuating, for instance, a discussion of Charles Manson’s possible exposure to ASARCO pollution while imprisoned near Tacoma, Washington, this way: Studies found “lead in soil ranging from a low of nineteen parts per million to a high of a 190. Helter smelter.” At the same time, she pays homage to a seemingly endless number of victims, while venting her fury toward “you corporate scribes and pharisees, you hypocrites, rubbing your hands over white sepulchers full of dead women’s bones.”
True crime fans will find Murderland a ravenous read.