Latest news with #CarolineFraser
Atlantic
3 days ago
- Atlantic
A Provocative Argument About What Creates Serial Killers
Caroline Fraser grew up in an area defined by unexpected, stochastic bursts of brutality. By the time she was a teen, in the 1970s, she knew of multiple people in and around her Mercer Island, Washington, community who'd died violently: Some were murdered; others had killed themselves. Intimate-partner violence was often a factor. So, too, was the floating bridge connecting the island to Seattle, where accidental deaths happened at an alarming rate. There was menace and dread in her own home as well, thanks to her father. Even after Fraser left, she found that she couldn't shake thoughts of the violence. She was captivated by the sheer number of serial killers running amok in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and '80s. Why, she wanted to know, did there seem to be so many men, born during or just after World War II, killing scores of women—frequently strangers to them—in brutal, compulsive ways? Men such as the Green River Killer, the Happy Face Killer, and the I-5 Killer operated mainly in Washington and Oregon, burglarizing homes, menacing hitchhikers, raping co-eds, and dumping bodies. Only when they were caught were faces put to those nicknames: Gary Ridgway, Keith Jesperson, Randall Woodfield, and their ilk became subjects of widespread fascination and horror. Today, those men—the Ted Bundys of the world, to name the most famous example—remain valuable grist for the dozens of true-crime books, podcasts, and documentaries put out each year. When Fraser, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, began looking into the project that would become her new book, Murderland, which is both a memoir of growing up during the serial-killing era and a unique investigation into its potential causes, she found a 'rising tide of inconceivable deviance,' she writes. It was localized to a specific time and place, and reproduced almost nowhere else in the country, without a larger explanation. And to Fraser's frustration, even in the 21st century, true-crime chroniclers mostly didn't probe the possibility of a systemic explanation for all of this death. But Fraser had an idea, one she'd not seen explored. When she was young, and when these men were terrorizing her region, industrial smelters were extracting elements such as iron, copper, lead, aluminum, and zinc from ores. Those plants were also pumping out continuous plumes of toxic vapors, releasing lead and arsenic into the environment. During the years that the smelters operated, these elements were present in the air; even after the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963 and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, their airborne assaults were only beginning to taper off. Fraser kept finding threads between environmental catastrophe and murder, and in Murderland, she makes the unconventional argument that the rise of serial killing has deep roots in the creation of industrial waste. The connection isn't as far-fetched as it may appear. Data bear out the relationship between elevated lead presence and increased crime rates. A 2022 meta-analysis of two dozen papers provided more evidence for the connection, and noted that exposure to lead, a neurotoxin, might amplify aggressive and impulsive behaviors. Once its harms were fully understood, leaded gasoline, a major source of exposure, was phased out beginning in 1973; it was fully out of use by 1996. New lead paint and lead pipes were also banned in the 1970s and '80s. In 1994, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the mean blood lead levels of those aged 1 to 74 declined 78 percent from 1976 to 1991. Children born after these interventions had less exposure than those raised in the decades before. Now consider the sharp drop in violent crime, particularly murder, in the country's most populated metro area, New York City, starting in the 1990s, after a terrifying peak of 2,245 murders in 1990. As of this writing, there have been 112 murders in all five boroughs in 2025, the lowest number in city history, according to the New York City Police D epartment. Two generations of NYC children have grown up with minimal lead presence in city apartment buildings, and academics such as the Amherst College economics professor Jessica Wolpaw Reyes have argued that lower levels of lead exposure in childhood correlate to reduced criminality. Setting up a tripartite structure of murder, industrial history, and memoir is a complicated task. Fraser comes close to pulling it off, as Murderland is wonderfully propulsive and hard to put down. But in casting about for a grand unified theory connecting serial murder to a larger environmental phenomenon, Fraser falls into a trap I've taken to calling the 'Bundy Problem': Whenever he's present in a story, even if the focus turns elsewhere, he dominates it; the abominable details of his myth, such as the sheer number of his victims and the enraging failures of law enforcement, take up all the available air. Bundy is the malware of narrative. By focusing on him, Fraser relegates her thesis about the damage done by pollution to the background. More important, Bundy's actual victims, the dozens of women and girls whose lives he snuffed out, grow ever dimmer. 'Welcome to the crazy wall,' Fraser announces in the book's introduction. She compares her investigation to the trope of crime obsessives or TV detectives who stew over a board full of clues and ephemera, pushing 'pins into wall maps, trying to find the pattern, to analyze, to snatch a cloud and pin it down.' At best, they may come up with the culprit; at worst, they tumble into the dark realm of conspiracy theory. Fraser is ready to show her work, piecing together her collection of pictures, timelines, and surveys 'until the whole thing resembles a graph of sheer lunacy, a visual eruption of obsession.' Fraser, most recently the author of a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won a Pulitzer, seems an unlikely candidate to spend years of her life marinating in the granular minutiae of serial killers. But she has explored facets of violence and narrative in several essays published by The New York Review of Books, including two on Joyce Carol Oates and a separate 2021 article, 'Murder Is My Business,' on the state of true crime (full disclosure: She included my 2020 anthology, Unspeakable Acts, in her article). That last essay, Fraser acknowledges, 'proved essential in contemplating' the project that became Murderland. Fraser doesn't believe it's a coincidence that would-be serial murderers grew up near industrial sites expelling heavy metals. Ted Bundy, the author's main case study, was born in 1946 to an unwed mother with uncertain paternity and raised in the Skyline neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington, as leaded-gas fumes wafted through the streets. Gary Ridgway, the future Green River Killer, was born three years after Bundy and resided a couple of miles from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where highway and jet-fuel vapors mixed with the lead-loaded air. Even the cross-country-traveling serial murderer Israel Keyes, not born until 1978, had a childhood connection to a remaining industrial plant in the Colville, Washington, area. The author lays much of the blame at the feet of two Gilded Age families: the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims. The Rockefellers made their money in oil, and the Guggenheims in mining; they would later both own (and fight for control of) the profitable American Smelting and Refining Company, later known as ASARCO. ASARCO ended up all over the country, but Tacoma proved particularly attractive for its potential access to minerals. For nearly a century, a smokestack hundreds of feet high shot lead and arsenic into the sky. But the dangers of smelting weren't unknown. In 1913, the chemist Frederick Gardner Cottrell wrote: 'The problem of smelter smoke is entirely distinct from that of ordinary city smoke.' Components such as zinc, sulfur dioxide, lead, and arsenic, he continued, 'cannot be simply 'burnt up.'' Instead, they linger in the air, are absorbed into the bloodstream, make their way into the soil, and get passed down from mothers to fetuses. Those living in proximity to a smelter plant were experiencing a slow-motion health disaster. Fraser writes about how ASARCO, like tobacco companies, attempted to downplay the dangers. By the 1970s, the company's claims strained credibility. At the same time, a seeming plague of serial murder was reaching an apex. Fraser juxtaposes the rise and fall of smelting with Bundy's escalating spree of crimes, characterizing each murder he committed not only as an individual act of abrupt violence, but also as one part of a wider system of senselessness. The story ought to be, she argues, that the oligarchs who saw opportunity and profit in an industry that would sicken scores of Americans also created an even more disturbing by-product in the form of these murders. But although Fraser does her damnedest to avoid it, Bundy repeatedly steals focus from the muck of smelter waste. Perhaps it's inevitable that systemic, slow-motion violence feels less dramatic than individuals killing individuals: After all, these men actively chose, sometimes again and again, to end another person's life. The fumes are certainly easier to ignore or deny than the visceral, immediate violence of serial murder—which is much rarer, and yet, for many, much more frightening. Fraser works tirelessly to make her correlations convincing. Her anger at environmental destruction, at men's capacity to hate and murder women in wholly novel ways, and at the indifference of American society is clear. But even though I was carried along by the narrative, I wondered if adding 'a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma' truly offered the explanation she sought. Other factors may have played a role in the overall reduction of crime rates since lead was phased out of American daily life: increased police presence in major cities; the growing sophistication of detecting and matching DNA evidence; surveillance, with cameras—in pockets, on buildings—absolutely everywhere. And different social-impact theories have also been put forward: The economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt have connected legalized abortion with lower crime rates, for example. The serial-killing era, which saw more than 100 of these murderers acting simultaneously in a given year, is firmly in the rearview mirror, and rates of other violent acts have trended downward since the mid-1990s. The Bundy Problem may help explain why Americans perceive modern crime rates, especially rape and murder, as sky-high—an understanding not rooted in reality. Male-on-female violence is, undeniably, a continuing scourge. But culturally, we tend to ignore its most common manifestations—60 percent of murdered women are killed by an intimate partner or family member—in favor of the vivid image of girls menaced by outwardly charming but secretly sinister figures, such as Bundy. This is not a formula that allows us to consider how the misogyny that animated many of the serial killers of the 20th century was encouraged or shared by their wider culture. Even Fraser fails to account for this: If elevated lead levels caused the violence, why did it remain skewed along gender lines? (From 1900 to 2010, 88.6 percent of all serial killers, and more than 90 percent of those in the United States, were male; just over 51 percent of their victims, however, were female, though white women were the most likely group to be murdered.) She doesn't fully pursue that question. Nor does she satisfactorily answer why, if industrial pollution was nationwide, there was a serial-killing cluster specifically in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps my own crazy wall is different. It posits that people who end up killing and people who don't aren't initially that much different from one another, and a confluence of random and semi-random events—broken homes, sexual trauma, poverty—might contribute to future violence, but also might not. My wall craves narrative but also knows that human behavior can be mystifying, and that attempting to make order from chaos is doomed to fail. There is value in seeing a bigger picture, and I'm glad to have followed the threads that Fraser unspooled. But there is equal, if not greater, value in accepting what we don't, and can't, know. And if the horrific uptick in serial killing remains an unexplained phenomenon, yet fewer women and girls today suffer from this unspeakable violence, then I can live with that.
Fox News
10-06-2025
- Fox News
Poisoned Minds: Caroline Fraser's Murderland
An epidemic of serial killers plagued the United States throughout the 1970s and '80s. The crimes were shocking, horrific, and vile, leading many people to ask themselves: What makes a murderer? The answer to that question may be an invisible evil – a poison that penetrated the earth, as well as the minds of these monsters. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser explores the cultural and environmental factors that gave way to this plague of violence in her new book, Murderland. Follow Emily on Instagram: @realemilycompagno If you have a story or topic we should feature on the FOX True Crime Podcast, send us an email at: truecrimepodcast@ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Yahoo
A New Book Might Just Explain Why So Many Serial Killers Came From One Part of the Country
Growing up on Washington state's Mercer Island in the 1960s and '70s, the writer Caroline Fraser got used to hearing people puzzle over why the Pacific Northwest was such a hotbed of infamous serial killers. From Ted Bundy to Gary Ridgway, aka the Green River Killer, these criminals seemed to be a mysterious product of a particular place and time, but why? Fraser—who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder—had her own reasons for discontent with her hometown, foremost among them a domineering Christian Scientist father whom she herself fantasized about eliminating. When, during the pandemic, she finally settled down to investigate this regional anomaly—part of an astonishing boom in serial killers nationwide between 1970 and 1990—she encountered an alternate explanation, one that she learned was especially pertinent to the Seattle and Tacoma area. Fraser's new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, explores this theory of why her girlhood home was so notably rife with strange and extravagant crimes. I spoke with her about what she discovered. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Laura Miller: There's a lot swirling around in You've got the history of Tacoma, Seattle, and the greater Pacific Northwest. There's your personal history, and then there are the stories of these many criminals and murderers. But there is also an argument underlying it that I wasn't familiar with, the lead-crime hypothesis. Could you explain that? Caroline Fraser: I didn't realize when I started this book that crime in the United States was at its worst in this period that I'm talking about—the late '60s, the '70s, the '80s. Violent crime reached heights that had not been seen before. And then there was this abrupt drop-off in the 1990s. One of the theories that recently emerged to explain that drop-off was the lead-crime hypothesis. Lead exposure, especially in childhood, really affects the development of the brain, and in particular, the male brain. What can happen is that if you're exposed to lead as a young child, then you are more likely to exhibit, later, in young adulthood, impulsivity and aggression. You're more likely to commit violent crime. How were people exposed to lead, and how was that exposure diminished later? In the '70s, lead was removed from paint, but the major way that most people were being exposed to lead was through leaded gasoline. It had existed since the 1920s, but when you think about, especially in this country, the rise in commuting and in car ownership that came about after World War II—you had more people driving, and driving longer distance. I mean, virtually everybody from the late 1940s and early 1950s to the 1980s was exposed to a lot of leaded gas. When was it removed? They started talking about removing it in the mid-'70s with the creation of the EPA, but it doesn't really get completely removed until about 1986. And then on top of the leaded gas, in certain parts of the country—you focus mainly on Tacoma—there were these metal smelters emitting lead and all kinds of other chemicals. These are called primary smelters, which were basically factories or plants to produce metal. There used to be so many of these that somebody once said that at one time, everybody in the country lived within 10 miles of a smelter. They were very common in cities. They were taking metal ores, the products of mining, and burning them. The smelter in Tacoma was first a lead smelter, then it changed pretty early on to a copper smelter. The issue with burning these ores is that they contain all these different kinds of metal, some of which are desirable, like silver and gold and copper, and others which are less so, like lead and arsenic. The Tacoma smelter was one of the dirtiest smelters in the country in terms of how much arsenic it produced. It also produced a lot of lead, and it was open and operating for decades, and over those decades, it polluted 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound region. The lead-crime hypothesis connects the general rise in crime with lead exposure, but has it been connected to the rise in the bizarre, unusual crimes that you're writing about in this book? I don't think that anybody has written a general-interest book that makes the connection between serial killers and the lead-crime hypothesis. What we are starting to see, though, are some scientific papers exploring the connection between lead exposure and psychopathy. But while it isn't completely unknown in the scientific record, I wanted to make this connection in a subjective way. I mean, I can't prove, for example, that Ted Bundy committed his crimes because of lead exposure. But what I can do is show you how much lead exposure he got, because there's now this extraordinary map, this Geographic Information System map that was produced by the Washington State Department of Ecology, that maps out the lead exposure, especially in Tacoma, but also the whole plume of it as it goes up into Seattle and Mercer Island and south of Tacoma. Now you can actually see how much lead was in Ted Bundy's front yard and his backyard, and how much arsenic. When did you learn about the lead exposure aspect, both its link to crime and the amount of metals the smelter was dumping in the area? Because you grew up there! You yourself were also exposed to all of that lead. Yeah, and draw whatever conclusion you like about that. I became aware of the smelter because we'd been thinking of possibly moving back to the Northwest and were looking at property. There was a piece of property on Vashon Island, which is right across from Tacoma, and the real estate agent had said that arsenic remediation was necessary, or something like that. I thought, how could there be arsenic on Vashon Island? It's this beautiful little island that was very agricultural. They grew strawberries there. But of course, because of its location right across from Tacoma, it got exposed to emissions from the smelter. So it has had arsenic and also lead. You make it very clear in your book that there's a long history of the danger of lead exposure being minimized by industry. ASARCO, the company that owned and operated the smelter, had this horribly compromised doctor on staff who kept insisting it was just fine. The government at the time seemed so docile in the face of those assertions. It just took forever for them to really recognize what a hazard it was. And by the time they were ready to recognize it, most of the smelters were going out of business anyway, which of course is not accidental timing. I think there are only three lead smelters or primary smelters left operating in the U.S. now. It's so much cheaper to go someplace like Mexico or Peru, countries that don't have the regulations that we have. So now those are the places that are being polluted. That is very disturbing. You make a connection between the whole femicide epidemic in Ciudad Juárez and the smelter emissions down there. The thing that we're still facing here is not the primary smelters like the one they had in Tacoma, but all this recycling. Your car battery has got lead in it. Let's talk more about these serial killers you cover. There's a lot of detail about the crimes in this book, and also there has been a lot written about at least some of these people. I'm not going say that I'm not interested in reading it, because I do love true crime, but a lot of people might complain that it has already been covered extensively. How did you come to the decision to examine the crimes themselves in some depth? One of the things that I was hoping to do by looking at some of these very overfamiliar characters like Ted Bundy, for example, is to put him in a historical context. Because I think that really changes the way we see who he is and what he did. I love true crime too, and Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me was a real gateway drug for me, but the thing that most true crime does is to take just one of these killers—Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, the BTK Killer—and they look just at that one guy. I wanted to do something different, to look at a selection of them over time and how that makes us see what they're doing differently in terms of history. It begins to seem more like a social phenomenon. It's really striking in how much the culture of true crime, especially lurid magazines like True Detective, fascinated killers like Bundy, and then how subsequent killers were obsessed with Bundy in turn—were basically fans who aspired to be like him, after reading about him in books. And they're all learning things from reading about what other serial killers have done. They're learning techniques for how to hide what they're doing and how to evade detection, and how to conceal their victims so that they're not found until there's very little forensic evidence left. Was there anything you found out researching this book that really surprised you? The Tacoma connection was a surprise to me, for starters, because I had always associated Ted Bundy with Seattle, where he committed some of his more notable crimes. And the connection between Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who's not that far from Tacoma. And then when I discovered that Charles Manson had been in the area in the '60s … I was really surprised to learn that the first victim of the D.C. sniper duo was in Tacoma! But then do you worry that you're getting into a certain amount of confirmation bias? Surely you must have come across serial killers with no major lead connection? Sure. I hope I present enough of the tentative quality about this so that people can kind of make up their own mind. There are definitely other serial killers. I looked at Son of Sam pretty closely, trying to find some sort of explanation for his behavior, but couldn't really do again, the whole problem with this era is that everybody was exposed to leaded gas. Everyone was exposed. It's striking that you include your own fairly cold-blooded thoughts about getting rid of your dad as a child. I think we all have moments of … not of wanting to kill somebody, but just frustration and anger and rage, potentially. Those feelings are particularly pronounced when you're a kid, when you feel that you have no autonomy, when you feel powerless. The behavior of the serial killers is just so monstrous that there's always the temptation to think that there's nothing about them that could have ever been normal. They come to seem, I think—especially when you see this whole series of them, and the repetitiveness of their behavior—like automatons. Almost like robots that are in this kind of cycle, and they can't really control it. But I'm not trying to let them off the hook or anything. One of the most striking parts of the book is when you quote from a newspaper story covering the demolition of the smelter. One woman actually says, 'Even if it kills me, I'm still gonna miss it.' There's something so resonant about that now, at a time when a lot of people want to 'bring back' terribly dangerous industries like mining that destroy the health of the people who work in them. The community of Ruston that was right around the smokestack had developed the sense of, Oh, this is a wonderful thing, and the jobs are so well-paying. And the smelter officials had done such a good job of quashing any investigation that would have exposed how deadly it was. People were forced to choose between jobs and health. They just should not have been put in that position.
New York Times
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Serial Killers of the Pacific Northwest: Did Toxins Make Them Do It?
MURDERLAND: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser Ever since the first Neanderthal clubbed a fellow caveman in a random act of violence, people have puzzled over the whys behind certain homicidal acts. Crimes of passion, possession, jealousy, rage and lust can be explained. But the serial killer who murders innocents without tidy explanation has kept many people of good conscience, and no small number of cops, up at night. Now comes Caroline Fraser, the lyrically luminescent author of books about a beloved heartland author and the odd mysteries of Christian Science, with a unified theory. It's something in the water — and in the air. She draws a clear line between the crimes committed by some of the world's most awful humans and their exposure to lead and other heavy metals from industrial pollution, primarily in the Pacific Northwest. The effects of lead poisoning on children are well documented. The causal link between this toxic chemical element and serial killers is less so. 'Murderland' is a book-length argument for the lead-crime hypothesis — advanced by a handful of studies in the past— connecting the metal to a host of behavioral problems, including extreme violence. 'Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps delivery, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage and neglect,' Fraser writes. '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? How about a little lead in your tea?' Fraser won a Pulitzer Prize for her last book, 'Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder,' which would seem to have little in common with this one. But just as Fraser probed a dark underside to that little house on the prairie, she finds menace beneath all the surface beauty in the far corner of America where she grew up. Even Mount Rainier, one of the most sublime volcanoes on the planet, comes in for a slap against its glacial hide. ''The mountain is out,' people say, self-satisfied, self-confident,' Fraser writes. 'But it is all a facade. The mountain is admittedly 'rotten inside.' Hollow, full of gas. A place where bad things happen.' Earthquakes, epic floods, smoldering peaks lurk, just like the lead from smelters. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
