Criminal Neglect

Imagine learning as an adult that you grew up in one of the most polluted areas of the United States in a home in which your father exhibited epic levels of explosive anger, no empathy for even his closest family members and a tendency for domestic violence that exceeded even the lowest acceptable norms of the 1960s and 70s. This is the framing Caroline Fraser brings to Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.

Readers learn in the first chapter of Murderland that Fraser grew up in the Seattle/Tacoma area of Washington State, within miles of three notorious serial killers of the age, one of whom was Ted Bundy. 

Fraser weaves the history of metal smelting in the US from the late 19th century through to the late 20th, when the newly-established EPA finally set exposure limits to smelter pollution as well as leaded gas and lead paint, and ties this to the absolute multitude of particularly demented serial killers who emerged during the mid-20th century. Fraser presents her hypothesis that the tons of pollution released every day for centuries, especially lead and arsenic, literally poisoned people who lived nearby and made them crazy. For some it was hallucinations, for some it was intense anger and violence and for some it was deviant behavior—theft, stalking, torture, rape, murder and necrophilia.

Tracing through the history of metal smelting in the US, we follow the fortunes of gilded-age scions such as the Guggenheim family and how their close ties with presidents and legislators allowed them to shape regulatory frameworks that somehow always favored the polluters, not the people affected by that pollution. Interspersed with this history, Fraser recounts the lives and crimes of some of the most infamous serial murderers, almost all of whom were raised near smelting operations: Ted Bundy, The Green River Killer, BTK, Richard Ramirez, et. al. The number of missing persons and dead bodies is staggering.

The incidence of serial murderers after the EPA began regulating leaded products and pollution more strictly, plummeted in a way that doesn’t confirm causation, but the numbers do tell an interesting story. Of course the 80s saw a rise in mass shootings perpetrated by (mostly) disaffected young men whose mantra wasn’t “one at a time” but “as many as possible in one go.”

As I was reading Murderland, I was also following the news about Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA Administrator pursuing further weakening of the Clean Air Act restrictions for coal and other industrial polluters, and SCOTUS approving use of glyphosate-based weed killers like RoundUp™ for use in agricultural food production and limiting plaintiffs' ability to bring lawsuits regarding health impacts. The polluters are winning again and the human and environmental impacts will start being felt in about 10–20 years if they are allowed to continue poisoning us all.