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Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
by Caroline Fraser
Book Reviewed by:From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Prairie Fires comes a terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond—a gripping investigation of how a new strain of psychopath emerged out of a toxic landscape of deadly industrial violence.
Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and '80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?
As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson—Fraser's Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy's Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was hardly unique in the West. As Fraser's investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers.
A propulsive nonfiction thriller, Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.
What are you reading this week? (8/14/2025)
I am reading.MURDERLAND by Caroline Fraser. It is ostensibly about serial killers in the Pacific Northwest but is also about cartography, and geology, and-for heaven's sake-the weather. Isolat...
-Margaret_S
Fraser focuses on the Bunker Hill Mine and Smelting Complex, a lead and silver mining and processing operation that heavily polluted the air, soil, and waterways throughout the Pacific Northwest over the course of a century, affecting the health of countless individuals, particularly children...She also links its pollution—as well as the high levels of lead that children were being exposed to throughout the country via lead paint and leaded gasoline, "a toxic cocktail" that poisoned a generation—to the development of serial killers...continued
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(Reviewed by Jordan Lynch).
Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
This book is a mapping, of murderers and their victims, yes, but also of the battle between nature and society, a battle staged out on the edge of America and in the hearts of the people who live there. It started by trying to understand why so many killers come from the Pacific Northwest but by the end it had cracked open the most taboo corners of the American psyche. This story is a menace and a beauty. It left me deeply unsettled—by the idea of monsters, by the myth of free will, and by all the realms of cause and effect that remain unexplored.
In her book Murderland, Caroline Fraser examines the lead-crime hypothesis, the theory that children exposed to high levels of lead have neurological changes that lead to increased aggressiveness in adulthood. Ted Bundy serves as Fraser's example of a child exposed to high levels of lead who proceeded to live a life of very violent crime. His exposure was largely due to environmental contamination from the Bunker Hill Mining and Metallurgical Complex.
Located in Smelterville, Idaho, the Bunker Hill Company began lead and silver mining operations at the end of the nineteenth century and continued for almost a hundred years, dumping tons of waste containing lead and other heavy metals into the air, soil, and waterways. In the 1970s and ...
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