MURDERLAND

A provocative, eerily lyrical study of the heyday of American serial killers.

From the 1940s through the 1980s, the number of serial killers in the U.S. rose precipitously, and the Pacific Northwest was, disproportionately, home for them; Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway (aka the Green River Killer), Jack Spillman (aka the Werewolf Butcher), and more hailed from the region. Observers attributed this to mere coincidence, or perhaps a side effect of the gloomy climate. Fraser (Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, etc.), a Pulitzer Prize winner and Northwest native, suggests a more direct culprit: the region’s high concentration of smelters, which released derangingly high levels of arsenic and lead into the atmosphere. (Notable serial killers elsewhere in the country had similar backgrounds; Dennis Rader, aka BTK, grew up near a smelter in Kansas’ “lead belt.”) Fraser’s book layers the evidence for this argument (known as the lead-crime hypothesis) precisely but with a novelistic structure, braiding together biographies of the killers (Bundy most prominently and prolifically), the growth of firms like mining and smelting companies ASARCO (controlled by the Guggenheim family), tragic incidents on a precarious floating bridge connecting Seattle and Mercer Island, and Fraser’s own recollections of growing up in a time and place when young women were inordinately targeted and killed. She depicts a lot of death; Fraser is determined to make the reader see the worst of the killers’ actions, in vivid but unsensationalistic detail, to underscore the ever-escalating crises that mining and smelting businesses tried to underplay, pay off, or ignore. By the ’90s, as bans on leaded gasoline took effect, smelters closed, and the EPA set stricter pollution standards, the number of serial killers dissipated. Fraser’s book is an engrossing and disturbing portrait of decades of carnage that required decades to confront.

A true-crime story written with compassion, fury, and scientific sense.