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.
Fans of linear narratives will find this book maddening. Fraser jumps around in time and topic, alighting on her cipher of a father, Rommel’s desert campaign in World War II and the bubble-gum pop songs she grew up with in the 1960s, on the leafy idyll of Mercer Island, connected by a treacherous floating bridge to Seattle. She hates the old bridge, built with a bulge that caused many auto fatalities.
She mostly gets away with this disjointed structure because she’s such a gifted writer. Reading her prose can be like skiing powder snow on a perfect day, one lovely turn after the other without really knowing where you’re going.
“Murderland” carries three major stories between its covers. One is about Fraser’s early years, dominated by her increasing anger toward her father, a strict Christian Scientist who seems indifferent to the suffering he inflicts on his family. She fantasizes about killing him — stabbing him with a letter opener or pushing him off his boat.
“Later in life, one phrase will come to mind, after my father has died without much help from me,” she writes. “I’ll think: I should have killed him while I had the chance.” Near as I could tell, she’s not kidding.
Another strand concerns the century-old horror of deadly pollutants showered down on people for the profit of Guggenheims and Rockefellers, plutocrats living far from the filthy source of their wealth. Among the worst offenders was a Tacoma copper smelter operated by a company known as Asarco. The smelter closed in 1985, after spitting out sulfur dioxide and lead from its towering smokestack — the source, along with dozens of other local plants, of the infamous Aroma of Tacoma.
In Fraser’s telling, the environmental crime is linked to the human crime, her third narrative. She tracks Ted Bundy, growing up beneath the smelter’s plume, from his troubled youth to his weedy blossoming as a man who admitted to killing 30 women and may have slain as many as 100.
There are enough books, documentaries and scholarly tomes about this psychopath that someone could major in Bundy studies in college. The mystery of how a man with his background — former Boy Scout with regular-guy good looks, Republican political aide, college graduate and law school student — could be a rapist, mass murderer and necrophiliac is endlessly compelling.
Fraser implies there’s no mystery at all. “It is specific to an environment, the imbalance in the chemicals,” she writes, reflecting on Bundy’s own musings about behavior such as his. “He just doesn’t know how. He will never know.”
Following Bundy, the pages drip blood, much of it hard to take. But there’s more, much more: the Hillside Strangler, the Green River Killer, the Night Stalker, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy and Dennis Rader, a murderer in Wichita known as the B.T.K. Killer, meaning bind, torture, kill.
What these madmen have in common, by Fraser’s reckoning, is excessive exposures at some point in their lives to arsenic or lead from paint or plumes. Gary Ridgway, the killer from near Seattle’s Green River, fits the profile: “In 1960, annual lead emissions from the Tacoma smokestack are estimated at 226 tons. In the summer of 1961, Gary is 12 and wets the bed. He is said to be ‘slow’ and is held back a grade.”
But what about the many thousands of people who also lived under Asarco’s toxic plume and went on to have normal lives? Or the homicidal maniacs who grew up far from smelters and never ingested lead paint? Every serial killer is sociopathic, each in their own way. Beyond that, you can pick your poison.
My Irish American ancestors lived in one of the most befouled places on earth, next to the copper mines and smelters of Butte, Mont., a place so contaminated that it became one of the nation’s largest Superfund cleanup sites — essentially an entire city of poison. One of my forebears killed himself in the 1920s by swallowing cyanide. In his suicide note, he blamed the collapse of his business. We’ll never know if it was the air he breathed.
Fraser’s book works best as a literary theme — crimes of industry choking the life out of the natural world, spawning crimes of the heart. Think “Chinatown.” The people who got rich off the poisons walked away unscathed, their names now kept alive in art museums and foundations. Though it’s an old story, maybe even uniquely American, it is still one worth repeating.
MURDERLAND: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers | By Caroline Fraser | Penguin Press | 466 pp. | $32
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