BookBrowse Reviews Murderland by Caroline Fraser

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An in-depth look at the connection between environmental exposure to lead and other heavy metals and the rise in serial killers in the Pacific Northwest of the 1970s.

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America in the 1970s has been described as "the golden age of serial killers." The I-5 Killer, BTK, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Stranglers, the Grocery Bag Killer, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and more were active during the decade and were responsible for hundreds of murders across the country. Caroline Fraser's latest book, Murderland, not only explores the acts of these killers but also examines the correlation between their violent crimes and exposure to high levels of lead and other heavy metals.

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 (see Beyond the Book). When a 1973 fire destroyed the baghouse—the building designed for filtering lead and other pollutants from the aerosol released from the smelter—the company decided that the prevention of further exposure to children wasn't worth the cost of closing the smelter for repairs. Even if the company had to pay a settlement of thousands of dollars to each subsequently affected child, they calculated, they would still make millions in profit if they kept the smelter running as usual. And indeed, Bunker Hill even increased production, exposing hundreds of children in the immediate area to dangerously high levels of lead. The next year, the Idaho health department found that 98% of blood samples collected from children living within a mile of Bunker Hill showed "dangerous lead concentrations," including one infant who had a blood lead level of 164 µg/dL, the highest blood lead level ever recorded in a human.

In this way, Fraser seems to be accusing the smelter of being a different kind of serial killer. 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. "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?" she asks. Other researchers have proposed the same connection, and recent studies have found that the abatement of lead pollution (caused by stricter environmental regulation and the phase-out of leaded gasoline) may be responsible for seven to 28 percent of the fall in homicides in the US since the 1980s.

And the extraordinarily high levels in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho seemed to have created the perfect breeding ground for serial killers. Fraser discusses many of them throughout the book; it seems like a new killer pops up every few pages. Most of these men grew up in areas rife with pollution from Bunker Hill, and those few who didn't, such as BTK and the Yorkshire Ripper, grew up in other areas poisoned by lead. But Murderland mainly focuses on one of America's most infamous serial killers: Ted Bundy, who grew up in Tacoma, Washington, squarely in the area impacted by Bunker Hill's pollution, and who confessed to 30 victims in his life (although experts suspect his true victim count could be as high as 100). Fraser uses quotes from interviews, court testimonies, and victim reports to convey the chilling depravity of Bundy's actions.

Between discussions of environmental toxicity and Ted Bundy, Fraser intersperses her own story: she was born and raised in Seattle in the '70s, and her personal history provides the perspective of a "normal life" during this period of serial killers and the Bunker Hill pollution. She also talks about other Pacific Northwest oddities, including the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge, a floating bridge across Lake Washington that connects Seattle to Mercer Island—due to a quirk of design, one section of the bridge became a hotspot for horrific accidents—and the Olympic-Wallowa Lineament, a fault line-like "optical illusion or topographic feature of 'unknown origin'" that runs diagonally across Washington. Fraser calls the lineament "a route wreathed in bodies," because it runs through both Bundy's main territory and areas that have experienced or could experience severe natural disasters.

Fraser seems to be calling the bridge and the lineament "serial killers" as well, but also examples of the way that profit motives and government inaction have put countless lives at risk over the decades: the bridge, for example, cuts an hour off the commute between Seattle and the east side of Lake Washington, a convenience that no one wants to see eliminated; and as Washington's population has exploded, developers have continued to build in the lineament's potentially dangerous areas. Although these sections slow down the narrative a bit, they contribute to Fraser's overall idea that greed at a large scale can have significant and deadly repercussions; and Murderland is a tragic look at a generation poisoned by this greed and one man whose terrifying proclivities may have been caused by that poison.

This review first ran in the June 18, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.