Who Are the Killers in ‘Murderland’?

What makes a killer? Could it be — something in the air?

That’s the premise of Caroline Fraser’s (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder) new book: Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. The title itself is a twist. Those “serial killers” could either be the murderers covered in the book — Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway (the “Green River Killer”), and Richard Ramirez (the “Night Stalker”), among others — or it could mean the entities that Fraser argues potentially sparked their killing sprees; the smelters spewing lead, arsenic, and copper into the atmosphere. The unsettling question posed is: Who are the true criminals here? Who are the true victims?

One of the things that so fascinates people about serial killers is wondering what makes them kill? The usual suggestions, like childhood abuse or a history of mental illness in the family, remain unsatisfactory because other children go through these ordeals yet don’t grow up to become serial killers themselves. Some simply write off such monsters as “bad seeds,” born with an inherent evil that cannot be overcome. But what if the cause was something more concrete?

Let’s start with Ted Bundy, the poster boy of serial killers, and the focal point of Murderland. Bundy spent his first years in Philadelphia which, at the time, was home to more lead smelters than any other U.S. city. “Furnaces burn raw ore until it flows, and their smokestacks pour the leftovers of that combustion into the air for all to breathe,” Fraser writes in a description that will make you choke. “Tons of ultrafine particles that float and fall out and settle on the roofs and sidewalks, in the backyards and on the brick stoops and windowsills of the city.”

Bundy lived four miles from such a place. He then moved with his mother to Tacoma, Washington, living across the bay from another smelter. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Fraser writes. “He is four, he is five, and the smokestack is filling the air with redolent particulates while he hunts for frogs in the local swamps.” Nine years later, at the age of 14, he possibly murders his first victim, eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr (though it’s a murder he never admits to).

Bundy’s just one killer. But it turns out the Pacific Northwest has an abundance of them, most living near a source of pollution. At the same time Bundy was said to be killing Ann Burr, Gary Ridgway was twelve, living near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, breathing in the fumes from the cars racing along the nearby highway and from the jet planes landing and taking off. Not too far away Charles Manson was serving time for forgery at McNeil Island Corrections Center, where the prisoners raised crops and livestock, with the earth and water saturated by the “particulates” from a smelter in nearby Ruston. “Helter smelter,” Fraser wryly observes.

Looking to see if the pattern persisted beyond the region, Fraser finds Ricardo Ramirez in El Paso, Texas. His mother works at a boot factory, mixing pigments and inhaling benzene, toluene, and xylene in the unventilated facility: “She often becomes dizzy, especially when she’s pregnant.” He grew up five miles from a smelter with the tallest smokestack in the world. He’d later find infamy in California as the Night Stalker. Dennis Rader grows up in Columbus, Kansas, breathing in the fumes from smelters in the region and swimming in the “pit lakes” that were originally coalpits. By his teen years, he’s fascinated by the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, immortalized in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. He’ll become the BTK Killer, suspected of killing more than the ten people for which he was convicted.

The grisly list continues with Kenneth Bianchi, born in Rochester, New York, who had a father who worked at a brake shoe foundry (making brake shoes for railroad cars), meaning that he grew up exposed to asbestos. He’d later be one half of the entity known as the Hillside Strangler (the other member of this killing team was Bianchi’s cousin, Angelo Buono, Jr.). The first victims of the unsolved Zodiac Killer murders were all from the inland Bay Area, scant miles from the Benicia Refinery — could that have played a role in the killer’s upbringing?

Murderland is quite the compendium of serial killers, a grim litany that turns the stomach; story after story after story of yet another man driven to kill (mostly) women in horrible ways. And the specter of poisoning from industrial pollution hovers over all of them. “It may or may not be a pattern,” Fraser said during a recent appearance in Seattle. “I have chosen to interpret it as a pattern. I will say as a caveat, you can’t really prove the association between lead poisoning and serial killers. But there are many, many studies that have shown the association between lead poisoning and violence. And so what I’m doing in this book is trying to tell a story based on these associations and kind of extrapolate. We do know that lead causes violence and aggression, and that the rate of violent crime in this country went up sharply during the 1970s and ’80s and reached heights that it has never reached again. And then it fell off quite suddenly and abruptly, beginning in the ’90s, after leaded gas was removed from the market. And a lot of scientists and specialists looked at that falloff in violent crime at that time and said ‘Hmm. Maybe there’s some connection here.’”

And, as Fraser reveals, there’s no doubt that those involved with the industry pushed back any hint of harmful effects. A scientist shilling for the local smelters in El Paso stated that most of the region’s air pollution was due to automobile traffic, not the smelters, and in any case “El Paso is fortunate in that there is a lot of wind movement and high air velocity.” When a state health official released a study showing “dangerous lead concentrations” in blood samples taken from children living near a smelter in Idaho, representatives of the smelter were quick to state that their own “private surveys” found no such thing. As lackadaisical as they were in tracing potential causes of sickness and crime, the authorities were eager to capture the scapegoats — the “real” killers, like Bundy and Ridgway.

“One of the inspirations for me in writing this book was the great gothic horror novels,” Fraser said at the same Seattle appearance. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and particularly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Because I think those stories capture, in a really unforgettable and visceral way, our bizarre love/hate relationship with science. That on the one hand science is spectacular and opens up all these possibilities and shows us how to live better lives. And on the other hand we’re terrified of a lot of what it does and can do. Possibly because of people like Robert Kehoe [the toxicologist who introduced lead into gas and misrepresented its effects], who was just an incredible shill for the lead industry and a liar. I mean, that’s what really gets to me about this industry stuff, is that these people just were incredible liars. And that’s, I think, the basis for the rough comparison that the book makes between actual individual serial killers and industrial corporate serial killers. Because I think there’s a lot of similarity between these two entities.”

Fraser’s lashings of dark humor throughout this book (“The sky is the color of lead because it’s full of lead”) provide some necessary moments of levity. For there’s no happy ending to this story. Those smelters that used to blight the U.S. have simply been relocated to other (generally poorer) countries. And with the current administration slashing away at government agencies with a predatory zeal, who knows how long it will be before slackening environment regulations turn the skies to the color of lead once again?

Take a deep breath. Or maybe better yet, don’t.