Occasionally a book can reshape one’s view of reality within a place.
Caroline Fraser’s “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers,” is a deep, dark recent history of the Pacific Northwest, particularly, but not limited to, the Tacoma/Seattle region in the late 1960s-1980’s.
During her recent visit to Clallam County as Peninsula College’s 2025 writer-in-residence, Fraser briefly summarized the book for an audience that turned out to hear about her 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning book “Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” at PenCol’s Studium Generale.
Sharing a slide of the cover of “Murderland,” Fraser said that “this book is really a sort of true crime history that looks at the myth behind serial killers. You can see the image of Ted Bundy in front, superimposed on an image of the ASARCO smelter — the lead and copper smelter that was in Tacoma for about 100 years and polluted that town.”
Bundy grew up in Tacoma.
“The idea of the book,” said Fraser, “is to look at what’s called the lead-crime hypothesis, which posits that the explosion of lead in the environment and our exposure to it in the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s led to a sharp rise in crime, and then the removal of lead ultimately resulted in a sharp drop-off in crime.”
Lead, Fraser said, is damaging to different parts of the body, “but especially to the frontal cortex, to the neurological development. Kids who are exposed to lead do exhibit personality changes that can take place when they’re young adults.”
In “Murderland” many events, people and places familiar to residents of this state become a coherent, connected whole, a collective nightmare from the past.
The contents cannot be easily summarized, as with all of Fraser’s books. All four are written with journalistic clarity, strong ecological ethics and the occasional sardonic remark.
Encompassing fault lines, volcanoes, Galloping Gertie and the Mercer Island Bridge, environmental consequences of WWII, leaded gas, pollution and violence, “Murderland” is told primarily through the central narrative of Bundy’s known crimes and the history of the ASARCO smelter, with additional narrative arcs which include Fraser’s own life growing up on Mercer Island and the histories of the Green River Killer and other regional serial killers — one very close to home.
Israel Keyes was living in Neah Bay at the time of his first known killing in 2001 and stayed at hotels in Sequim between 2007-09 and in Port Angeles between 2002-06 according to the FBI, who also said that he sank the body of at least one of his victims in Lake Crescent.
Fraser’s steady, unrelenting and unembroidered retelling of Bundy’s story is disturbing, puncturing the romanticization of serial killers on the internet and other media.
In addition to childhood exposure to the smelter, Fraser wrote in an email to the Sequim Gazette that “Bundy filled his gas tank all the time, since he was afraid of running out of gas with a body in his car.
“Recall that gas in those days was leaded gas, and the more someone was exposed to that, the more unhinged, erratic, and dangerous he became.”
Noted Fraser, “Unfortunately, because leaded gas was ubiquitous for decades, there were no places that weren’t environmentally devastated. Everybody born between the 1950s and the 1980s was exposed to it, and even rural areas had widespread exposure from lead arsenate pesticides.”
Fraser is a meticulous researcher. The pages of her books are dense with information with the complementary detailed bibliographies and indexes — each a potential starting point for further thought, study and debate.
Before Fraser was a freelance writer she was a fact checker at the “New Yorker,” she said in an interview with the Gazette. “Working as a fact checker gives you a great education in learning how to do reporting.”
In fact checking, “you repeat what the author has done … talk to the people they may have interviewed, the sources they may have used,” she explained.
Fraser said she started the research for “Murderland” in earnest around 2020, but “I actually began thinking about this material many years ago and had written snippets of it (including the part about my neighbor who blew up his house when I was eight) before I wrote ‘Prairie Fires.’
“The material is fairly heavy and often grim, but it’s probably easier to handle than what journalists go through reporting from a war zone, if only because we’re separated from it in time.”
Fraser said that she enjoys exploring different topics. Each of her books are about different subjects, she said, but they all have in common her interest in history, particularly American history. “That’s something I’ve always found fascinating to explore.”
“Prairie Fires,” her second book, resonated with a wide swath of people, many of whom grew up reading the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, including some who showed up at the Studium Generale. In the book Fraser examines the historical events that shaped the lives of Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, the displacement of native peoples and the devastation of the prairie ecology of the Midwest.
She said that in her books she also examines human institutions — “what they are capable of and what can go wrong.”
Toward the end of “Murderland” Fraser writes, “Corporations can be people, and people can be killers, ergo, corporations can be killers.”
The book illustrates that the murders committed by Bundy and others are grotesque and personal, but the deaths due to corporations can be seen as more impactful and ongoing.
Fraser’s first book, “God’s Perfect Child, Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church,” is a history of the religion she grew up in, originated in the United States by Mary Baker Eddy.
Fraser said that “it started with my own personal connection to the church, the history of the church and the people I met.”
An essay in The Guardian condenses some of the information in that book, including her father’s slow death to gangrene and the innumerable preventable deaths of powerless children within the religion, as well as the lasting legal legacy of the church’s battle to prevent routine childhood immunizations and other governmental overwatch of children’s health.
“The founder and leader of the church, Mary Baker Eddy, taught that disease was unreal because the human body and the entire material world were mere illusions of the credulous, a waking dream. Those who awoke and knew the ‘Truth’ could be instantaneously healed,” Fraser wrote in the essay.
“Murderland” incorporates elements of Fraser’s own life growing up on Mercer Island, home to the Mercer Island Bridge, where there have been many deadly accidents. Mercer Island is part of the 1,000 square miles polluted by the ASARCO smelter according to the Washington Department of Ecology from northern Olympia/Lacey to Seattle, Puyallup to Bainbridge Island. It closed permanently in 1985.
This book may be personal for many readers here in Washington, where the pollution plume from ASARCO lives on in gardens and bodies. The poisons were exported in various forms across the region and the world just as the ore for the smelter was imported from multiple locations.
The murderous sprees of serial killers live on in the chance of human bones turning up during a hike through the mountains or while fishing on the banks of a river. And in imaginations and fears.
Find “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers” through book retailers.
Photos by Emily Matthiessen Peninsula College writer-in-residence shows a slide detailing the effects of lead poisoning on the human body as she talks about her new book “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers” during a Studium Generale primarily dedicated to her Pulitzer Prize winning “Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
Fraser enters the Pirate Union building at the college on the day she spoke during a Studium Generale appearance.
Photo by Emily Matthiessen/ Author Caroline Fraser reveals to a local audience the cover image for her new book “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers” shortly before its June release.
