Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser’s latest work is a gripping, compelling, and frequently disturbing read. Well argued, thoroughly researched, and intricately connected,Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers makes a unique argument for the toxic concoction that led to the “golden age” of mass murderers.
Fraser’s serial killer recipe has a lengthy and complicated list of ingredients. The main component is toxic waste, often lead, that permeated America in dangerous levels before widespread acceptance of environmental protections in the 1970s. Indeed, the Pacific Northwest wasn’t always as environmentally friendly as it is perceived to be today. For long periods of the 19th and 20th Centuries, cities like Tacoma and Seattle literally stunk from the factories and smelters.
Fraser points out that Tacoma native Frank Herbert based the ecological wasteland inDune(1965) on his hometown, which “receives 8.5 million gallons of smelter discharge per day, brimming with 2,500 pounds of toxic materials.” Herbert said that you could “chew” the atmosphere.
The main antagonist in Fraser’s telling is the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) founded in the late 1800s by several investors. Famous names like Rockefeller and Guggenheim play key roles in the company’s history, and this plotline reads like Patrick Radden Keefe’s exploration of the Sacker family and the opioid crisis, 2021’s Empire of Pain.
It’s a challenge to considerMurderlandwithout resorting to the cliché of a witch’s brew.
There is the industrial waste, the main culprit. However, Fraser also weaves in the deadly design of bridges to Mercer Island, the Rolling Stones’ song “Sympathy for the Devil”, the 1968 Associated Press photo of the Saigon execution, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, a tectonic fault line called the Olympic-Wallowa Lineament (OWL), that time the Cuyahoga River burned in Cleveland, and even the fact that Mt. Ranier is due for an explosion estimated to kill 150,000 people.
These intricately woven depictions are both a strength and a weakness of Murderland. Fraser seamlessly moves from environmental recklessness to pop culture to crime scene forensics to her own personal story of childhood on Mercer Island. For example:
“The summer is tense. In July, the mysterious attacker in Seattle is eclipsed when Richard Speck rapes and stabs and strangles eight student nurses in Chicago. Lisa is shown a photo of Speck by police but does not recognize him.
In Austin, Texas, that August, Charles Whitman knifes to death his wife and mother, then shoots dozens from a snipers nest atop the university tower, killing seventeen and wounding more than thirty.
Donovan sings creepy songs. “Season of the Witch.” “Sunshine Superman.”
At some point, my grandmother acquires a big black police whistle and begins sleeping with it under her pillow. A widow, she lives alone.”
Ted Bundy. The Green River Killer. The I-5 Killer. Even Charles Manson had connections in the Pacific Northwest.
Fraser also makes the shift – while sustaining the environmental influence argument – to the flat, brown landscape of El Paso, where Richard Ramirez grew up “five miles downwind from the massive lead and copper smelter built in the Chihuahuan Desert on the Rio Grande, with a land grant signed over to the American Smelting and Refining Company.” His mother worked at a boot factory with “benzene, toluene, and xylene, and there is no ventilation: no fans or suction or windows or masks” during pregnancy.
Ramirez would become known as the Night Stalker after his killings in California, primarily in the Los Angeles area.
Then, up to the plains in Kansas where Dennis Rader (“B.T.K.”) was raised, 25 miles from a town that was smelting “188,000 pounds of zinc a week… twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week” at the turn of the twentieth century. His father worked at a utility company.
Some reviews ofMurderland(see below) have wrestled with the validity of Fraser’s environmental blame. I’m neither a scientist nor a serial killer expert, so this was a new line of discussion for me. It’s interesting and seems, at least, plausible to this layperson.
To be clear, Fraser does not ignore the myriad of other factors that create a monster. The town near B.T.K. was named Pittsburgh because of the numerous coal pits and smelters. When the future serial killer was in elementary school in the 1950s, there were almost 20,000 residents of Pittsburgh documented in census records. They breathed the same air as Rader, but they didn’t become serial killers, too. While Fraser is clearly passionate about her environmental argument, she never insinuates that the noxious circumstances absolve the serial killers.
She is also clear in her attempts to create serious, sincere examinations of crime that honor and respect the victims as opposed to the tawdry true crime pulp books and magazines.Murderlandgrew, in part, out of an essay Fraser published inThe New York Review of Booksabout the distinction between serious works and salacious ones.
Nevertheless, there are times when Fraser obviously tries too hard to crank up the spookiness. Fraser’s father is an unpleasant figure, a PhD in elementary education, a Christian Scientist, a hot-tempered man who “does a lot of damage.” In one paragraph, Fraser writes
“He has arranged for our purebred Siamese, Skoshi Toru, to be raped by a strange cat in the basement while she screams and growls in unholy rage. She has kittens on November 5, Election Day, and we name them Granko, Spiro T. Kitty, and Cassandra. When the kittens are old enough, he sells them.”
The breeding of domesticated animals can, indeed, be scary to a child. Still, this passage seems overdone, particularly in a book that contains so much sexual assault of humans. In another section of Murderland, where Fraser lists her dad’s tools, she ends the paragraph with the statement: “He has an axe.” Inthisbook, the simple farm implement conjures different emotions than normal household items most of us own. Fraser clearly uses this trick intentionally. She knows what she’s doing as a writer.
In another section, she personalizes the culture of the era and effectively connects it to pop culture, which she normally does very well.
“Seriously injured, Kevin pulls through and is able to provide a description. A police sketch appears in the newspaper. Dennis [Rader, also known as B.T.K.] finds it suggestive of his own features, and it makes him uncomfortable. But the police are convinced that there cannot be a link between the attack on the Brights and the Otero murders.
The day after Dennis kills Kathy Bright, a high school teacher in Maine publishes his debut novel, about a girl who can murder people with her mind. She has my name.”
I can think of at least five other Stephen Kingbooks that have proper names in their titles. So, if there are any writers named Christine, Holly, Dolores, Gerald, or Rose out there who want an eerie connection, then Fraser has provided the template.
Luckily,Murderlandkeeps the right balance most of the time. There are startling images and moments that seem perfect for film, even acknowledging how much TV and movies have done about serial killers. One of the most memorable – and closest to the edge of ridiculousness – lines that Carolyn Fraser writes in the book is aRust Cohle-style description of Ted Bundy’s cross-country trek
“If you’re an animal on the run and your frontal cortex is picking up weaknesses in the continental crust, singing sensations of fault zones and hot spots, movements in the lithosphere that ping the lead in your brain and speak to you through the nonunion of your coronal suture, these message may well urge you to go to the Florida State University campus and kill women.”
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