August 4, 2025 • 53 mins
This week’s author grew up in the Pacific Northwest with the memories of notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, who also lived there. But the region wasn’t just home to those two murderers: there were many more. Was there a connection between the Pacific Northwest’s most infamous killers…and its incredible amounts of pollution? Caroline Fraser thinks so and she explains why in her book: Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
The actual corporate serial killers who just deliberately went out
and poisoned generations of children deliberately.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers mate, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. This week's author grew up
in the Pacific Northwest with the memories of notorious serial
(01:13):
killers like Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer who
also lived there. But the region wasn't just home to
those two murderers. There were many more. Was there a
connection between the Pacific Northwest's most infamous killers and its
incredible amounts of pollution? Caroline Fraser thinks so, and she
(01:34):
explains why in her book Murderland, Crime and Bloodlust in
the Time of serial Killers. First, let's talk about the
book where our listeners might have heard of you from,
like the real big book, which I think is just amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, that was my previous book, Prairie Fires, which was
a biography of Laura Engelswilder. And one of the things
that I I was able to do in that book
was able to talk about with the crazy ecological history
of the Great Planes and what happened to the Ingles family,
who were very you know, typical of pioneers who went
(02:14):
out there and kind of found themselves ruined, but were
themselves also ruining the Great Planes and so so that
you know, had ramifications that would last for decades and
end up in the you know, des Bowl and so forth.
So that was, you know, the ecological history is something
that I've always really been interested in.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Do you have a background in that? Is that something
you might have studied in college.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I remember as a kid reading Ranger Rick magazine and
learning about Rachel Carson, and you know, so I've always
been really really interested in conservation and the environment. And
my second book, which was called Rewilding the World was
about conservation projects. So I do have some background as
(03:01):
a you know, enthusiast. I'm really sort of an amateur.
I'm not you know, professional, I'm not a biologist, but
it's something I've always been interested in writing about.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So my very first book was called Death in the
Air and it was about the nineteen fifty two air
pollution disaster that happened in London. And I remember pitching
that first. I don't even think it made it to
my editor. I think my agent said, I don't know
if this is going to make it as a book,
because I didn't know how many people were that were
going to be that interested in the systemic issue of
(03:33):
pollution and you know, the all of the sulfi dioxide
and all of the talk I had to get into.
But when you make it collide with a serial killer
and of so many dramatic stories that comes with stories
about pollution and people dying and government cover up and everything,
then then it made it sort of a mainstream story.
(03:54):
Have you found that too? Was it the environmental part
first for you or was it the story first and
you discovered there was this ecological connection?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, well, well, just first I know that book and
I have it, and I love it. I think it's
a really great contribution to the whole sort of air
pollution thank you thing, which sounds so technical, but it's
really so fascinating. And I think I first heard about
that whole thing through The Crown, you know, that episode
(04:28):
of The Crown, and then I kind of went looking
for more stuff about it and found your book, which
is just so fascinating. The first thing that came along
for me was was really the whole serial killer aspect
of this. I grew up in the Northwest in the
nineteen seventies near Seattle, so I was around, you know,
(04:52):
I was like thirteen in nineteen seventy four when the
whole Ted Bundy thing started happening and all these women
began disappearing from the area and from the region, and
so that was kind of very much.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
In my mind.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And all the time in the Northwest, you're reading these
headlines about, you know, why are there so many serial
killers here? And I'd always wondered about that, like was
this just a urban myths or legend? Was there really
something to it? And I was always curious about that.
So that was kind of the first piece in my mind.
(05:27):
But I never really envisioned writing a book about it.
It was just kind of something I was interested in.
But a few years ago it did happen. Upon some
additional information about where these guys came from. Ted Bundy
grew up in Tacoma. Gary Ridgeway, who would later be
(05:49):
the Green River Killer, he grew up quite close to
SeaTac Airport, which is between Tacoma and Seattle, so he
was right in that. Rea and I also read a
biography of Charles Manson and learned that he was in
the area at the same time as those guys were
(06:09):
growing up. He was on McNeil Island, incarcerated in the
federal prison just off Tacoma. And I just thought, Wow,
that's a really weird coincidence, Like, how did these guys
all spring from this one sort of obscure city. And
(06:30):
as I was kind of pondering that, I learned about
the smelter that was in Tacoma, the Osarco Smelter, sort
of by accident. I mean, Tacoma has always been known
as this really heavily industrialized city and it smelled terrible.
(06:51):
I mean, up until just a few years ago, there
was something called the Aroma of Tacoma, and Beddy, who
had been there, knew about that, and a lot of
it was from a pulp mill. But there were so
many you know, smelters and plants and refining plants and factories,
(07:12):
and you know, you didn't even really know what was
doing what. But I did learn about the smelter actually
by reading a real estate ad for a nearby place
on Vashion Island that said something about arsenic remediation. I mean,
I know Vashon Island because we used to have friends there,
(07:34):
and it's a beautiful, you know, rural spot just off
West Seattle in Puget Sound, and I just couldn't fathom, like,
how did they get arsenic and Fashion Island And so
you know, started googling that, and like five minutes later,
I'm deeply into the history of smelting.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Well, what is smelting? Is that melting down and creating
something else with them? Is that what that is? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
And I think a lot of people I don't think
I really understood what it was when I first started
reading about it. I think it's such a sort of
specific to the era of the you know, eighteen hundreds
and nineteen hundreds, because that's when all this stuff really
needed to be made. We needed metal, and so these
(08:26):
these smelters sprang up. And yes, they were taking in
rocks or ores that had metal in them from mines
and then essentially heating them and smelting them, which means
just taking apart, you know, the different components, the metallic
components that are in those ores and separating the silver
(08:50):
and the gold and the arsenic and the lead and
copper really became the chief metal that was being smelted
in a lot of these places. But since all these
other metals existed, they were also finding ways to monetize,
as we would now say, and arsenic was used to
(09:14):
create pesticides and insecticides that were used in the forties
and fifties, and you know they were actually used in
eastern Washington on the apple orchards and so forth. So
it was a huge industry at one time. It no
longer is. I mean, most of the smelters in this
(09:35):
country have cloths due to EPA regulations. But at the
time that I was growing up, and when Ted Bundy
and Carrie Ridgeway were growing up in the Northwest, that
plant was putting tons of lead and arsenic into the air.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Were there lawsuits happening in this time period at all?
Is this the height of smelting and pollution in the
seventies when Bundy and and were there.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, there were, you know, beginning in the sixties, communities
started waking up to the hazards of this stuff, which
were kind of hard to ignore because like you could
hang out laundry and Tacoma for example, and it would
get all these weird spots on it because of the arsenic.
(10:23):
Pets would die, you know after walking in it. You know,
people were finding the paint on their cars and their
boats was being eaten away by the acids that were
coming out of the smokestack. So people were just starting
to kind of freak out about it. But Asarco was
very controlling about the information that they let out. And
(10:47):
of course they were also a huge, huge employer in
the North Dakoma area, and so people didn't want to
sue a Sarco because you know, those jobs were at stake,
and there was always this fear that the plant would
close down.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
You know, I was thinking about the time in London,
you know, I had to do all this research on
pollution in London that there was a period where you know,
everybody's burning trees, right, and then the trees go and
that's when coal comes and then you see all of
this pollution. So you said, what eighteen hundred seventeen hundreds
is really when this started? And this must have just
(11:29):
built up. It has to be in the soil, is
it in the water?
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And you know Puget Sound, there's there's quite a lot
of lead and copper and other things at the bottom
of Puget Sound. There are issues. They did quite a
lot of cleanup during the superfund era because the Sarca
smelter and Tacoma eventually closed in eighty six then became
(11:57):
a huge superfund site, and they did a lot of
cleanup in the neighborhood around the smokestack and in North Dakoma.
But you know, like a lot of these super fun things,
they run out of money eventually, and so even though
the most important parts of the cleanup were accomplished, there's
(12:18):
a lot of areas around the fringes that I think
never got the treatment that they should have.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
So we've had so far. I've written down Bundy and
Manson and Gary Ridgeway. Did you include BTK in that
Dennis Raider also in that group.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
No, he was actually in Wichita, Kansas. That's where he
committed the majority of his murders. Although there I think
they're now finding out that he may have gotten over
into Oklahoma at one point and killed a couple of
women there. But yeah, he was down in Kansas and
in an area that became known for its own smelter,
(12:55):
Oh my gosh, in the nineteen hundreds. That whole south
east east corner of Kansas has a lot of coal
in it, and so there were a lot of open
pit mines and a zinc smelter in the town where
he was born, I think, and he spent a lot
of time with his grandparents who had farms in that
(13:18):
region and may or may not have been exposed to lead.
We certainly know that that Ted Bundy and Ridgway were
pretty heavily exposed to lead, both from where they lived
and Ridgway worked most of his life painting trucks, and
the paint for big trucks is exempt from lead restrictions,
(13:43):
So I think he was getting it from a number
of different sources. But yeah, I think Raider, Denis Rader,
the BTK killer, is just so interesting because he kind
of represents like Ridgeway, the mentally limited serial killer who
just kind of does the same thing over and over
(14:06):
and over again and seems to have the mentality of
like a you know, about a sixth grader or something.
I mean, whereas you also see people who are exposed
to lead who are quite smart, like Bundy, because I
think it really affects people at different times and different
in their development and in different ways, and so there's
(14:28):
a whole range of effects that you can see in
the individual.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Is this brand new thinking? And actually in a way,
I don't even know where to start, because we could
start with how do these pollutants if we just take
you know, the Tacoma area, how do they affect everyone?
Just in general? Is there with arsenic? I mean, I
know the normal way I could see with arsenic, you know,
blackening of organs, sometimes the blackening of a face. But
(14:56):
that's for me the eighteen hundreds. I don't know what
it would be like coming out of a smeltering plant.
So can we talk in general just about what everybody
was experiencing?
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Sure? Yeah, I mean they eventually were able to demonstrate
that the guys who were working in the plants where
arsenic was produced had a higher level of lung cancer specifically,
or respiratory diseases, so that was a specific thing that
(15:25):
was tied to their exposure. I think in the community
it was much harder to establish a connection to health
because OSARGO did everything that they could to quash any
kind of research that was being done. So eventually they
did come up with some, you know, just some very
(15:47):
basic readings on how much arsenic the kids were being
exposed to, which was a lot. But the thing that
I was really interested in was the lead because lead
has been shown to have, as I said, a whole
range of effects, but one of them is that if
(16:07):
you're exposed to lead as a child while your brain
is still developing, it can lead to a really profound
effect in the development of the frontal cortex and the
things that we our brain uses to control our behavior.
And so people who have had serious let exposure can
(16:32):
show a lot of aggression, their higher rates of juvenile
delinquency as these kids get older, and higher rates of
violent crime. Those associations are pretty well established at this point.
It's only in very recent years that scientists have also
begun to link let exposure to psychopathy and to psychopaths
(16:59):
who have been caught and have been you know, who
have agreed to be interviewed or studied or whatever. There
is no they're now showing a link to that.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
So there is a definitive link between lead and aggressive behavior,
not with everybody. But is that an MRI or how
does that show up?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, they have done MRIs. There's a guy, a biologist
in England, Adriane Raine, who did a whole book about
this where he looked at all these different contributing factors,
including you know, lead and Cadmium is another heavy metal
that's often mentioned in this regard, which seems to operate
(17:42):
a lot like lead if you get it in your system.
There was a mass shooter, one of the first mass
shooters in California in the eighties, who killed some people
in a McDonald's near San Diego. He worked with cadmium
and was shown to have an enormous amount of academium
in his body after autopsy. So Rain looked at all
(18:07):
of this. He looked at diet, he looked at I
think head trauma. But he has he reproduces a lot
of MRIs in his book and one of the interesting
things that has come along more recently. I'm not quite
sure whether he talked about it or not. I think
it's more recent, but there appears to be kind of
(18:27):
a real gender difference in how men and women respond
to lead exposure. That men seem to be much more
profoundly affected in the whole frontal cortex than women, Which
is not to say that women don't share some of
the impulsivity. That's another thing that's caused by lead. And
(18:53):
they've done these graphs that show, you know, because of
course there was leaded gas between nineteen fifties in the
nineteen eighties, and so you can show the rise and
violent crime on these graphs really tracks quite closely to
the availability and use of letted gas, and then it
(19:14):
falls off quite sharply in the nineties once leaded gas
had been withdrawn from the market and once smelters started
closing as well. So, yeah, with women, it tended to
be I mean, I don't know if you remember, but
in the seventies and eighties there was this big rise
in teen pregnancies, and so that's been used as a
(19:38):
kind of metric to look at what happened with women
in that period.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Is this argument an argument that environmentalists have made in
order to say no to leaded gas in the past,
no to smelters. I mean, it seems like, you know,
save the environment, Yeah, lower crime, I mean, or is
that just too far out there for Congress to wrap
its head around. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
I think medical doctors have been arguing since the nineteen
twenties that putting this much lead into the environment was
an incredibly dangerous thing to do, and they're not focusing
so much, you know, on it as an environmental issue,
but as a human health issue, and saying that this
(20:26):
is going to have terrible effects on human health generally,
because lead doesn't just you know, cause crazy behavior, it
also causes all kinds of other diseases, you know, respiratory
diseases and heart disease. I think als has now been
(20:46):
linked to lead. So there's a whole range of just
really terrible facts and the fact that you know, industry
just took those recommendations in the twenties and thirties and said, oh,
this isn't going to be a problem, yeah, you know,
(21:06):
and just did this experiment on the entire population of
the country and of course around the world. Because lighted
gas was sold everywhere.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Let's talk about the industrialists who profited off of this.
I know this is another part of your book. Where
does that fit in for you? Is that the history
and sort of the craven, selfishness and money hungry industrialists
that are causing this, or where does that fit for you? Well?
Speaker 2 (21:35):
That was to me the critical piece that made me
feel like there was a book in this material, because
I didn't want to just write about serial killers, fascinating
though they are.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
My audience would disagree with you, I think that, okay,
But I.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Just I wasn't really moved to write an entire book
about that phenomenon. But when I learned about the environmental
link to this, that to me was just huge because
it was a really overwhelmingly emotional thing to learn about
what these people did to places that I really care about.
(22:15):
You know, Puget Sound is one of the most beautiful
places in the country, and the fact that these people
just deliberately did the most incredible damage to it without caring,
without caring about the community, without caring about the long
term effects, was just amazing to me. And I think
(22:40):
that as people read the book, I hope that they
start to see the link between you know, the actual
individual serial killers and their behavior, their constant lying, their
you know, lack of empathy, and the corporate serial killers
who just deliberately went out and poisoned generations of children deliberately.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Did this begin with the building of the railroads? Is
that sort of where all of this started in the
Pacific Northwest? What was them? I know we took about smelting,
but was that really the beginning is getting all of
these minerals or was it building things? Well?
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, I think that the railroads, the development of the
railroads and mining went hand in hand because the railroads
were designed to shift the ores, the rocks from the
mines to Tacoma. I mean, the last piece of the
railroad that ends in Tacoma. That's why it was built,
(23:46):
essentially was to do that service. And for a long
time there was this terrible smelter in Idaho which was
connected to the Tacoma smelter, which also, I mean just
into the nineteen seventies was poisoning kids in an interior
(24:07):
valley in Killogg, Idaho.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
If we shift back momentarily to the serial killers, I
was thinking about the brain defense with all of this
with the air pollution, which to me, when someone says
the brain defense in court, which usually what has been
explained to me is CTE or another kind of head trauma,
and it's not to get somebody out, it's usually a
mitigating circumstance to maybe get them knocked down from the
(24:32):
death penalty to life or something. I know that the
cases vary. Has anyone ever used sort of environmental pollution
or anything like that as part of mitigating circumstances in
a criminal trial? Has any of this evidence come up
in a criminal trial, not that.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I'm aware of. Bundy, of course did his lawyer's death
row attorneys did attempt and then insanity you know defense.
They tried to go back and say that he he
wasn't fit to stand drial, which he may not have been. Actually,
I actually find their arguments pretty compelling at this point.
(25:08):
But of course that didn't you know, I think that
the bar for that is set so high and is
so rarely you know, superseded, that it just certainly didn't
work for him. But yeah, I'm not aware of anybody
using doesn't mean it hasn't happened, but certainly not lead
or cadmium or something like that. And I guess this
(25:30):
is a good moment to say that. I think that
there are always lots of factors that probably produce a
serial killer. It's not just lead exposure. I mean you
mentioned CTE, the head trauma, which is surely a factor
with some of these guys, you know that who have
had brain damage, maybe caused by physical abuse. There's also
(25:54):
you know, sexual abuse, there's poor diet a lot. If
you look at the history of a lot of these guys,
they were raised and often in pretty extreme poverty. People
have also talked about, you know, the whole period in
the nineteen fifties when doctors used fourceeps to deliver babies
and you know, possibly cause brain damage with forceps. So,
(26:18):
you know, I think there's just a whole range of
things that can go into this, and you have to
consider all of that as well.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I do get asked, do you believe that people are
inherently evil like a Ted Bundy or a Jeffrey Dahmer,
you know, do you think they're born evil or predisposed
to do things like this? What do you think?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
To me? That question seems rooted in a kind of
religious understanding of good and evil, which I do not
kind of that's not the way I see things, so
I don't really interpret them that way. Of course, their
actions are evil, I mean, yea, their actions are are
just horrific to the extreme, and so I certainly understand
(27:05):
why people want to say that. But as to somebody
being born evil, I mean, again, we've been talking about
all these things that can cause brain damage, which, yeah,
you can have brain damage just from being born. It happens.
But in terms of, like, you know, the whole issue
of just you know, somebody being sort of imbued with
(27:27):
the devil or being a Satanic or something, that's just
not really how I think about things.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Nor do I, but I do ask quite a bit.
But listen, I understand that, and I always preface it
when I answer the question you know, and I answer
it by saying, no, it's the same thing you did,
which is I think that people do evil acts. I
think that oftentimes there are things that are happening that
we don't know, or maybe we don't want to know
because the acts are so evil you don't want to
(27:54):
have any kind of sympathy for these people. And there's
always the argument, well, the guy right sitting on the
other side of us has the exact same brain damage
or whatever it is, and he hasn't gone and done anything.
But I really feel like there's so many factors that
go into it, and true crime in general gets a
(28:14):
lot of bad flag of glorifying the killer. And I
think that this is really different what we're talking about,
because this is not saying how interesting Bundy was and
how brilliant Dennis Raider was or anybody else. This is
looking at literally the things that affect everybody and how
they might affect somebody who has these, you know, experiencing
(28:35):
these added circumstances all on top of that. It's a
tapestry that causes someone to become an attorney versus somebody
to become a state at home father and somebody to
go out and kill twelve people.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Right, you know, the last thing I want to do
is and in fact, I think I tried to explain
what these guys did in a way that would not
only not glamorize them, but would kind of take them
out of that genre, because you know, we're now so
used to this conception of the serial killer as a genius,
(29:07):
you know, somebody who is sort of devilishly clever at
evading detection and coming up with these very bizarre, elaborate crimes.
I don't really think that much of that is true.
You know, Ted Bundy was not a genius. He was
somebody who was who was clever at evading detection at
(29:30):
a time when there was no DNA, you know. And
that's true of most of the rest of the guys
that I'm talking about here, Dennis Rader in Kansas and
Richard Ramirez who grew up in El Paso. These guys
clearly had something wrong with them, whether it was all
led or whether it was lead and a whole bunch
(29:52):
of other stuff added in, which I think is probably
the case. I think we need to start thinking about
them differently than we have based on you know, Hollywood tropes,
you know, the whole Silence of the Lambs and the
Hannibal Lecter and all of that stuff. I mean, those
things are entertaining, but I don't think they really capture
(30:16):
the real sort of debased quality of the thinking of
these guys.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
I agree. So I think, you know, that's why your
book is really interesting. As you're taking the what I
would say, these are killers who all have this weird
mystique around them, and you sort of dispel it and say,
part of this is lad. There's a lot that happens
here that is the sexiness is not the right word.
But for the people who really really are into the
(30:45):
serial killers and who glorify them, reading about their exposure
to lead is going to kind of take down that fantasy.
And there are quite a lot of people who think
like that that take that fantasy down a notch. So
you're really revealing the person behind the murders that are happening.
And I think a lot of people don't want that.
I don't think they want to know about the awful
(31:08):
childhood's or you know, Bundy feeling like he was a bastard,
you know, and rejection and all of that stuff. I
don't think that they want that. I think they want
that kind of image.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
So yeah, So it's interesting what you're doing in the book.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
We do, of course, have to recognize how rare this is.
But the whole argument that like, oh, you know, if
lead causes this kind of behavior, why wasn't everybody in
Tacoma a serial killer?
Speaker 1 (31:35):
I just don't.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
I think that's the wrong question, because you know, it's
like with cigarettes or tobacco. You know, there are people
who smoke until they're ninety years old and they don't
die of lung cancer. But does that mean it doesn't
cause lung I mean, of course tobacco causes lung cancer,
and arsenic and lead do have specific effects, and they
(32:00):
have raised the violent crime rate into com up, which
was very high. I'm looking at serial killers because that's
a way to tell this story in a way that
I think people will comprehend. But there were I think
real world consequences and costs to you know, blanketing an
(32:21):
entire populated city with these substances.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Now where do the smelters across the United States stand today?
Do we have a lot of them still? And I
know that you talk more that it's not just smelters,
it's fertilizer and so many other things. But that's one
of the big subjects.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
What I'm talking about were what's called primary smelters, where
they actually brought them rocks from mines and melted them
and separated the metals and created you know, pure copper
and lead and so forth. Those have largely disappeared from
this country because of EPA regulations and because it just
(32:58):
became far tooensive to operate them, partly because of regulations
and partly because of you know, commodities, that these commodities
were readily available and being produced in other countries where
it was cheaper to do so. And so now you
find primary smelters largely in places like China and Russia
(33:21):
and South America and in places that don't have the
regulations that we enacted. The thing that we do still
have are recycling plants where you know, you take your
lead car battery for example, when it's used up, and
those recycling plants are themselves kind of a secondary smelter
(33:46):
that is separating out the valuable metals from these batteries
and other things, and they can be quite polluting as well.
And PR did a piece recently about a you know,
a recycling plant in Florida that was emitting a lot
of lead and that was also exposing its workers to
(34:09):
incredible amounts of lead.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Well, let me ask you, I did not know a
lot about radio isotopes until maybe a year or two ago.
Is that something that they can study? You know, when
you can pull somebody's hair, I assume you could do
it with blood too, and just sort of see the
different regions where they came from. Can we find out pollution?
I think we can right from studying what blood hair,
(34:33):
what would it be?
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah. In fact, in al Paso, somebody did do a
study because an al Pasa, the a Sarco smelter there
had been denying for years that they were the source
of so much of the lead that was being deposited
in the city. They kept saying, oh, it comes from
traffic and you know cars and trucks because I ten
(34:58):
goes through El Paso, for example. So they kept pointing
to other places that might have been producing the lead poisoning.
So a scientist did a study of exactly that and
was able to kind of nail them on this because
you can tie the lead chemically to where it came
from and how it was being produced. Don't ask me
(35:21):
to explain how, because I'm not a chemist and I
can't speak to that, but yeah, it has been done.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
I wonder if there's ever been a thought of, you know,
not exooming bodies, but moving forward. You have a Jeffrey
Dalmer who says, please study my brain and figure out
why I did this. I wonder if there would be
a way or if there would be an interest in
testing you know, these people. I know it's only a
handful of people that these, I mean the man accuse
of the Long Island serial murders for example, and seeing
(35:54):
you know, what the what the pollution levels are as
just part of a study. I think that would be
so interest.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, there are ways to do that, perhaps at autopsy.
The issue with testing people for lead is that they're
very inexpensive and readily available blood tests for lead that
capture a picture of how much you currently you know,
is circulating in your blood stream, but that has to
(36:24):
have been very recent exposure. So you know, say you
were in an area that had some lead in the air,
or you ate something, or a child ate some paint chips.
You know, they can find that out if it's a
very recent exposure. The trickier thing is to do a
study or a test that shows how much lead exposure
(36:48):
you've had over your lifetime, because lead in the body
is deposited in the bones and the teeth, and those
are harder too. You know, there are, in fact, I
think these very kind of elaborate tests that can be
done to show what's happening with lead in the bones,
(37:08):
But those machines are few and far between, and those
are very expensive tests to run. So it's a complicated issue.
And I don't know that anybody's ever gonna say, oh,
we need to do a study of serial killers and
find out about their their lead exposure. I kind of
doubt it.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
That's interesting. I didn't know, you know, I've never really
dealt with lead before, but I knew that carbon monoxide
stays in your body for a very long time, and
because I remember from death in the air, they were
able to test from bodies that had been buried for
a very long time to figure out really Yeah, okay,
So when you talk about Bundy and you talk about
(37:49):
you know, Manson, I guess I'm thinking particularly of Gary
Ridgeway and Bundy. In the book, you do get into
their crimes. Did you feel like you wanted to do
that that it's just kind of you can't just name
these people. You have to be able to explain what
happened with them. Or was it an illustration for you
of sort of the cause and effect in a way,
(38:10):
not just of the pollution, but of everything that goes
into what happens in their backgrounds.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Yeah, I think that their behavior becomes so robotic almost
kind of they're kind of like automatons, you know. One point,
I talked a little bit about doctor Jackyl and mister
Hyde because it almost has that quality of like, you know,
and Ted Bundykins seem to be a normal law student
(38:38):
one moment, and then two hours later he's driving around
picking up some woman or attacking a woman on the
street and seizing her. And you know, the repetitiveness of
their crimes I thought was important, and also the similarity
between these guys the things that they do. I mean,
(39:00):
Bundy is sort of the chief example of this, but
when you look at his crimes next to other Tacoma
rapists and murderers and raider in a different part of
the country and Ramirez, who you know, his crimes are
so completely off the wall. I mean, there's something so
(39:27):
aberrant about their behavior that eventually, you know, I think
you can see the similarities between them, which to me
speaks to some similarity in what's gone wrong with them.
Whether it's a whole constellation of things that includes let exposure,
that's the question. But I think it's important to see
(39:50):
that for the reader to understand this isn't Hannibal Lecter,
you know, plotting some incredibly clever thing. These are sexual
crimes overwhelmingly, and that I think was part of why
I wanted to kind of tell a little bit of
the story of the nineteen seventies from my perspective, because
(40:13):
I think people may have forgotten what it was like
or didn't ever, you know, because they were younger. They
didn't know what it was like to be live during
the seventies and how different differently rape was perceived at
that time.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Now I'm wondering about everybody, and I know you didn't
probably study any of these folks, but like in Israel,
keys who came from Alaska, isn't that kind of a
heavily polluted area.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Also, he is one of the last people that I
talk about. Yeah, he he was born in Utah and
then moved to Washington State and the area where he
grew up was incredibly remote in the northeast part of
(40:56):
the state. But the one thing that was out there
was the lead smelter he lived. You know, he was
living with these crazy his parents were crazy, you know,
white nationalists, and they were living this completely isolated you know,
in a kind of a log cabin out in the wilderness,
(41:19):
and I think there was a lot of hunger in
that family. The mother kept having kids. It was a
very large family. I think he was one of the
He was the second oldest, and constantly went out, I think,
to fish in the Columbia River, which was heavily heavily
polluted by the smelter, which is right up in British Columbia,
(41:41):
and shoot game like deer. I mean, who knows what
I mean. Obviously he grew up in an environment in
which there was a incredible poverty and privation and hated
his parents, who he became strange trum at the age
(42:01):
of sixteen. But you know, you wonder what different elements
went into creating this person who was so so.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Lethal Golden State Killer. Did you look at all him
Northern California?
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Yeah, I mean I actually did look at him and
was really interested in him, but took him out just
because there was was getting to be too many serial
kills the book and we didn't want it to read
like an encyclopedia. But yeah, fascinating again, the poverty of
(42:37):
his background. I think he was abused, physically abused. Hard
to say what you know, he might have been exposed to.
But he was running around, you know, gigging frogs, which
he apparently ate out of this oh boy river which
was next to a raytheon plant. So I mean, he
needs his own book, which of course he got with
(42:59):
Michelle mac Because he committed so many different crimes over
such a long period of time, you almost can't summarize
what he did.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Well, I was going to tell you, you know, my other
show Buried Bones with Paul Holes, who of course studied
the Golden worked in the Golden State killer case. We
did an episode from Australia nineteen sixty three and it
was a murder investigation of a couple who were cheating
on their spouses and went down to a river bank
(43:30):
and we're having sex and the next day somebody finds
them dead and they're trying to figure out did the
spouses do it? And it was under all of these
odd circumstances. Decades later, they did studies and found out
that during that time period that river was so heavily
polluted that when they were on the ground, it killed them,
both of them. Oh, it's so fascinating. Paul almost didn't
(43:54):
believe it, and I actually I think I had to
send him to study. And there was a couple to
win men who in the sixties in Australia in the sixties,
it would have been no no for them to get
caught together. But they were having a makeout session they
heard the other couple come in. They had to crouch
into the bushes, not to spy on the couple, the
first couple, but because one of them left the purse nearby,
(44:17):
so they were crouching and they were low enough so
they weren't on the ground where the river with the
pollution was coming off on the river, but they were
squatting down low enough where they both felt sick, like
they both thought they were going to pass out, I know,
and then they ended up leaving. They said that that
river was so polluted that was bubbling up and it
was some nearby plant and it had been known as
being an awful polluter. And so you know, they ran
(44:40):
all these tests on these two bodies and that's what
they found out. So you know, when I unraveled these
stories for Paul Holes, he never knows where it's going,
and he was really convinced this was murder, and I said, no,
talk to the industrialists who created this plant nearby, and
I had never heard. I just didn't know that that
pollution would do that. I knew from death in the air.
(45:02):
But they've done animal testing, I'm assuming with lead and arsenic.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, I mean, obviously you can't test those on people deliberately.
Some of the more interesting tests are early in the fifties,
who were done with kids looking at their teeth because
they could measure you know, what they call the indigenous
teeth or something, you know, because they lose their kids
lose their teeth, and so you can take those teeth
(45:28):
and then test them for lead. And yeah, that was
showing significant aspects of aggression in people's behavior. But do
you know what kind of pollution the Australia case.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Was, or let me see high concentrations of hydrogen sulfate
from a nearby flour mill that had been dumping waste
into the river for sixty years and in an area
of the river that was dammed right where this couple
was found, so the gas was built up and the
river bottom could suddenly release large amounts of hydrogen soul fight.
(46:05):
Can you imagine that? I mean, oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Yeah, that's incredible. It reminds me of the you know
the descriptions I read about coming out of the Bunker
Hill mines and smelter in Idaho, because kids used to
be afraid that their balls would fall in the stream
that went through town because they would melt. You know,
(46:29):
if you had like a big rubber ball and it
fell in, it would melt. And there was you know,
in that town. There was an elementary school directly across
the street from the smelter smoke stack, and the teachers
would sometimes say, you know, they would be afraid that
the building was on fire because there was so much
(46:50):
smoke in the building. So yeah, that whole thing of
the incredibly polluted rivers. I mean when you think back
to the seventies and the you know kay Oga River
that caught on fire, which was sort of one of
the reasons why we now have you know, the Clean
Water Act and the EPA and so forth. But yeah,
(47:11):
Australia is full of stories about you know, mining pollution
like that because they had so many mines. My husband
and I once were driving through a place in Tasmania
where we're driving to a national park. Of course I'd
never been there before, and we ended up driving through
(47:31):
this town and a hillside that was so heavily polluted
by copper mines that it was orange. Like the whole
hillside behind this town was the most unnatural shade of orange.
And I mean I was afraid to get out of
(47:51):
the car, you know. And there are a lot of
places in this country where you can drive in Arizona,
for example, if you get off the beaten track, you'll
find yourself, you know, driving through open pit mines. I
think there are three remaining primary smelters in this country,
and two of them are in Arizona.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Well, you probably know this answer just from your own experience.
But when I was doing interviews for Death in the
Air of the people who were alive during the smog
in fifty two, I asked Holly, six of them gave
me the exact same response. I said, what did it
smell like? What did it feel like to you? The
air pollution? And I was wondering if you had sort
of this way that you could respond as far as
(48:35):
lead and viscerally, how it feels. They said it smelled
when the small came five day smog, it smelled like
rotten eggs in a barrel. And then one of the
women who everybody agreed with said that when you would
breathe it in, it was if you can imagine metal
shavings and swallowing metal shavings, That's what it felt like.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
A lot of people and to come out remember that
and associated it with arsenic. They remembered the metal taste
in their mouth. There was one guy who said it
was like playing tennis with a lighted match in your mouth.
Oh but yeah, which that was such a weird image.
(49:18):
And there's another guy I talked about who worked briefly
at the smelter as a college kid during the summer,
but his father worked there for years as a foreman,
and he had what they called smelter nose, which he
had a septum that inside his nose there was just
(49:39):
this hole and he could put his finger through the
hole in his nose because it had just been eaten away.
So yeah, there were a lot of stories about that,
and I'm not sure how you separate whether that was
arsenic or lead. I certainly remember, not that I was
too far away to have experienced the taste sensation, but
(50:04):
I do remember the nineteen seventies in the Northwest having
more smog, and I think some of that must have
been from the the asarca smelter.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
If there is one thing that you want people to
walk away from when they read your book, not a
theme necessarily, or a question that they would like an
answer to, what do you think that would be? What
is the point? At a dinner party you say that
you wrote the book for.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
Yeah, I mean, I don't think the book is intended
as a public service announcement, and I hope that people
find it compelling and entertaining and a good story, good
narrative about this subject. But yeah, I mean, I do
think that people need to know more about the incredible
(50:53):
sort of dangers of legacy pollution that are still out there.
I think people because we don't see it, you know,
because we don't see the lead in our environment, we
don't realize how dangerous it is. I mean, every once
in a while there's a story that comes along, like flint,
you know, Michigan, the lead and the pipes, or lead
(51:17):
and paint in older housing. But I think we have
to realize that everybody can be exposed to this. It
can be in crops, it can be in toothpaste, it
can be in baby food, in rice. It's something that
is so dangerous that we really have to get a
handle on how to get it out of our environment,
(51:42):
and if we don't, we're going to live with the consequences.
I mean, I just don't know how us to say it,
but it's out there and we have to figure out
a way to deal with environmental issues that's not political.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(52:33):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked
(52:54):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked and on Facebook
at Wicked war birds Pod
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
The actual corporate serial killers who just deliberately went out
and poisoned generations of children deliberately.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers mate, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. This week's author grew up
in the Pacific Northwest with the memories of notorious serial
(01:13):
killers like Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer who
also lived there. But the region wasn't just home to
those two murderers. There were many more. Was there a
connection between the Pacific Northwest's most infamous killers and its
incredible amounts of pollution? Caroline Fraser thinks so, and she
(01:34):
explains why in her book Murderland, Crime and Bloodlust in
the Time of serial Killers. First, let's talk about the
book where our listeners might have heard of you from,
like the real big book, which I think is just amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, that was my previous book, Prairie Fires, which was
a biography of Laura Engelswilder. And one of the things
that I I was able to do in that book
was able to talk about with the crazy ecological history
of the Great Planes and what happened to the Ingles family,
who were very you know, typical of pioneers who went
(02:14):
out there and kind of found themselves ruined, but were
themselves also ruining the Great Planes and so so that
you know, had ramifications that would last for decades and
end up in the you know, des Bowl and so forth.
So that was, you know, the ecological history is something
that I've always really been interested in.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Do you have a background in that? Is that something
you might have studied in college.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I remember as a kid reading Ranger Rick magazine and
learning about Rachel Carson, and you know, so I've always
been really really interested in conservation and the environment. And
my second book, which was called Rewilding the World was
about conservation projects. So I do have some background as
(03:01):
a you know, enthusiast. I'm really sort of an amateur.
I'm not you know, professional, I'm not a biologist, but
it's something I've always been interested in writing about.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So my very first book was called Death in the
Air and it was about the nineteen fifty two air
pollution disaster that happened in London. And I remember pitching
that first. I don't even think it made it to
my editor. I think my agent said, I don't know
if this is going to make it as a book,
because I didn't know how many people were that were
going to be that interested in the systemic issue of
(03:33):
pollution and you know, the all of the sulfi dioxide
and all of the talk I had to get into.
But when you make it collide with a serial killer
and of so many dramatic stories that comes with stories
about pollution and people dying and government cover up and everything,
then then it made it sort of a mainstream story.
(03:54):
Have you found that too? Was it the environmental part
first for you or was it the story first and
you discovered there was this ecological connection?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, well, well, just first I know that book and
I have it, and I love it. I think it's
a really great contribution to the whole sort of air
pollution thank you thing, which sounds so technical, but it's
really so fascinating. And I think I first heard about
that whole thing through The Crown, you know, that episode
(04:28):
of The Crown, and then I kind of went looking
for more stuff about it and found your book, which
is just so fascinating. The first thing that came along
for me was was really the whole serial killer aspect
of this. I grew up in the Northwest in the
nineteen seventies near Seattle, so I was around, you know,
(04:52):
I was like thirteen in nineteen seventy four when the
whole Ted Bundy thing started happening and all these women
began disappearing from the area and from the region, and
so that was kind of very much.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
In my mind.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And all the time in the Northwest, you're reading these
headlines about, you know, why are there so many serial
killers here? And I'd always wondered about that, like was
this just a urban myths or legend? Was there really
something to it? And I was always curious about that.
So that was kind of the first piece in my mind.
(05:27):
But I never really envisioned writing a book about it.
It was just kind of something I was interested in.
But a few years ago it did happen. Upon some
additional information about where these guys came from. Ted Bundy
grew up in Tacoma. Gary Ridgeway, who would later be
(05:49):
the Green River Killer, he grew up quite close to
SeaTac Airport, which is between Tacoma and Seattle, so he
was right in that. Rea and I also read a
biography of Charles Manson and learned that he was in
the area at the same time as those guys were
(06:09):
growing up. He was on McNeil Island, incarcerated in the
federal prison just off Tacoma. And I just thought, Wow,
that's a really weird coincidence, Like, how did these guys
all spring from this one sort of obscure city. And
(06:30):
as I was kind of pondering that, I learned about
the smelter that was in Tacoma, the Osarco Smelter, sort
of by accident. I mean, Tacoma has always been known
as this really heavily industrialized city and it smelled terrible.
(06:51):
I mean, up until just a few years ago, there
was something called the Aroma of Tacoma, and Beddy, who
had been there, knew about that, and a lot of
it was from a pulp mill. But there were so
many you know, smelters and plants and refining plants and factories,
(07:12):
and you know, you didn't even really know what was
doing what. But I did learn about the smelter actually
by reading a real estate ad for a nearby place
on Vashion Island that said something about arsenic remediation. I mean,
I know Vashon Island because we used to have friends there,
(07:34):
and it's a beautiful, you know, rural spot just off
West Seattle in Puget Sound, and I just couldn't fathom, like,
how did they get arsenic and Fashion Island And so
you know, started googling that, and like five minutes later,
I'm deeply into the history of smelting.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Well, what is smelting? Is that melting down and creating
something else with them? Is that what that is? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
And I think a lot of people I don't think
I really understood what it was when I first started
reading about it. I think it's such a sort of
specific to the era of the you know, eighteen hundreds
and nineteen hundreds, because that's when all this stuff really
needed to be made. We needed metal, and so these
(08:26):
these smelters sprang up. And yes, they were taking in
rocks or ores that had metal in them from mines
and then essentially heating them and smelting them, which means
just taking apart, you know, the different components, the metallic
components that are in those ores and separating the silver
(08:50):
and the gold and the arsenic and the lead and
copper really became the chief metal that was being smelted
in a lot of these places. But since all these
other metals existed, they were also finding ways to monetize,
as we would now say, and arsenic was used to
(09:14):
create pesticides and insecticides that were used in the forties
and fifties, and you know they were actually used in
eastern Washington on the apple orchards and so forth. So
it was a huge industry at one time. It no
longer is. I mean, most of the smelters in this
(09:35):
country have cloths due to EPA regulations. But at the
time that I was growing up, and when Ted Bundy
and Carrie Ridgeway were growing up in the Northwest, that
plant was putting tons of lead and arsenic into the air.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Were there lawsuits happening in this time period at all?
Is this the height of smelting and pollution in the
seventies when Bundy and and were there.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, there were, you know, beginning in the sixties, communities
started waking up to the hazards of this stuff, which
were kind of hard to ignore because like you could
hang out laundry and Tacoma for example, and it would
get all these weird spots on it because of the arsenic.
(10:23):
Pets would die, you know after walking in it. You know,
people were finding the paint on their cars and their
boats was being eaten away by the acids that were
coming out of the smokestack. So people were just starting
to kind of freak out about it. But Asarco was
very controlling about the information that they let out. And
(10:47):
of course they were also a huge, huge employer in
the North Dakoma area, and so people didn't want to
sue a Sarco because you know, those jobs were at stake,
and there was always this fear that the plant would
close down.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
You know, I was thinking about the time in London,
you know, I had to do all this research on
pollution in London that there was a period where you know,
everybody's burning trees, right, and then the trees go and
that's when coal comes and then you see all of
this pollution. So you said, what eighteen hundred seventeen hundreds
is really when this started? And this must have just
(11:29):
built up. It has to be in the soil, is
it in the water?
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And you know Puget Sound, there's there's quite a lot
of lead and copper and other things at the bottom
of Puget Sound. There are issues. They did quite a
lot of cleanup during the superfund era because the Sarca
smelter and Tacoma eventually closed in eighty six then became
(11:57):
a huge superfund site, and they did a lot of
cleanup in the neighborhood around the smokestack and in North Dakoma.
But you know, like a lot of these super fun things,
they run out of money eventually, and so even though
the most important parts of the cleanup were accomplished, there's
(12:18):
a lot of areas around the fringes that I think
never got the treatment that they should have.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
So we've had so far. I've written down Bundy and
Manson and Gary Ridgeway. Did you include BTK in that
Dennis Raider also in that group.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
No, he was actually in Wichita, Kansas. That's where he
committed the majority of his murders. Although there I think
they're now finding out that he may have gotten over
into Oklahoma at one point and killed a couple of
women there. But yeah, he was down in Kansas and
in an area that became known for its own smelter,
(12:55):
Oh my gosh, in the nineteen hundreds. That whole south
east east corner of Kansas has a lot of coal
in it, and so there were a lot of open
pit mines and a zinc smelter in the town where
he was born, I think, and he spent a lot
of time with his grandparents who had farms in that
(13:18):
region and may or may not have been exposed to lead.
We certainly know that that Ted Bundy and Ridgway were
pretty heavily exposed to lead, both from where they lived
and Ridgway worked most of his life painting trucks, and
the paint for big trucks is exempt from lead restrictions,
(13:43):
So I think he was getting it from a number
of different sources. But yeah, I think Raider, Denis Rader,
the BTK killer, is just so interesting because he kind
of represents like Ridgeway, the mentally limited serial killer who
just kind of does the same thing over and over
(14:06):
and over again and seems to have the mentality of
like a you know, about a sixth grader or something.
I mean, whereas you also see people who are exposed
to lead who are quite smart, like Bundy, because I
think it really affects people at different times and different
in their development and in different ways, and so there's
(14:28):
a whole range of effects that you can see in
the individual.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Is this brand new thinking? And actually in a way,
I don't even know where to start, because we could
start with how do these pollutants if we just take
you know, the Tacoma area, how do they affect everyone?
Just in general? Is there with arsenic? I mean, I
know the normal way I could see with arsenic, you know,
blackening of organs, sometimes the blackening of a face. But
(14:56):
that's for me the eighteen hundreds. I don't know what
it would be like coming out of a smeltering plant.
So can we talk in general just about what everybody
was experiencing?
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Sure? Yeah, I mean they eventually were able to demonstrate
that the guys who were working in the plants where
arsenic was produced had a higher level of lung cancer specifically,
or respiratory diseases, so that was a specific thing that
(15:25):
was tied to their exposure. I think in the community
it was much harder to establish a connection to health
because OSARGO did everything that they could to quash any
kind of research that was being done. So eventually they
did come up with some, you know, just some very
(15:47):
basic readings on how much arsenic the kids were being
exposed to, which was a lot. But the thing that
I was really interested in was the lead because lead
has been shown to have, as I said, a whole
range of effects, but one of them is that if
(16:07):
you're exposed to lead as a child while your brain
is still developing, it can lead to a really profound
effect in the development of the frontal cortex and the
things that we our brain uses to control our behavior.
And so people who have had serious let exposure can
(16:32):
show a lot of aggression, their higher rates of juvenile
delinquency as these kids get older, and higher rates of
violent crime. Those associations are pretty well established at this point.
It's only in very recent years that scientists have also
begun to link let exposure to psychopathy and to psychopaths
(16:59):
who have been caught and have been you know, who
have agreed to be interviewed or studied or whatever. There
is no they're now showing a link to that.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
So there is a definitive link between lead and aggressive behavior,
not with everybody. But is that an MRI or how
does that show up?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, they have done MRIs. There's a guy, a biologist
in England, Adriane Raine, who did a whole book about
this where he looked at all these different contributing factors,
including you know, lead and Cadmium is another heavy metal
that's often mentioned in this regard, which seems to operate
(17:42):
a lot like lead if you get it in your system.
There was a mass shooter, one of the first mass
shooters in California in the eighties, who killed some people
in a McDonald's near San Diego. He worked with cadmium
and was shown to have an enormous amount of academium
in his body after autopsy. So Rain looked at all
(18:07):
of this. He looked at diet, he looked at I
think head trauma. But he has he reproduces a lot
of MRIs in his book and one of the interesting
things that has come along more recently. I'm not quite
sure whether he talked about it or not. I think
it's more recent, but there appears to be kind of
(18:27):
a real gender difference in how men and women respond
to lead exposure. That men seem to be much more
profoundly affected in the whole frontal cortex than women, Which
is not to say that women don't share some of
the impulsivity. That's another thing that's caused by lead. And
(18:53):
they've done these graphs that show, you know, because of
course there was leaded gas between nineteen fifties in the
nineteen eighties, and so you can show the rise and
violent crime on these graphs really tracks quite closely to
the availability and use of letted gas, and then it
(19:14):
falls off quite sharply in the nineties once leaded gas
had been withdrawn from the market and once smelters started
closing as well. So, yeah, with women, it tended to
be I mean, I don't know if you remember, but
in the seventies and eighties there was this big rise
in teen pregnancies, and so that's been used as a
(19:38):
kind of metric to look at what happened with women
in that period.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Is this argument an argument that environmentalists have made in
order to say no to leaded gas in the past,
no to smelters. I mean, it seems like, you know,
save the environment, Yeah, lower crime, I mean, or is
that just too far out there for Congress to wrap
its head around. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
I think medical doctors have been arguing since the nineteen
twenties that putting this much lead into the environment was
an incredibly dangerous thing to do, and they're not focusing
so much, you know, on it as an environmental issue,
but as a human health issue, and saying that this
(20:26):
is going to have terrible effects on human health generally,
because lead doesn't just you know, cause crazy behavior, it
also causes all kinds of other diseases, you know, respiratory
diseases and heart disease. I think als has now been
(20:46):
linked to lead. So there's a whole range of just
really terrible facts and the fact that you know, industry
just took those recommendations in the twenties and thirties and said, oh,
this isn't going to be a problem, yeah, you know,
(21:06):
and just did this experiment on the entire population of
the country and of course around the world. Because lighted
gas was sold everywhere.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Let's talk about the industrialists who profited off of this.
I know this is another part of your book. Where
does that fit in for you? Is that the history
and sort of the craven, selfishness and money hungry industrialists
that are causing this, or where does that fit for you? Well?
Speaker 2 (21:35):
That was to me the critical piece that made me
feel like there was a book in this material, because
I didn't want to just write about serial killers, fascinating
though they are.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
My audience would disagree with you, I think that, okay,
But I.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Just I wasn't really moved to write an entire book
about that phenomenon. But when I learned about the environmental
link to this, that to me was just huge because
it was a really overwhelmingly emotional thing to learn about
what these people did to places that I really care about.
(22:15):
You know, Puget Sound is one of the most beautiful
places in the country, and the fact that these people
just deliberately did the most incredible damage to it without caring,
without caring about the community, without caring about the long
term effects, was just amazing to me. And I think
(22:40):
that as people read the book, I hope that they
start to see the link between you know, the actual
individual serial killers and their behavior, their constant lying, their
you know, lack of empathy, and the corporate serial killers
who just deliberately went out and poisoned generations of children deliberately.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Did this begin with the building of the railroads? Is
that sort of where all of this started in the
Pacific Northwest? What was them? I know we took about smelting,
but was that really the beginning is getting all of
these minerals or was it building things? Well?
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, I think that the railroads, the development of the
railroads and mining went hand in hand because the railroads
were designed to shift the ores, the rocks from the
mines to Tacoma. I mean, the last piece of the
railroad that ends in Tacoma. That's why it was built,
(23:46):
essentially was to do that service. And for a long
time there was this terrible smelter in Idaho which was
connected to the Tacoma smelter, which also, I mean just
into the nineteen seventies was poisoning kids in an interior
(24:07):
valley in Killogg, Idaho.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
If we shift back momentarily to the serial killers, I
was thinking about the brain defense with all of this
with the air pollution, which to me, when someone says
the brain defense in court, which usually what has been
explained to me is CTE or another kind of head trauma,
and it's not to get somebody out, it's usually a
mitigating circumstance to maybe get them knocked down from the
(24:32):
death penalty to life or something. I know that the
cases vary. Has anyone ever used sort of environmental pollution
or anything like that as part of mitigating circumstances in
a criminal trial? Has any of this evidence come up
in a criminal trial, not that.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I'm aware of. Bundy, of course did his lawyer's death
row attorneys did attempt and then insanity you know defense.
They tried to go back and say that he he
wasn't fit to stand drial, which he may not have been. Actually,
I actually find their arguments pretty compelling at this point.
(25:08):
But of course that didn't you know, I think that
the bar for that is set so high and is
so rarely you know, superseded, that it just certainly didn't
work for him. But yeah, I'm not aware of anybody
using doesn't mean it hasn't happened, but certainly not lead
or cadmium or something like that. And I guess this
(25:30):
is a good moment to say that. I think that
there are always lots of factors that probably produce a
serial killer. It's not just lead exposure. I mean you
mentioned CTE, the head trauma, which is surely a factor
with some of these guys, you know that who have
had brain damage, maybe caused by physical abuse. There's also
(25:54):
you know, sexual abuse, there's poor diet a lot. If
you look at the history of a lot of these guys,
they were raised and often in pretty extreme poverty. People
have also talked about, you know, the whole period in
the nineteen fifties when doctors used fourceeps to deliver babies
and you know, possibly cause brain damage with forceps. So,
(26:18):
you know, I think there's just a whole range of
things that can go into this, and you have to
consider all of that as well.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I do get asked, do you believe that people are
inherently evil like a Ted Bundy or a Jeffrey Dahmer,
you know, do you think they're born evil or predisposed
to do things like this? What do you think?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
To me? That question seems rooted in a kind of
religious understanding of good and evil, which I do not
kind of that's not the way I see things, so
I don't really interpret them that way. Of course, their
actions are evil, I mean, yea, their actions are are
just horrific to the extreme, and so I certainly understand
(27:05):
why people want to say that. But as to somebody
being born evil, I mean, again, we've been talking about
all these things that can cause brain damage, which, yeah,
you can have brain damage just from being born. It happens.
But in terms of, like, you know, the whole issue
of just you know, somebody being sort of imbued with
(27:27):
the devil or being a Satanic or something, that's just
not really how I think about things.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Nor do I, but I do ask quite a bit.
But listen, I understand that, and I always preface it
when I answer the question you know, and I answer
it by saying, no, it's the same thing you did,
which is I think that people do evil acts. I
think that oftentimes there are things that are happening that
we don't know, or maybe we don't want to know
because the acts are so evil you don't want to
(27:54):
have any kind of sympathy for these people. And there's
always the argument, well, the guy right sitting on the
other side of us has the exact same brain damage
or whatever it is, and he hasn't gone and done anything.
But I really feel like there's so many factors that
go into it, and true crime in general gets a
(28:14):
lot of bad flag of glorifying the killer. And I
think that this is really different what we're talking about,
because this is not saying how interesting Bundy was and
how brilliant Dennis Raider was or anybody else. This is
looking at literally the things that affect everybody and how
they might affect somebody who has these, you know, experiencing
(28:35):
these added circumstances all on top of that. It's a
tapestry that causes someone to become an attorney versus somebody
to become a state at home father and somebody to
go out and kill twelve people.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Right, you know, the last thing I want to do
is and in fact, I think I tried to explain
what these guys did in a way that would not
only not glamorize them, but would kind of take them
out of that genre, because you know, we're now so
used to this conception of the serial killer as a genius,
(29:07):
you know, somebody who is sort of devilishly clever at
evading detection and coming up with these very bizarre, elaborate crimes.
I don't really think that much of that is true.
You know, Ted Bundy was not a genius. He was
somebody who was who was clever at evading detection at
(29:30):
a time when there was no DNA, you know. And
that's true of most of the rest of the guys
that I'm talking about here, Dennis Rader in Kansas and
Richard Ramirez who grew up in El Paso. These guys
clearly had something wrong with them, whether it was all
led or whether it was lead and a whole bunch
(29:52):
of other stuff added in, which I think is probably
the case. I think we need to start thinking about
them differently than we have based on you know, Hollywood tropes,
you know, the whole Silence of the Lambs and the
Hannibal Lecter and all of that stuff. I mean, those
things are entertaining, but I don't think they really capture
(30:16):
the real sort of debased quality of the thinking of
these guys.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
I agree. So I think, you know, that's why your
book is really interesting. As you're taking the what I
would say, these are killers who all have this weird
mystique around them, and you sort of dispel it and say,
part of this is lad. There's a lot that happens
here that is the sexiness is not the right word.
But for the people who really really are into the
(30:45):
serial killers and who glorify them, reading about their exposure
to lead is going to kind of take down that fantasy.
And there are quite a lot of people who think
like that that take that fantasy down a notch. So
you're really revealing the person behind the murders that are happening.
And I think a lot of people don't want that.
I don't think they want to know about the awful
(31:08):
childhood's or you know, Bundy feeling like he was a bastard,
you know, and rejection and all of that stuff. I
don't think that they want that. I think they want
that kind of image.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
So yeah, So it's interesting what you're doing in the book.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
We do, of course, have to recognize how rare this is.
But the whole argument that like, oh, you know, if
lead causes this kind of behavior, why wasn't everybody in
Tacoma a serial killer?
Speaker 1 (31:35):
I just don't.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
I think that's the wrong question, because you know, it's
like with cigarettes or tobacco. You know, there are people
who smoke until they're ninety years old and they don't
die of lung cancer. But does that mean it doesn't
cause lung I mean, of course tobacco causes lung cancer,
and arsenic and lead do have specific effects, and they
(32:00):
have raised the violent crime rate into com up, which
was very high. I'm looking at serial killers because that's
a way to tell this story in a way that
I think people will comprehend. But there were I think
real world consequences and costs to you know, blanketing an
(32:21):
entire populated city with these substances.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Now where do the smelters across the United States stand today?
Do we have a lot of them still? And I
know that you talk more that it's not just smelters,
it's fertilizer and so many other things. But that's one
of the big subjects.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
What I'm talking about were what's called primary smelters, where
they actually brought them rocks from mines and melted them
and separated the metals and created you know, pure copper
and lead and so forth. Those have largely disappeared from
this country because of EPA regulations and because it just
(32:58):
became far tooensive to operate them, partly because of regulations
and partly because of you know, commodities, that these commodities
were readily available and being produced in other countries where
it was cheaper to do so. And so now you
find primary smelters largely in places like China and Russia
(33:21):
and South America and in places that don't have the
regulations that we enacted. The thing that we do still
have are recycling plants where you know, you take your
lead car battery for example, when it's used up, and
those recycling plants are themselves kind of a secondary smelter
(33:46):
that is separating out the valuable metals from these batteries
and other things, and they can be quite polluting as well.
And PR did a piece recently about a you know,
a recycling plant in Florida that was emitting a lot
of lead and that was also exposing its workers to
(34:09):
incredible amounts of lead.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Well, let me ask you, I did not know a
lot about radio isotopes until maybe a year or two ago.
Is that something that they can study? You know, when
you can pull somebody's hair, I assume you could do
it with blood too, and just sort of see the
different regions where they came from. Can we find out pollution?
I think we can right from studying what blood hair,
(34:33):
what would it be?
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah. In fact, in al Paso, somebody did do a
study because an al Pasa, the a Sarco smelter there
had been denying for years that they were the source
of so much of the lead that was being deposited
in the city. They kept saying, oh, it comes from
traffic and you know cars and trucks because I ten
(34:58):
goes through El Paso, for example. So they kept pointing
to other places that might have been producing the lead poisoning.
So a scientist did a study of exactly that and
was able to kind of nail them on this because
you can tie the lead chemically to where it came
from and how it was being produced. Don't ask me
(35:21):
to explain how, because I'm not a chemist and I
can't speak to that, but yeah, it has been done.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
I wonder if there's ever been a thought of, you know,
not exooming bodies, but moving forward. You have a Jeffrey
Dalmer who says, please study my brain and figure out
why I did this. I wonder if there would be
a way or if there would be an interest in
testing you know, these people. I know it's only a
handful of people that these, I mean the man accuse
of the Long Island serial murders for example, and seeing
(35:54):
you know, what the what the pollution levels are as
just part of a study. I think that would be
so interest.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, there are ways to do that, perhaps at autopsy.
The issue with testing people for lead is that they're
very inexpensive and readily available blood tests for lead that
capture a picture of how much you currently you know,
is circulating in your blood stream, but that has to
(36:24):
have been very recent exposure. So you know, say you
were in an area that had some lead in the air,
or you ate something, or a child ate some paint chips.
You know, they can find that out if it's a
very recent exposure. The trickier thing is to do a
study or a test that shows how much lead exposure
(36:48):
you've had over your lifetime, because lead in the body
is deposited in the bones and the teeth, and those
are harder too. You know, there are, in fact, I
think these very kind of elaborate tests that can be
done to show what's happening with lead in the bones,
(37:08):
But those machines are few and far between, and those
are very expensive tests to run. So it's a complicated issue.
And I don't know that anybody's ever gonna say, oh,
we need to do a study of serial killers and
find out about their their lead exposure. I kind of
doubt it.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
That's interesting. I didn't know, you know, I've never really
dealt with lead before, but I knew that carbon monoxide
stays in your body for a very long time, and
because I remember from death in the air, they were
able to test from bodies that had been buried for
a very long time to figure out really Yeah, okay,
So when you talk about Bundy and you talk about
(37:49):
you know, Manson, I guess I'm thinking particularly of Gary
Ridgeway and Bundy. In the book, you do get into
their crimes. Did you feel like you wanted to do
that that it's just kind of you can't just name
these people. You have to be able to explain what
happened with them. Or was it an illustration for you
of sort of the cause and effect in a way,
(38:10):
not just of the pollution, but of everything that goes
into what happens in their backgrounds.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Yeah, I think that their behavior becomes so robotic almost
kind of they're kind of like automatons, you know. One point,
I talked a little bit about doctor Jackyl and mister
Hyde because it almost has that quality of like, you know,
and Ted Bundykins seem to be a normal law student
(38:38):
one moment, and then two hours later he's driving around
picking up some woman or attacking a woman on the
street and seizing her. And you know, the repetitiveness of
their crimes I thought was important, and also the similarity
between these guys the things that they do. I mean,
(39:00):
Bundy is sort of the chief example of this, but
when you look at his crimes next to other Tacoma
rapists and murderers and raider in a different part of
the country and Ramirez, who you know, his crimes are
so completely off the wall. I mean, there's something so
(39:27):
aberrant about their behavior that eventually, you know, I think
you can see the similarities between them, which to me
speaks to some similarity in what's gone wrong with them.
Whether it's a whole constellation of things that includes let exposure,
that's the question. But I think it's important to see
(39:50):
that for the reader to understand this isn't Hannibal Lecter,
you know, plotting some incredibly clever thing. These are sexual
crimes overwhelmingly, and that I think was part of why
I wanted to kind of tell a little bit of
the story of the nineteen seventies from my perspective, because
(40:13):
I think people may have forgotten what it was like
or didn't ever, you know, because they were younger. They
didn't know what it was like to be live during
the seventies and how different differently rape was perceived at
that time.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Now I'm wondering about everybody, and I know you didn't
probably study any of these folks, but like in Israel,
keys who came from Alaska, isn't that kind of a
heavily polluted area.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Also, he is one of the last people that I
talk about. Yeah, he he was born in Utah and
then moved to Washington State and the area where he
grew up was incredibly remote in the northeast part of
(40:56):
the state. But the one thing that was out there
was the lead smelter he lived. You know, he was
living with these crazy his parents were crazy, you know,
white nationalists, and they were living this completely isolated you know,
in a kind of a log cabin out in the wilderness,
(41:19):
and I think there was a lot of hunger in
that family. The mother kept having kids. It was a
very large family. I think he was one of the
He was the second oldest, and constantly went out, I think,
to fish in the Columbia River, which was heavily heavily
polluted by the smelter, which is right up in British Columbia,
(41:41):
and shoot game like deer. I mean, who knows what
I mean. Obviously he grew up in an environment in
which there was a incredible poverty and privation and hated
his parents, who he became strange trum at the age
(42:01):
of sixteen. But you know, you wonder what different elements
went into creating this person who was so so.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Lethal Golden State Killer. Did you look at all him
Northern California?
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Yeah, I mean I actually did look at him and
was really interested in him, but took him out just
because there was was getting to be too many serial
kills the book and we didn't want it to read
like an encyclopedia. But yeah, fascinating again, the poverty of
(42:37):
his background. I think he was abused, physically abused. Hard
to say what you know, he might have been exposed to.
But he was running around, you know, gigging frogs, which
he apparently ate out of this oh boy river which
was next to a raytheon plant. So I mean, he
needs his own book, which of course he got with
(42:59):
Michelle mac Because he committed so many different crimes over
such a long period of time, you almost can't summarize
what he did.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Well, I was going to tell you, you know, my other
show Buried Bones with Paul Holes, who of course studied
the Golden worked in the Golden State killer case. We
did an episode from Australia nineteen sixty three and it
was a murder investigation of a couple who were cheating
on their spouses and went down to a river bank
(43:30):
and we're having sex and the next day somebody finds
them dead and they're trying to figure out did the
spouses do it? And it was under all of these
odd circumstances. Decades later, they did studies and found out
that during that time period that river was so heavily
polluted that when they were on the ground, it killed them,
both of them. Oh, it's so fascinating. Paul almost didn't
(43:54):
believe it, and I actually I think I had to
send him to study. And there was a couple to
win men who in the sixties in Australia in the sixties,
it would have been no no for them to get
caught together. But they were having a makeout session they
heard the other couple come in. They had to crouch
into the bushes, not to spy on the couple, the
first couple, but because one of them left the purse nearby,
(44:17):
so they were crouching and they were low enough so
they weren't on the ground where the river with the
pollution was coming off on the river, but they were
squatting down low enough where they both felt sick, like
they both thought they were going to pass out, I know,
and then they ended up leaving. They said that that
river was so polluted that was bubbling up and it
was some nearby plant and it had been known as
being an awful polluter. And so you know, they ran
(44:40):
all these tests on these two bodies and that's what
they found out. So you know, when I unraveled these
stories for Paul Holes, he never knows where it's going,
and he was really convinced this was murder, and I said, no,
talk to the industrialists who created this plant nearby, and
I had never heard. I just didn't know that that
pollution would do that. I knew from death in the air.
(45:02):
But they've done animal testing, I'm assuming with lead and arsenic.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, I mean, obviously you can't test those on people deliberately.
Some of the more interesting tests are early in the fifties,
who were done with kids looking at their teeth because
they could measure you know, what they call the indigenous
teeth or something, you know, because they lose their kids
lose their teeth, and so you can take those teeth
(45:28):
and then test them for lead. And yeah, that was
showing significant aspects of aggression in people's behavior. But do
you know what kind of pollution the Australia case.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Was, or let me see high concentrations of hydrogen sulfate
from a nearby flour mill that had been dumping waste
into the river for sixty years and in an area
of the river that was dammed right where this couple
was found, so the gas was built up and the
river bottom could suddenly release large amounts of hydrogen soul fight.
(46:05):
Can you imagine that? I mean, oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Yeah, that's incredible. It reminds me of the you know
the descriptions I read about coming out of the Bunker
Hill mines and smelter in Idaho, because kids used to
be afraid that their balls would fall in the stream
that went through town because they would melt. You know,
(46:29):
if you had like a big rubber ball and it
fell in, it would melt. And there was you know,
in that town. There was an elementary school directly across
the street from the smelter smoke stack, and the teachers
would sometimes say, you know, they would be afraid that
the building was on fire because there was so much
(46:50):
smoke in the building. So yeah, that whole thing of
the incredibly polluted rivers. I mean when you think back
to the seventies and the you know kay Oga River
that caught on fire, which was sort of one of
the reasons why we now have you know, the Clean
Water Act and the EPA and so forth. But yeah,
(47:11):
Australia is full of stories about you know, mining pollution
like that because they had so many mines. My husband
and I once were driving through a place in Tasmania
where we're driving to a national park. Of course I'd
never been there before, and we ended up driving through
(47:31):
this town and a hillside that was so heavily polluted
by copper mines that it was orange. Like the whole
hillside behind this town was the most unnatural shade of orange.
And I mean I was afraid to get out of
(47:51):
the car, you know. And there are a lot of
places in this country where you can drive in Arizona,
for example, if you get off the beaten track, you'll
find yourself, you know, driving through open pit mines. I
think there are three remaining primary smelters in this country,
and two of them are in Arizona.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Well, you probably know this answer just from your own experience.
But when I was doing interviews for Death in the
Air of the people who were alive during the smog
in fifty two, I asked Holly, six of them gave
me the exact same response. I said, what did it
smell like? What did it feel like to you? The
air pollution? And I was wondering if you had sort
of this way that you could respond as far as
(48:35):
lead and viscerally, how it feels. They said it smelled
when the small came five day smog, it smelled like
rotten eggs in a barrel. And then one of the
women who everybody agreed with said that when you would
breathe it in, it was if you can imagine metal
shavings and swallowing metal shavings, That's what it felt like.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
A lot of people and to come out remember that
and associated it with arsenic. They remembered the metal taste
in their mouth. There was one guy who said it
was like playing tennis with a lighted match in your mouth.
Oh but yeah, which that was such a weird image.
(49:18):
And there's another guy I talked about who worked briefly
at the smelter as a college kid during the summer,
but his father worked there for years as a foreman,
and he had what they called smelter nose, which he
had a septum that inside his nose there was just
(49:39):
this hole and he could put his finger through the
hole in his nose because it had just been eaten away.
So yeah, there were a lot of stories about that,
and I'm not sure how you separate whether that was
arsenic or lead. I certainly remember, not that I was
too far away to have experienced the taste sensation, but
(50:04):
I do remember the nineteen seventies in the Northwest having
more smog, and I think some of that must have
been from the the asarca smelter.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
If there is one thing that you want people to
walk away from when they read your book, not a
theme necessarily, or a question that they would like an
answer to, what do you think that would be? What
is the point? At a dinner party you say that
you wrote the book for.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
Yeah, I mean, I don't think the book is intended
as a public service announcement, and I hope that people
find it compelling and entertaining and a good story, good
narrative about this subject. But yeah, I mean, I do
think that people need to know more about the incredible
(50:53):
sort of dangers of legacy pollution that are still out there.
I think people because we don't see it, you know,
because we don't see the lead in our environment, we
don't realize how dangerous it is. I mean, every once
in a while there's a story that comes along, like flint,
you know, Michigan, the lead and the pipes, or lead
(51:17):
and paint in older housing. But I think we have
to realize that everybody can be exposed to this. It
can be in crops, it can be in toothpaste, it
can be in baby food, in rice. It's something that
is so dangerous that we really have to get a
handle on how to get it out of our environment,
(51:42):
and if we don't, we're going to live with the consequences.
I mean, I just don't know how us to say it,
but it's out there and we have to figure out
a way to deal with environmental issues that's not political.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(52:33):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked
(52:54):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked and on Facebook
at Wicked war birds Pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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