June 30, 2025 • 58 mins
Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?
As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson—Fraser’s Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy’s Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was hardly unique in the West. As Fraser’s investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers.
Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk. MURDERLAND: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers-Caroline Fraser
As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson—Fraser’s Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy’s Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was hardly unique in the West. As Fraser’s investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers.
Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk. MURDERLAND: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers-Caroline Fraser
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
killers in true crime history and the authors that have
written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every week,
another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Good Evening. Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of
Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in
American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body
dumps in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But
in the nineteen seventies and eight, Bundy was just one
(01:02):
perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder
across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and
nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall
of an epidemic of serial killing? As Murderland indelibly maps
(01:23):
the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers
in Mayhem, The Green River Killer, the I five Killer,
the Nightstalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson. Fraser's Northwestern
death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an
overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in ted
(01:48):
Bundy's Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper,
and arsenic smelters in the world, but was hardly unique
in the West. As Fraser's and Vents instigation inexorably proceeds,
evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only
sickened and blighted millions of lives, but also warped young minds,
(02:12):
including some who grew up to become serial killers. Murderland
transcends true crime, voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on
a profound quest into the dark heart of the real
American berserk. The book you were featuring this evening is Murderland,
(02:34):
Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, with
my special guest, Pulitzer Prize winning author Caroline Fraser. Welcome
to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Caroline Fraser, thanks for having me, happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Thank you so much, and congratulations on murder Land.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Well, thank you. It was a fascinating project to write,
although it took me in some unexpected directions.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
So let's talk about the origins before we get into
this incredible story. But just tell us how you came
to be the author of this story, How you came
to be again, the author of Murderland.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Yeah. Well, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in Seattle,
in a place called Mercer Island, which is a suburb
of Seattle in the middle of Lake Washington. As I
was growing up, some of these things happened. You know.
I was thirteen in nineteen seventy four when Ted Bundy
(03:46):
began committing the crimes that would be attributed to him,
although I think he actually started much earlier than nineteen
seventy four, But in any event, I certainly remember that time.
And in the years after that, people began asking the
(04:06):
question why are there so many serial killers in the
Pacific Northwest? And this was, you know, something that came
up over and over again in the press. The newspapers
would revisit this question every you know, couple of years
and print lists of how many serial killers there were
(04:29):
in the region. And I'd always kind of wondered about that,
like what accounted for this? Was it really a thing
or was it some kind of you know, urban legend.
So that was sort of in my mind for a
long time, and I worked on other projects, very different
(04:49):
kinds of things. But during COVID particularly, I was looking
for something that I could work on from home, and
I began looking at that question again and just trying
to investigate both the number of serial killers and their
(05:10):
individual stories in the Northwest and see where that led.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
You. Right early on in this book that you are
an amateur cartographer and you draw lines and make maps.
Tell us about your early map that you did.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yeah, well, you know, I had seen on various websites.
It's well known where Ted Bundy grew up in the
city of Tacoma. For example. He wasn't originally from there.
He was born in Vermont and spent a couple of
years in Philadelphia, but then ended up about the age
(05:51):
of five in Tacoma. And so I looked at where
he was living in Tacoma. I was struck by the
fact that another very prolific and well known serial killer,
Gary Ridgeway, was also from that area. That he grew
(06:11):
up just a couple miles east of SeaTac the airport
just north of Tacoma. And then another thing that I
learned about more recently was the fact that Charles Manson
had spent a significant amount of time being incarcerated on
(06:31):
McNeil Island, which is just off of Tacoma. So then
I had these three points on the map of where
these three guys were, and it was really quite striking
how close to each other they were. And that was
a map that sort of sent me back to the
(06:55):
drawing board, if you will, to think about the question
of is there anything these guys could have been exposed
to that would have led to where they ended up.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
You read about another map, they call it the Owl.
Tell us about this owl and its relation to what
you were just speaking about.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
The owl refers to the something that's called the Olympic
Wallawa Lineament, which came into being when a cartographer, a
man who drew maps professionally back in the forties. He
was drawing a map of Washington State and the northwest,
(07:45):
very very detailed and quite beautiful map. You can still
see it online. As he was finishing this map, he
happened to kind of glance across at sideways and saw
a line that goes from the very top of the
(08:06):
northwest tip of Cape Flattery. That's really the north westernmost
point of both Washington State and the United States. And
this this line, this depression in the map that he
noticed kind of cut southeast down across the state of
(08:30):
Washington and kind of carved it in two. And he
was so intrigued by this, which was really just created by,
you know, a kind of depression in the land. He
was so intrigued by this that he called it the Owl,
the Olympic Wallawa lineum and he began theorizing about what
(08:54):
it might be. It probably he thought it was probably
a fault line. I think most people now think he
was probably right about that. There are many, many fault
lines that cut through Washington State, and many of them
have only been discovered recently with the kind of light
(09:15):
art technology that can see beneath the surface. And it
has been discovered and is quite a cause of concern
that there are so many fault lines in Washington, particularly
lying under very heavily populated parts of Seattle, that it
(09:37):
is felt that this could create quite a terrible situation
if there's another really big earthquake, the way there was
about seven hundred years ago. So I used the Owl
as a kind of image of both the perils of
the natural world in that region, which were certainly in
(10:03):
some ways taken advantage of by these serial killers, because
one of the things that both Bundy and Ridgeway, for example,
did was to take their victims out into the woods
and dispose of their bodies in places where they would
not readily be found, and that made it particularly difficult
(10:25):
for any forensic investigation to take place. So the owl
is really kind of a metaphor for the hazards of
this region.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Let's talk about some of the writing you have in
a chapter called the Smelter. First off, tell us for
people that don't know what a smelter is. And you
take us to Philadelphia and you posit that you're not
quite sure if it's Lloyd Marshall or Jack Worthington, the
father of Ted Bundy. But you take us to Philadelphia
(10:59):
and the smelters and the situation there. You say, the
city is full of smelters. Tell us what this is.
You've called it a commercial volcano. Tell us what smelters are,
their purpose? And Philadelphia and Ted Bundy's childhood.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Ted Bundy of course never really knew who his father was,
and I think this was a source of great kind
of anguish and rage for him. He was born in
a foundling home in Vermont. He was the product of
some kind of either illicit relationship that his mother had
(11:39):
or we don't know exactly, but she was sent to
this home where nuns would take care of babies that
were born. Legitimately, she left him there for a couple
of months, then she took him home with her to Philadelphia,
which was called the City of Smelters because it had
(12:00):
more smelters than just about any other place, although I
will say that at the time smelters were just everywhere.
They were in every major American city, and what they
were doing was producing metal. A smelter is designed to
take in these rocks or ores from mines, the kinds
(12:25):
of ores that have metals within them, and then they
melt them down and this produces all kinds of different
metals because the ores contain all these sort of associated
chemicals and metal, So they contained stuff like lead, copper, arsenic, cadmium,
(12:46):
and many many other metals, and they're burning them in
order to separate the metals so that they can separate out.
For example, silver evaluable metal. Gold, lead copper was very
valuable so a lot of these these smelters specialized in
(13:08):
one or the other metals, but produced all kinds of stuff,
a lot of which was going up the smokestack, and
Philadelphia's had because after the war it was producing so
much from it smelters that had a great deal of
lead pollution in Philadelphia, where where Ted spent a couple
(13:33):
of formative years. And then when Ted and his mother
went and moved to Tacoma, where her cousin lived, they
were moving to another place that had an very very
prominent smelter that belonged to the American Smelting and Refining
(13:54):
Company or a SARCO. And that smelter was right in
the middle of a very popular area, and Ted lived
always within just a few miles of that smelter. And
the thing that you have to know about lead is
that it is associated and this has been proven by
(14:17):
a number of scientific studies with aggression and violence in
the people who were exposed to it, especially children. It's
very dangerous for children to be exposed to lead because
it really changes the development of their brain and their
(14:38):
frontal cortex, and it causes you know, there's kind of
a time lag of about twenty years. But if a
child is exposed to lead at a young age and
has that as part of their makeup, then by the
time they're a teenager or a young adult, they may
(14:59):
be showing some of the neurological signs of light exposure,
which include violence, impulsivity, sort of an inability to control
their behavior.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
You read about Charles Manson and his stay at McNeil
Island prison, what is its proximity Tacoma to Tacoma and
also how was Charles Manson and other prisoners exposed to
lead and other chemicals from the smelters.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Mcdeil Island is about. It was, for instance, about seven
miles I think from where Ted Bundy was living. There
was another maybe five miles to the smelter, so it
was within about a ten or twelve mile radius of
the smelter and its smokestack. So it was getting some
(15:58):
degree of the fallout from that smoke stack. And the
thing that was unique about McNeil Island is that the
prisoners on the island were working in agriculture. They had
heard of cattle, They had crops that they were raising,
so they were raising all the food that they were
(16:20):
consuming on the Islands, and the water that they were
drinking was also from sources on the island, so they
had to have been exposed to some degree to the
fallout from that smoke stack. It's probably worth noting that
Charles Manson, by the time he ended up on McNeil Island,
(16:44):
was already an incredibly troubled individual. I'm not trying to
say that what he did was entirely down to lead.
He had a terrible experience as a kid and his mother,
his teenage mother, ended up in jail when he was
(17:06):
just three or four years old. He had been in
and out of institutions all his life, born in a
really poor coal mining town in the east, so he
obviously had many many strikes against him. But I don't
think the lead probably helped.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
You talk about some of the early effects that were
seen by people that were working in the industry producing
these chemicals, and just people their families and people in
proximity to these factories as well. You say Ted Bundy's
family in Philadelphia was only about four miles or less
(17:46):
than four miles away from one of these plants. So
what was some of the first things in the nineteenth
or the twentieth century that people noted and what was
the result of this sort of indication that there is
some side effects to this industry.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
One of the principal products that was contributing led to
the atmosphere early on was leaded gas. Leaded gas was
developed in the nineteen twenties, although it wasn't under as
heavy use then as it would be later. But immediately
(18:28):
when the Company's Standard Oil and DuPont and so forth
that we're developing leaded gas, when they started producing it
in large quantities, they made some mistakes really in they
didn't realize how grievously it was going to affect the
(18:49):
guys who worked in these plants. Two or three occasions,
they caused such severe lead poisoning in their workers that
people they started having hallucinations, became quite violent and rapidly died.
There were a number of people who died in several
(19:10):
incidents in these plants, and some people, some of these
workers who were so terribly affected didn't die, but were
affected really for the rest of their lives. They saw hallucinations.
Sometimes they called them the you know, the butterfly men,
because they were constantly sort of seeing hallucinations of things
(19:34):
flying around and would wave their hands at them. And
they continued, some of these guys to work at the plants,
but they were essentially really damaged emotionally and mentally by
what they'd been through.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now. It's very interesting you spoke about this
incredible effect of working with these chemicals and that being hallucinations,
and I think that's very important for the case that
you make in this book. And it's very interesting too
(20:12):
that one of the principal criminals psychopathic killers that you
focus on in this book is Gary Ridgeway and his
proximity to Ted Bundy and McNeil Island and Charles Manson.
But tell us also, as you write Gary Ridgeway was
experiencing hallucinations as well. So tell us a little bit
(20:36):
about Gary Ridgeway, where he lived near Seattle and the
hallucinations that he experienced.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Yeah, Ridgeway grew up just a couple miles east of
SeaTac at a time when aircraft jet aircraft were flying
with leaded gas. He also lived in close proximity to
a couple of major highways, including I five, and as
(21:05):
an adult he began working at the Kenworth truck plant
as a painter. He was somebody who sprayed the cabs
of big trucks and painted them at a time when
those paint formulations probably included lead, because lead had been
(21:31):
removed from house paint by that point, by you know,
the nineteen seventies, but there was an exemption that was
carved out for commercial paint applications which would have included
what he was doing. So he was he was exposed
to lead in you know, at least two or three ways.
(21:52):
And I'm not sure about the hallucinations, but he certainly
did begin behave in a profoundly kind of robotic way,
almost by doing the same things over and over and
over again, capturing women who he'd picked up sex workers,
(22:15):
runaway girls, enacting on them sort of the same behavior
again and again. He did like to have sex with
women outside, so he would often take these women out
in the woods to have sex with them. When he
was not able to do that when he had to
(22:36):
take them to his house. He had one wall of
his bedroom covered in a sort of silk screen photographic
image of the woods, so that he could feel like
he was having sex in the woods. In his House. Yeah,
he was an incredibly sort of robotic individual who captures
(22:57):
that sense. I think the a lot of these serial
kills had of just being trapped in this kind of
cycle of violence.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Did you single out these examples of especially aberrant crimes
and criminals such as Ted Bundi, Charles Manson, Gary Ridgeway,
and then later on you write about Jerry Brutos and
also Israel Keys. But did you single out these people
to demonstrate something specifically related to these chemicals? In other words,
(23:35):
are there extreme crimes related to what you consider extreme poisoning?
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Yes, I think to some extent. I was looking first
of all at a lot of the serial killers who
came from the Northwest, and looking at their proximity to
either letted gat sources of gas with highways, or smelters.
And then I began sort of opening it up and
(24:06):
looking at some other places, like, for example, because I
had spent a certain amount of time explaining the history
of Asarco, the smelting company which was owned by the
Guggenheim family, I looked at another smelter that they had
in El Paso and asked myself, well, were there any
(24:29):
infamous serial killers associated with El Paso, because I didn't
know of any. As soon as I got into the
research on that, immediately it turned out that Richard Ramirez,
the so called Nightstalker, that he had grown up in
El Paso, again only a few miles from the Asarco smelter,
(24:53):
which was a huge landmark in that town and ultimately
polluted quite a bit of El Paso and of the
CEO DoD Warrez on the other side of the border.
So that to me was very fascinating. So yes, I
did tend to focus on individuals who I could tie
(25:14):
to this chemical exposure. There are certainly other serial killers
whose exposure I can't figure out, or you know, you know,
maybe is a mystery, somebody like Son of Sam and
those figures. You know, it's it's harder to tie them
to this. But I think you also have to realize
(25:37):
that during this period you were born, between the say,
the nineteen forties and the nineteen eighties, everybody, no matter
who you are or where you lived, everybody was exposed
to letted gas.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
You talk about that Richard Ramirez's family just to lend
some credibility to this exposure. You said the entire family
had behavioral problems, at school and also physical ailments, but
especially had all of them had behavioral problems cited at school.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Yeah, it's sort of a tragic tale because there were
I think five kids in that family, and all of
them showed some kind of pretty severe physical and emotional illness.
Their mother was exposed to a lot of really damaging
(26:41):
chemicals from working in a boot factory in El Paso
when she was pregnant with Richard, and the father was
somebody who was quite violent himself and visited a lot
of of violence on the kids. Again, this brings up
(27:04):
the question of how much of this might have been led,
how much of it might have been other other exposures
and other events, Because the FBI, for example, in doing
their work on profiling, has often pointed out how many
serial killers have had either physical or sexual abuse or both,
(27:27):
maybe head trauma from beatings or other accidents or other
sources that can cause neurological damage as well. So there's
a whole host of things that may go into creating
these patterns of behavior, and we it's very very difficult
(27:48):
to tease them apart.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
You do state this case, though, that this predominance of
West Coast serial killers and also the correlation between the
proliferation of industries that spew this lead, arsenic, copper, all
of these toxic chemicals. Yes, you write that also to
(28:14):
sort of muddle the entire statistics, I imagine is lead gasoline.
But you do state the case of the increasing industries
and the chemicals that are spewed from their smokestacks, but
also the fight for and recognition of these chemicals as
(28:34):
toxins and the fight to have them removed. You talk
about the formation of the EPA and before that, initiatives
to try to clean up this industry that people recognize
as absolutely dangerous.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Yeah. I mean one of the really disturbing elements of
the story is that from the very beginning, even in
the nineteen twenty, there were physicians who were telling industry
representatives and government officials that they should never, never, never
(29:12):
allow let it casts to be sold, and that they
should do everything that they can to lower the amount
of lead in the environment, not increase it. Because it
was well known that lead is a you know, led
is one of the chief poisons that we have known
(29:32):
about for centuries, for millennium. I mean, the Greeks and
the Romans knew that it was very bad and arsenic.
I mean, everybody knows that arsenic is a poison. And
one of the things that happened during this period is
that industry really developed all the techniques that we would
(29:54):
be familiar with from our own time in terms of,
for example, the bacco industry. You know, the ways in
which industry tried to make these chemicals seem benign, like
they weren't really a problem, like they existed naturally in
the environment was one of the claims, which that's not
(30:19):
really true, and it's not true because we haven't. You know,
it took human beings to bring them out of the
environment and to make them much more potent in their
you know, inorganic arsenic, for examples, different than the arsenic
that you find in dirt or sometimes in water or
(30:40):
in shellfish. Inorganic arsenic is a product of industry and
is much much more poisonous than organic arsenic. And so
all the kind of misinformation that was being put out
bond liberately by these corporations that stood to gain from
(31:02):
smelters and leaded gas really did, as you say, muddy
the water for decades and provided an excuse for what
they were doing, which was really you know, a wholesale
medical disaster, because things like lead and arsenic do not
(31:26):
just cause the kind of behavior that I'm talking about.
Lead causes all kinds of other diseases, causes heart disease,
it's associated with als, it is something that you know
can cause all kinds of respiratory problems, and likewise with arsenic.
(31:47):
Arsenic is associated with lung cancer. So there are really
serious health effects across the board from all these chemicals,
and basically they were being foisted on the American public
and around the world under basically the corporations were just
(32:11):
lying about their effects and trying to convince people that
these things were safe. They were not safe, and we're
going to be dealing with the cleanup of these things
for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now. You read about the Clean Air Act
and Water Quality Improvement Act teen seventy and in nineteen
seventy one the Surgeon General decide no child should have
blood level blood lead levels exceeding forty micrograms. In your research,
(32:51):
you write about far exceeding that recommendation.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
It took me a really long time for the govern
were meant to kind of catch up, i think, to
where the medical community already was because there was so
much pressure coming from industry. But yes, the creation of
OSHA for worker safety, the creation of the EPA, and
(33:19):
all the different regulations and legislation that was passed to
clean up our air and water, those things all began
running right into and against the interests of the smelting
companies and the companies that were selling lioded gas. And
(33:40):
there was a real period of ten fifteen years where
they were engaged in a struggle political struggle really to
try to prevail to enact safety regulations that would really
try to reduce the amount of lead that kids, especially
(34:02):
were exposed to. And this took, you know, an unconscionably
long time, and it really was quite incremental. You can
see the CDC over the decades lowering the amount of
lead to which children can be exposed from you know,
sixty to forty to thirty to you know ten, and
(34:26):
now it's at three point five micrograms per desc leader
of blood. But even that is considered too much because
there really is no safe level of lead in the environment,
and no safe level of lead to which children can
be exposed, and this presents a huge problem for the
(34:49):
government because trying to lower the amounts of lead in
the environment is so expensive. You know, you're looking at
all of the old lead pipes that are in public
schools and old lead paint that are that's in military housing,
(35:10):
and just I mean, the problem is so widespread that
it costs millions and millions of dollars to address it.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
You're right that in Tacoma the crime rate rises twenty
percent in nineteen seventy four, and you write never has
the number of violent crimes been higher in America in
nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Yeah, nineteen seventy four I think as a real watershed year,
both for the rate of violent crime in Tacoma, in
the Northwest and across the country. And it is perhaps
not coincidentally the year in which Ted Bundy begins this
(35:58):
kind of series of of extremely high profile abductions disappearances
of women. Of course, we didn't know then who he was.
We wouldn't even know part of his name until July
of seventy four, when he abducted two women from Lake
(36:20):
Samamish on a hot July afternoon during an event in
which thousands of people had gathered on the beaches of
Lake Samamish, and he somehow abducted two women in separate
events on that same day. And that's when the kind
of news really exploded across the area, because that was
(36:45):
kind of the culmination of a number of other abductions,
including a couple of women in Seattle. And on that
day a number of people heard him say my name
is Ted, and so that was the first time anybody
had a name for him, and the police were able
to develop a couple of several composite drawings of his face,
(37:09):
including one that was recognized both by his girlfriend and
by a number of other people who knew him, including
Anne Rule, the true crime writer, who had met him
while volunteering at a rape crisis center in Seattle.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yes, very very interesting. You write that Ted Bundy lived
near astonishing high measurements of two hundred and eighty three
hundred and forty and six hundred and twenty parts per
million of lead from this rust and smokespac that he
(37:50):
lived nearby.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
Doubtless was exposed to lead, because we know now from
the very detail GIS map developed by the Department of
Ecology in Washington State we know how much lead was
in his front yard and his backyard and how much
arsenic and it was much higher than normal, So we
(38:16):
know he was exposed. The question remains how much did
that exposure influence his behavior.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
It's a very interesting point though, as well as getting
back to Ted Bundy that you you said that Ted
Bundy was reading True Detective magazine. Of course later he
works with alongside and Ruhl, who is an author coincidentally
writing for those same type of magazines.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Yes, she says that he asked her once for copies
of some of the magazines that she'd had articles in
because he wanted to use them in his so called research.
I mean, he was supposedly, for a short time was
helping out with some research that was being developed about
(39:08):
rape statistics in Seattle. Yeah, I mean it's just some
extraordinary you can't even make out these kinds of things.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Absolutely, he read about nineteen sixty one, Jerry Brutos marries
a seventeen year old in Corvallis, Oregon, and Jerry Brutos
suffers blackouts. Reportedly tell us a little bit about where
he is in proximity to the industries and near Tacoma.
(39:44):
Tell us about Jerry Brutos.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah, Brutos didn't have a particular Tacoma connection. But one
of the things that I found out about him from
Anne Rule's reporting in her book lust Ca about Jerry
Brudos was that he grew up in South Dakota, not
far from what would later become a superfund site for
(40:11):
its dumping of lead arsenate pesticides. One of the things
that the companies were doing to sell the arsenic that
they had left over from their smelting activities was to
develop arsenic into a whole bunch of different kinds of pesticides.
And when Jerry Brudos was growing up, like many rural
(40:36):
farm kits, those chemicals were in heavy usage and a
lot of kids were exposed that way, and I suspect
that he might have been as well, since he lived
so close to what would become a superfund site where
the water had been contaminated with these kind of chemicals,
(40:57):
and he had a number Like Richard Ramirez and his siblings,
Jerry Brutos had a number of strange diseases and symptoms
as a young kid. Also, as a young kid, he
developed a fetish for women's footwear for high heeled shoes.
(41:19):
He had a very harsh mother who punished him for
wearing women's clothing and shoes. They then moved to Oregon
and he became a sort of completely out of control
character who would approach women in parking lots on the
(41:41):
street and eventually did kill several women he encountered and
was very interested in making lead paper weights from parts
of their bodies.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Incredible, that uses as an opportunity to stop to hear
the messages. You're right about that lead exposure correlates with
higher adult crime rates, but you talk about that in
starting in nineteen ninety two, the crime rate starts to fall.
What is the correlation with lead and other chemicals and
(42:20):
the fight to have these chemicals recognized as the dangerous
elements that they are.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Leaded gas was removed from the market beginning in the
mid eighties, and that removal was complete by the early
to mid nineties. In this country, it had just become
so apparent that lead was a danger in the environment
(42:52):
and to human health, and they eventually succeeded the health
community in convincing Congress and regulatory agencies that it had
to be removed. So at the same time, the smelters
started going out of business because the prices of metals
(43:17):
had started to go down. They hit a real high
in nineteen seventy four for various reasons, which meant that
many of the smelters were kind of running flat out
in the mid seventies. But then prices started to be
affected and went down, and because of all the regulations,
(43:40):
basically many of them just could not stand business and
make a profit anymore. And so the Tacoma smelter closed
in nineteen eighty six, and many of the other smelters
around the country closed around the same time during the
mid eighties, and that led to a very sharp drop
(44:02):
off in the amount of lead in the atmosphere and
also in our blood levels. So you start to see
it go down very sharply in children's blood led levels, fortunately,
and in everybody's And so that was when the so
(44:23):
called lead crime hypothesis was born, because scientists looked at
the drop off of lead in the environment and the
drop off of crime and associated the two. And it's
been debated ever since. You know, there are other hypotheses
that point to other reasons why this might have occurred.
(44:47):
There were a lot of police associations, for example, claimed
that it was because policing increased and had a lot
more resources and more people or being incarcerated. There's also
a theory about abortion that has been very well publicized,
(45:08):
but for reasons that I think I try to explain
in the book a little bit. I think the leed
crime hypothesis does have these other things may be a factor,
but I think that the lead crime hypothesis has emerged
as kind of a leading contender that in answering that question.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
You write that lead exposure in childhood is linked to
brain volume loss. Where the subjects reach adulthood, the effects
are particularly notable. You write in men, why is that?
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Yeah, the answer to that is still a bit of
a mystery. I think that there are genes that have
been implicated in this. In other words, if you're a
male and you have lead exposure, and you have a
certain genetic component that that may influence how you react
(46:10):
to the lead exposure. But I think there's still a
lot of work going on trying to explain that. It
certainly is apparent from the MRIs. There's a guy who
published a book a few years ago, Adrian Rain, called
the Biology of Violence and He reproduced a number of
(46:32):
these MRI images the scans in his book, and you
can see that there is a sort of more marked
difference between men and women, which is not to say
that women don't have neurological effects from lead exposure. They do.
Their effects seem to be organized more around impulsivity. And
(46:55):
there are graphs that show, for example, a rye in
teenage pregnancy during the seventies and eighties that correlates to
the rise in juno delinquency and violent crime.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
But is there again, I'm probably asking the question again,
but is there some form or deuced recognize an extremity
and to the serial killers that you write about in
this book, the prolific serial killers that are on the
West Coast, and the profound effect of lead and other chemicals.
(47:39):
Is there a correlation to the extreme nature of these
particular psychopathic killers.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Well, I think there is. And one of the things
that I find so inescapable is the really bizarre nature
of some of these crimes, yes, which don't seem to
fit a mold either before or since. I mean, there
was just something so unhinged about some of these guys
(48:11):
and what they were doing. Really there was you know
many of these crimes were sexual in nature. The kind
of violence was so extreme, the sexual nature was extreme,
and the extent, you know, just the sheer number of
people who were involved. I mean Ridgeway for example. I
(48:34):
think he pled guilty to forty eight or forty nine murders,
but is suspected of far more, maybe twice as many
as that. So there's something about that that just feels
different and looks different. And I'm not a scientist, so
I can't really line up what we know about le exposure,
(49:00):
but I will say that they have now started to
do some studies that show a connection between psychopathy and
lead exposure, and that there seems to be a higher
rate of psychopaths who have led exposure versus the general public.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
You talk about write about the Arisco the refinery, the
smelter company, based on lawsuits, is going bankrupt in two
thousand and nine. It yields the biggest landmark settlement in
American history, one point seven billion. And you write, the
(49:46):
money goes to nineteen states, Washington State getting the line's share,
or a bigger share of one hundred and eighty eight million.
This is about arsenic in lead. And you write, about
that an area that was full of arsenic and lead.
They built a luxury hotel and condos in that area.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
Yeah, it's it's a very bizarre, bizarre phenomenon. I I
personally can't go to that area and not see what
used to be there. In part because Asarco the company,
while it was in operation, they actually created a giant
(50:31):
peninsula of land from the slag the waste products of
the mining. Once they had you know, separated the metals
out of it, they would dump all this stuff that
kind of looks like gravel, you know, it looks like
a sort of black gravel. And they dumped all this
(50:51):
and it created this just giant peninsula. That part of
it was used to create the Tacoma Yacht Club. The
rest of it has now become this huge condo development,
and I'm sure that the waterfacing units have beautiful views,
(51:15):
but boy, I would not be able to live there
without thinking about what I was what I was living on.
There's also a fascinating park there called the Dune Peninsula
because Frank Herbert, the author of Dune and Tacoma, and
a lot of the stuff that he describes in Dune
(51:38):
was inspired by the pollution in Tacoma.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
In the end of this book, just to add another
example of an extreme psychopathic killer, you include a little
bit of the story of Israel Keys. What's Israel Key's
story of exposure, and just tell us a little bit
of some of the extreme behavior that he exhibits in
(52:06):
his murders.
Speaker 3 (52:09):
Israel Keys came from a very bizarre and reclusive family
that moved to a quite a remote area in the
northeast part of Washington State when Israel was just a
young kid, and there was not a whole lot out there.
(52:33):
It was near the town. The property they had was
near the town of Calville and not that far from
the Columbia River. And what I found was that one
of the things that was out there was a smelter.
The tech Cominko smelter, which is right on the border
of British Columbia and north of Calville, has been in
(53:00):
operation for decades since around the turn of the last century.
It's still in operation. It has put enormous amounts of lead,
arsenic and other contaminants into the Columbia which have all
filtered down. Have been the cause of a major international
(53:24):
lawsuit in which the Calville tribes in that area have
sued because of the contamination of the Columbia River. Israel
Keys grew up in this family that had to He
was one of the eldest, and they had to provide
I think most of their own food. I don't think
(53:45):
that they did a lot of shopping and stores. They
were sort of living in a remote cabin. I suspect
that a lot of the food that they were eating,
whatever they could shoot or hunt fish from the river
was contaminated. Israel grew up to be one of the
(54:05):
most bizarre serial killers in our history. We know very
little about what he did and how many people he killed.
He confessed to. He only named I think a couple
of his victims. He was arrested and was going to
(54:29):
go on trial for the murder of a young woman
who was working as a barista in Anchorage, Alaska, when
he abducted and murdered her, but he would never confess
to the rest of his victims, which are thought to
be maybe around eleven people. He seemed to range all
(54:51):
over the country, committed a lot of armed robberies of banks.
He committed arson. He had a plan to set off
explosions at a federal building two of the guys who
grew up with were the infamous Kiho brothers, who actually
did commit a number of federal crimes and are now
(55:13):
in jail for that. So boy, I mean, it's just
a story that you just again, you can't make this
stuff up. It is just so bizarre, and you wonder
what went into that, what supercharged the sort of rage
and murderousness of an individual like Israel Keys.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
Yes, you're right. In the two thousands, oh, pardon me,
and throughout the nineteen nineties nationwide, there were six hundred
and sixty nine serial killers in the two thousands, three
hundred and seventy one from twenty ten to twenty twenty,
one hundred and seventeen, So a dramatic, somatic drop in
(56:01):
serial killer numbers in America with no connection better than
the story and the argument that you put forth in
this book.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
Yeah, the rise and fall of violent crime, the graph
that that makes, the drawing that you can make of
the rise of crime and then it's falling off in
the nineties, and the rise of the number of serial
killers and the falling off of that. You can put
(56:34):
those graphs together and they look almost exactly the same,
and they correlate so closely also with the rise of
lead in the environment and the drop off of lead,
and I find that quite convincing. I mean, I'm not
a statistician, I'm not an epidemiologist, so I can't speak
(56:59):
to how how well this association holds up. But boy,
you look at that and you think, wow, there must
be something to this.
Speaker 2 (57:14):
Absolutely, it's a fascinating exploration and investigation and a very
very compelling argument that you put forth in this book.
I want to thank you so much for coming on
and talking about your new book, murder, Land, Crime and
Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. Can you tell
us if you have a website, do any social media
(57:36):
or where people might find out more about this book.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
Sure? Yeah, I'm at Carolinefraser dot net. That's my website.
I'm on Instagram, Twitter, and blue Sky at the moment,
and I'll be in Saint Louis tomorrow at the public
Library for an event at seven o'clock I think. And
(58:05):
I'll also be in Albuquerque the following week at Bookworks,
the bookstore in Albuquerque for another event. So I have
more details on that on my website and I'll keep
posting about that on Twitter as well, so you can
find the book anywhere and I hope people read it
(58:30):
and find it as fascinating as I did to write it.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
Absolutely. Thank you so much Caroline Fraser for coming on
and talking about murderland crime and bloodlust in the time
of serial killers. Thank you very much for this interview
and you have a great evening and good night. Thanks
a lot, thank you, good night, good night.
You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
killers in true crime history and the authors that have
written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every week,
another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Good Evening. Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of
Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in
American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body
dumps in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But
in the nineteen seventies and eight, Bundy was just one
(01:02):
perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder
across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and
nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall
of an epidemic of serial killing? As Murderland indelibly maps
(01:23):
the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers
in Mayhem, The Green River Killer, the I five Killer,
the Nightstalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson. Fraser's Northwestern
death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an
overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in ted
(01:48):
Bundy's Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper,
and arsenic smelters in the world, but was hardly unique
in the West. As Fraser's and Vents instigation inexorably proceeds,
evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only
sickened and blighted millions of lives, but also warped young minds,
(02:12):
including some who grew up to become serial killers. Murderland
transcends true crime, voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on
a profound quest into the dark heart of the real
American berserk. The book you were featuring this evening is Murderland,
(02:34):
Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, with
my special guest, Pulitzer Prize winning author Caroline Fraser. Welcome
to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Caroline Fraser, thanks for having me, happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Thank you so much, and congratulations on murder Land.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Well, thank you. It was a fascinating project to write,
although it took me in some unexpected directions.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
So let's talk about the origins before we get into
this incredible story. But just tell us how you came
to be the author of this story, How you came
to be again, the author of Murderland.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Yeah. Well, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in Seattle,
in a place called Mercer Island, which is a suburb
of Seattle in the middle of Lake Washington. As I
was growing up, some of these things happened. You know.
I was thirteen in nineteen seventy four when Ted Bundy
(03:46):
began committing the crimes that would be attributed to him,
although I think he actually started much earlier than nineteen
seventy four, But in any event, I certainly remember that time.
And in the years after that, people began asking the
(04:06):
question why are there so many serial killers in the
Pacific Northwest? And this was, you know, something that came
up over and over again in the press. The newspapers
would revisit this question every you know, couple of years
and print lists of how many serial killers there were
(04:29):
in the region. And I'd always kind of wondered about that,
like what accounted for this? Was it really a thing
or was it some kind of you know, urban legend.
So that was sort of in my mind for a
long time, and I worked on other projects, very different
(04:49):
kinds of things. But during COVID particularly, I was looking
for something that I could work on from home, and
I began looking at that question again and just trying
to investigate both the number of serial killers and their
(05:10):
individual stories in the Northwest and see where that led.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
You. Right early on in this book that you are
an amateur cartographer and you draw lines and make maps.
Tell us about your early map that you did.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yeah, well, you know, I had seen on various websites.
It's well known where Ted Bundy grew up in the
city of Tacoma. For example. He wasn't originally from there.
He was born in Vermont and spent a couple of
years in Philadelphia, but then ended up about the age
(05:51):
of five in Tacoma. And so I looked at where
he was living in Tacoma. I was struck by the
fact that another very prolific and well known serial killer,
Gary Ridgeway, was also from that area. That he grew
(06:11):
up just a couple miles east of SeaTac the airport
just north of Tacoma. And then another thing that I
learned about more recently was the fact that Charles Manson
had spent a significant amount of time being incarcerated on
(06:31):
McNeil Island, which is just off of Tacoma. So then
I had these three points on the map of where
these three guys were, and it was really quite striking
how close to each other they were. And that was
a map that sort of sent me back to the
(06:55):
drawing board, if you will, to think about the question
of is there anything these guys could have been exposed
to that would have led to where they ended up.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
You read about another map, they call it the Owl.
Tell us about this owl and its relation to what
you were just speaking about.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
The owl refers to the something that's called the Olympic
Wallawa Lineament, which came into being when a cartographer, a
man who drew maps professionally back in the forties. He
was drawing a map of Washington State and the northwest,
(07:45):
very very detailed and quite beautiful map. You can still
see it online. As he was finishing this map, he
happened to kind of glance across at sideways and saw
a line that goes from the very top of the
(08:06):
northwest tip of Cape Flattery. That's really the north westernmost
point of both Washington State and the United States. And
this this line, this depression in the map that he
noticed kind of cut southeast down across the state of
(08:30):
Washington and kind of carved it in two. And he
was so intrigued by this, which was really just created by,
you know, a kind of depression in the land. He
was so intrigued by this that he called it the Owl,
the Olympic Wallawa lineum and he began theorizing about what
(08:54):
it might be. It probably he thought it was probably
a fault line. I think most people now think he
was probably right about that. There are many, many fault
lines that cut through Washington State, and many of them
have only been discovered recently with the kind of light
(09:15):
art technology that can see beneath the surface. And it
has been discovered and is quite a cause of concern
that there are so many fault lines in Washington, particularly
lying under very heavily populated parts of Seattle, that it
(09:37):
is felt that this could create quite a terrible situation
if there's another really big earthquake, the way there was
about seven hundred years ago. So I used the Owl
as a kind of image of both the perils of
the natural world in that region, which were certainly in
(10:03):
some ways taken advantage of by these serial killers, because
one of the things that both Bundy and Ridgeway, for example,
did was to take their victims out into the woods
and dispose of their bodies in places where they would
not readily be found, and that made it particularly difficult
(10:25):
for any forensic investigation to take place. So the owl
is really kind of a metaphor for the hazards of
this region.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Let's talk about some of the writing you have in
a chapter called the Smelter. First off, tell us for
people that don't know what a smelter is. And you
take us to Philadelphia and you posit that you're not
quite sure if it's Lloyd Marshall or Jack Worthington, the
father of Ted Bundy. But you take us to Philadelphia
(10:59):
and the smelters and the situation there. You say, the
city is full of smelters. Tell us what this is.
You've called it a commercial volcano. Tell us what smelters are,
their purpose? And Philadelphia and Ted Bundy's childhood.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Ted Bundy of course never really knew who his father was,
and I think this was a source of great kind
of anguish and rage for him. He was born in
a foundling home in Vermont. He was the product of
some kind of either illicit relationship that his mother had
(11:39):
or we don't know exactly, but she was sent to
this home where nuns would take care of babies that
were born. Legitimately, she left him there for a couple
of months, then she took him home with her to Philadelphia,
which was called the City of Smelters because it had
(12:00):
more smelters than just about any other place, although I
will say that at the time smelters were just everywhere.
They were in every major American city, and what they
were doing was producing metal. A smelter is designed to
take in these rocks or ores from mines, the kinds
(12:25):
of ores that have metals within them, and then they
melt them down and this produces all kinds of different
metals because the ores contain all these sort of associated
chemicals and metal, So they contained stuff like lead, copper, arsenic, cadmium,
(12:46):
and many many other metals, and they're burning them in
order to separate the metals so that they can separate out.
For example, silver evaluable metal. Gold, lead copper was very
valuable so a lot of these these smelters specialized in
(13:08):
one or the other metals, but produced all kinds of stuff,
a lot of which was going up the smokestack, and
Philadelphia's had because after the war it was producing so
much from it smelters that had a great deal of
lead pollution in Philadelphia, where where Ted spent a couple
(13:33):
of formative years. And then when Ted and his mother
went and moved to Tacoma, where her cousin lived, they
were moving to another place that had an very very
prominent smelter that belonged to the American Smelting and Refining
(13:54):
Company or a SARCO. And that smelter was right in
the middle of a very popular area, and Ted lived
always within just a few miles of that smelter. And
the thing that you have to know about lead is
that it is associated and this has been proven by
(14:17):
a number of scientific studies with aggression and violence in
the people who were exposed to it, especially children. It's
very dangerous for children to be exposed to lead because
it really changes the development of their brain and their
(14:38):
frontal cortex, and it causes you know, there's kind of
a time lag of about twenty years. But if a
child is exposed to lead at a young age and
has that as part of their makeup, then by the
time they're a teenager or a young adult, they may
(14:59):
be showing some of the neurological signs of light exposure,
which include violence, impulsivity, sort of an inability to control
their behavior.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
You read about Charles Manson and his stay at McNeil
Island prison, what is its proximity Tacoma to Tacoma and
also how was Charles Manson and other prisoners exposed to
lead and other chemicals from the smelters.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Mcdeil Island is about. It was, for instance, about seven
miles I think from where Ted Bundy was living. There
was another maybe five miles to the smelter, so it
was within about a ten or twelve mile radius of
the smelter and its smokestack. So it was getting some
(15:58):
degree of the fallout from that smoke stack. And the
thing that was unique about McNeil Island is that the
prisoners on the island were working in agriculture. They had
heard of cattle, They had crops that they were raising,
so they were raising all the food that they were
(16:20):
consuming on the Islands, and the water that they were
drinking was also from sources on the island, so they
had to have been exposed to some degree to the
fallout from that smoke stack. It's probably worth noting that
Charles Manson, by the time he ended up on McNeil Island,
(16:44):
was already an incredibly troubled individual. I'm not trying to
say that what he did was entirely down to lead.
He had a terrible experience as a kid and his mother,
his teenage mother, ended up in jail when he was
(17:06):
just three or four years old. He had been in
and out of institutions all his life, born in a
really poor coal mining town in the east, so he
obviously had many many strikes against him. But I don't
think the lead probably helped.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
You talk about some of the early effects that were
seen by people that were working in the industry producing
these chemicals, and just people their families and people in
proximity to these factories as well. You say Ted Bundy's
family in Philadelphia was only about four miles or less
(17:46):
than four miles away from one of these plants. So
what was some of the first things in the nineteenth
or the twentieth century that people noted and what was
the result of this sort of indication that there is
some side effects to this industry.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
One of the principal products that was contributing led to
the atmosphere early on was leaded gas. Leaded gas was
developed in the nineteen twenties, although it wasn't under as
heavy use then as it would be later. But immediately
(18:28):
when the Company's Standard Oil and DuPont and so forth
that we're developing leaded gas, when they started producing it
in large quantities, they made some mistakes really in they
didn't realize how grievously it was going to affect the
(18:49):
guys who worked in these plants. Two or three occasions,
they caused such severe lead poisoning in their workers that
people they started having hallucinations, became quite violent and rapidly died.
There were a number of people who died in several
(19:10):
incidents in these plants, and some people, some of these
workers who were so terribly affected didn't die, but were
affected really for the rest of their lives. They saw hallucinations.
Sometimes they called them the you know, the butterfly men,
because they were constantly sort of seeing hallucinations of things
(19:34):
flying around and would wave their hands at them. And
they continued, some of these guys to work at the plants,
but they were essentially really damaged emotionally and mentally by
what they'd been through.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now. It's very interesting you spoke about this
incredible effect of working with these chemicals and that being hallucinations,
and I think that's very important for the case that
you make in this book. And it's very interesting too
(20:12):
that one of the principal criminals psychopathic killers that you
focus on in this book is Gary Ridgeway and his
proximity to Ted Bundy and McNeil Island and Charles Manson.
But tell us also, as you write Gary Ridgeway was
experiencing hallucinations as well. So tell us a little bit
(20:36):
about Gary Ridgeway, where he lived near Seattle and the
hallucinations that he experienced.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Yeah, Ridgeway grew up just a couple miles east of
SeaTac at a time when aircraft jet aircraft were flying
with leaded gas. He also lived in close proximity to
a couple of major highways, including I five, and as
(21:05):
an adult he began working at the Kenworth truck plant
as a painter. He was somebody who sprayed the cabs
of big trucks and painted them at a time when
those paint formulations probably included lead, because lead had been
(21:31):
removed from house paint by that point, by you know,
the nineteen seventies, but there was an exemption that was
carved out for commercial paint applications which would have included
what he was doing. So he was he was exposed
to lead in you know, at least two or three ways.
(21:52):
And I'm not sure about the hallucinations, but he certainly
did begin behave in a profoundly kind of robotic way,
almost by doing the same things over and over and
over again, capturing women who he'd picked up sex workers,
(22:15):
runaway girls, enacting on them sort of the same behavior
again and again. He did like to have sex with
women outside, so he would often take these women out
in the woods to have sex with them. When he
was not able to do that when he had to
(22:36):
take them to his house. He had one wall of
his bedroom covered in a sort of silk screen photographic
image of the woods, so that he could feel like
he was having sex in the woods. In his House. Yeah,
he was an incredibly sort of robotic individual who captures
(22:57):
that sense. I think the a lot of these serial
kills had of just being trapped in this kind of
cycle of violence.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Did you single out these examples of especially aberrant crimes
and criminals such as Ted Bundi, Charles Manson, Gary Ridgeway,
and then later on you write about Jerry Brutos and
also Israel Keys. But did you single out these people
to demonstrate something specifically related to these chemicals? In other words,
(23:35):
are there extreme crimes related to what you consider extreme poisoning?
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Yes, I think to some extent. I was looking first
of all at a lot of the serial killers who
came from the Northwest, and looking at their proximity to
either letted gat sources of gas with highways, or smelters.
And then I began sort of opening it up and
(24:06):
looking at some other places, like, for example, because I
had spent a certain amount of time explaining the history
of Asarco, the smelting company which was owned by the
Guggenheim family, I looked at another smelter that they had
in El Paso and asked myself, well, were there any
(24:29):
infamous serial killers associated with El Paso, because I didn't
know of any. As soon as I got into the
research on that, immediately it turned out that Richard Ramirez,
the so called Nightstalker, that he had grown up in
El Paso, again only a few miles from the Asarco smelter,
(24:53):
which was a huge landmark in that town and ultimately
polluted quite a bit of El Paso and of the
CEO DoD Warrez on the other side of the border.
So that to me was very fascinating. So yes, I
did tend to focus on individuals who I could tie
(25:14):
to this chemical exposure. There are certainly other serial killers
whose exposure I can't figure out, or you know, you know,
maybe is a mystery, somebody like Son of Sam and
those figures. You know, it's it's harder to tie them
to this. But I think you also have to realize
(25:37):
that during this period you were born, between the say,
the nineteen forties and the nineteen eighties, everybody, no matter
who you are or where you lived, everybody was exposed
to letted gas.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
You talk about that Richard Ramirez's family just to lend
some credibility to this exposure. You said the entire family
had behavioral problems, at school and also physical ailments, but
especially had all of them had behavioral problems cited at school.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Yeah, it's sort of a tragic tale because there were
I think five kids in that family, and all of
them showed some kind of pretty severe physical and emotional illness.
Their mother was exposed to a lot of really damaging
(26:41):
chemicals from working in a boot factory in El Paso
when she was pregnant with Richard, and the father was
somebody who was quite violent himself and visited a lot
of of violence on the kids. Again, this brings up
(27:04):
the question of how much of this might have been led,
how much of it might have been other other exposures
and other events, Because the FBI, for example, in doing
their work on profiling, has often pointed out how many
serial killers have had either physical or sexual abuse or both,
(27:27):
maybe head trauma from beatings or other accidents or other
sources that can cause neurological damage as well. So there's
a whole host of things that may go into creating
these patterns of behavior, and we it's very very difficult
(27:48):
to tease them apart.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
You do state this case, though, that this predominance of
West Coast serial killers and also the correlation between the
proliferation of industries that spew this lead, arsenic, copper, all
of these toxic chemicals. Yes, you write that also to
(28:14):
sort of muddle the entire statistics, I imagine is lead gasoline.
But you do state the case of the increasing industries
and the chemicals that are spewed from their smokestacks, but
also the fight for and recognition of these chemicals as
(28:34):
toxins and the fight to have them removed. You talk
about the formation of the EPA and before that, initiatives
to try to clean up this industry that people recognize
as absolutely dangerous.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Yeah. I mean one of the really disturbing elements of
the story is that from the very beginning, even in
the nineteen twenty, there were physicians who were telling industry
representatives and government officials that they should never, never, never
(29:12):
allow let it casts to be sold, and that they
should do everything that they can to lower the amount
of lead in the environment, not increase it. Because it
was well known that lead is a you know, led
is one of the chief poisons that we have known
(29:32):
about for centuries, for millennium. I mean, the Greeks and
the Romans knew that it was very bad and arsenic.
I mean, everybody knows that arsenic is a poison. And
one of the things that happened during this period is
that industry really developed all the techniques that we would
(29:54):
be familiar with from our own time in terms of,
for example, the bacco industry. You know, the ways in
which industry tried to make these chemicals seem benign, like
they weren't really a problem, like they existed naturally in
the environment was one of the claims, which that's not
(30:19):
really true, and it's not true because we haven't. You know,
it took human beings to bring them out of the
environment and to make them much more potent in their
you know, inorganic arsenic, for examples, different than the arsenic
that you find in dirt or sometimes in water or
(30:40):
in shellfish. Inorganic arsenic is a product of industry and
is much much more poisonous than organic arsenic. And so
all the kind of misinformation that was being put out
bond liberately by these corporations that stood to gain from
(31:02):
smelters and leaded gas really did, as you say, muddy
the water for decades and provided an excuse for what
they were doing, which was really you know, a wholesale
medical disaster, because things like lead and arsenic do not
(31:26):
just cause the kind of behavior that I'm talking about.
Lead causes all kinds of other diseases, causes heart disease,
it's associated with als, it is something that you know
can cause all kinds of respiratory problems, and likewise with arsenic.
(31:47):
Arsenic is associated with lung cancer. So there are really
serious health effects across the board from all these chemicals,
and basically they were being foisted on the American public
and around the world under basically the corporations were just
(32:11):
lying about their effects and trying to convince people that
these things were safe. They were not safe, and we're
going to be dealing with the cleanup of these things
for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now. You read about the Clean Air Act
and Water Quality Improvement Act teen seventy and in nineteen
seventy one the Surgeon General decide no child should have
blood level blood lead levels exceeding forty micrograms. In your research,
(32:51):
you write about far exceeding that recommendation.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
It took me a really long time for the govern
were meant to kind of catch up, i think, to
where the medical community already was because there was so
much pressure coming from industry. But yes, the creation of
OSHA for worker safety, the creation of the EPA, and
(33:19):
all the different regulations and legislation that was passed to
clean up our air and water, those things all began
running right into and against the interests of the smelting
companies and the companies that were selling lioded gas. And
(33:40):
there was a real period of ten fifteen years where
they were engaged in a struggle political struggle really to
try to prevail to enact safety regulations that would really
try to reduce the amount of lead that kids, especially
(34:02):
were exposed to. And this took, you know, an unconscionably
long time, and it really was quite incremental. You can
see the CDC over the decades lowering the amount of
lead to which children can be exposed from you know,
sixty to forty to thirty to you know ten, and
(34:26):
now it's at three point five micrograms per desc leader
of blood. But even that is considered too much because
there really is no safe level of lead in the environment,
and no safe level of lead to which children can
be exposed, and this presents a huge problem for the
(34:49):
government because trying to lower the amounts of lead in
the environment is so expensive. You know, you're looking at
all of the old lead pipes that are in public
schools and old lead paint that are that's in military housing,
(35:10):
and just I mean, the problem is so widespread that
it costs millions and millions of dollars to address it.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
You're right that in Tacoma the crime rate rises twenty
percent in nineteen seventy four, and you write never has
the number of violent crimes been higher in America in
nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Yeah, nineteen seventy four I think as a real watershed year,
both for the rate of violent crime in Tacoma, in
the Northwest and across the country. And it is perhaps
not coincidentally the year in which Ted Bundy begins this
(35:58):
kind of series of of extremely high profile abductions disappearances
of women. Of course, we didn't know then who he was.
We wouldn't even know part of his name until July
of seventy four, when he abducted two women from Lake
(36:20):
Samamish on a hot July afternoon during an event in
which thousands of people had gathered on the beaches of
Lake Samamish, and he somehow abducted two women in separate
events on that same day. And that's when the kind
of news really exploded across the area, because that was
(36:45):
kind of the culmination of a number of other abductions,
including a couple of women in Seattle. And on that
day a number of people heard him say my name
is Ted, and so that was the first time anybody
had a name for him, and the police were able
to develop a couple of several composite drawings of his face,
(37:09):
including one that was recognized both by his girlfriend and
by a number of other people who knew him, including
Anne Rule, the true crime writer, who had met him
while volunteering at a rape crisis center in Seattle.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yes, very very interesting. You write that Ted Bundy lived
near astonishing high measurements of two hundred and eighty three
hundred and forty and six hundred and twenty parts per
million of lead from this rust and smokespac that he
(37:50):
lived nearby.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
Doubtless was exposed to lead, because we know now from
the very detail GIS map developed by the Department of
Ecology in Washington State we know how much lead was
in his front yard and his backyard and how much
arsenic and it was much higher than normal, So we
(38:16):
know he was exposed. The question remains how much did
that exposure influence his behavior.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
It's a very interesting point though, as well as getting
back to Ted Bundy that you you said that Ted
Bundy was reading True Detective magazine. Of course later he
works with alongside and Ruhl, who is an author coincidentally
writing for those same type of magazines.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Yes, she says that he asked her once for copies
of some of the magazines that she'd had articles in
because he wanted to use them in his so called research.
I mean, he was supposedly, for a short time was
helping out with some research that was being developed about
(39:08):
rape statistics in Seattle. Yeah, I mean it's just some
extraordinary you can't even make out these kinds of things.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Absolutely, he read about nineteen sixty one, Jerry Brutos marries
a seventeen year old in Corvallis, Oregon, and Jerry Brutos
suffers blackouts. Reportedly tell us a little bit about where
he is in proximity to the industries and near Tacoma.
(39:44):
Tell us about Jerry Brutos.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah, Brutos didn't have a particular Tacoma connection. But one
of the things that I found out about him from
Anne Rule's reporting in her book lust Ca about Jerry
Brudos was that he grew up in South Dakota, not
far from what would later become a superfund site for
(40:11):
its dumping of lead arsenate pesticides. One of the things
that the companies were doing to sell the arsenic that
they had left over from their smelting activities was to
develop arsenic into a whole bunch of different kinds of pesticides.
And when Jerry Brudos was growing up, like many rural
(40:36):
farm kits, those chemicals were in heavy usage and a
lot of kids were exposed that way, and I suspect
that he might have been as well, since he lived
so close to what would become a superfund site where
the water had been contaminated with these kind of chemicals,
(40:57):
and he had a number Like Richard Ramirez and his siblings,
Jerry Brutos had a number of strange diseases and symptoms
as a young kid. Also, as a young kid, he
developed a fetish for women's footwear for high heeled shoes.
(41:19):
He had a very harsh mother who punished him for
wearing women's clothing and shoes. They then moved to Oregon
and he became a sort of completely out of control
character who would approach women in parking lots on the
(41:41):
street and eventually did kill several women he encountered and
was very interested in making lead paper weights from parts
of their bodies.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Incredible, that uses as an opportunity to stop to hear
the messages. You're right about that lead exposure correlates with
higher adult crime rates, but you talk about that in
starting in nineteen ninety two, the crime rate starts to fall.
What is the correlation with lead and other chemicals and
(42:20):
the fight to have these chemicals recognized as the dangerous
elements that they are.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Leaded gas was removed from the market beginning in the
mid eighties, and that removal was complete by the early
to mid nineties. In this country, it had just become
so apparent that lead was a danger in the environment
(42:52):
and to human health, and they eventually succeeded the health
community in convincing Congress and regulatory agencies that it had
to be removed. So at the same time, the smelters
started going out of business because the prices of metals
(43:17):
had started to go down. They hit a real high
in nineteen seventy four for various reasons, which meant that
many of the smelters were kind of running flat out
in the mid seventies. But then prices started to be
affected and went down, and because of all the regulations,
(43:40):
basically many of them just could not stand business and
make a profit anymore. And so the Tacoma smelter closed
in nineteen eighty six, and many of the other smelters
around the country closed around the same time during the
mid eighties, and that led to a very sharp drop
(44:02):
off in the amount of lead in the atmosphere and
also in our blood levels. So you start to see
it go down very sharply in children's blood led levels, fortunately,
and in everybody's And so that was when the so
(44:23):
called lead crime hypothesis was born, because scientists looked at
the drop off of lead in the environment and the
drop off of crime and associated the two. And it's
been debated ever since. You know, there are other hypotheses
that point to other reasons why this might have occurred.
(44:47):
There were a lot of police associations, for example, claimed
that it was because policing increased and had a lot
more resources and more people or being incarcerated. There's also
a theory about abortion that has been very well publicized,
(45:08):
but for reasons that I think I try to explain
in the book a little bit. I think the leed
crime hypothesis does have these other things may be a factor,
but I think that the lead crime hypothesis has emerged
as kind of a leading contender that in answering that question.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
You write that lead exposure in childhood is linked to
brain volume loss. Where the subjects reach adulthood, the effects
are particularly notable. You write in men, why is that?
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Yeah, the answer to that is still a bit of
a mystery. I think that there are genes that have
been implicated in this. In other words, if you're a
male and you have lead exposure, and you have a
certain genetic component that that may influence how you react
(46:10):
to the lead exposure. But I think there's still a
lot of work going on trying to explain that. It
certainly is apparent from the MRIs. There's a guy who
published a book a few years ago, Adrian Rain, called
the Biology of Violence and He reproduced a number of
(46:32):
these MRI images the scans in his book, and you
can see that there is a sort of more marked
difference between men and women, which is not to say
that women don't have neurological effects from lead exposure. They do.
Their effects seem to be organized more around impulsivity. And
(46:55):
there are graphs that show, for example, a rye in
teenage pregnancy during the seventies and eighties that correlates to
the rise in juno delinquency and violent crime.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
But is there again, I'm probably asking the question again,
but is there some form or deuced recognize an extremity
and to the serial killers that you write about in
this book, the prolific serial killers that are on the
West Coast, and the profound effect of lead and other chemicals.
(47:39):
Is there a correlation to the extreme nature of these
particular psychopathic killers.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Well, I think there is. And one of the things
that I find so inescapable is the really bizarre nature
of some of these crimes, yes, which don't seem to
fit a mold either before or since. I mean, there
was just something so unhinged about some of these guys
(48:11):
and what they were doing. Really there was you know
many of these crimes were sexual in nature. The kind
of violence was so extreme, the sexual nature was extreme,
and the extent, you know, just the sheer number of
people who were involved. I mean Ridgeway for example. I
(48:34):
think he pled guilty to forty eight or forty nine murders,
but is suspected of far more, maybe twice as many
as that. So there's something about that that just feels
different and looks different. And I'm not a scientist, so
I can't really line up what we know about le exposure,
(49:00):
but I will say that they have now started to
do some studies that show a connection between psychopathy and
lead exposure, and that there seems to be a higher
rate of psychopaths who have led exposure versus the general public.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
You talk about write about the Arisco the refinery, the
smelter company, based on lawsuits, is going bankrupt in two
thousand and nine. It yields the biggest landmark settlement in
American history, one point seven billion. And you write, the
(49:46):
money goes to nineteen states, Washington State getting the line's share,
or a bigger share of one hundred and eighty eight million.
This is about arsenic in lead. And you write, about
that an area that was full of arsenic and lead.
They built a luxury hotel and condos in that area.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
Yeah, it's it's a very bizarre, bizarre phenomenon. I I
personally can't go to that area and not see what
used to be there. In part because Asarco the company,
while it was in operation, they actually created a giant
(50:31):
peninsula of land from the slag the waste products of
the mining. Once they had you know, separated the metals
out of it, they would dump all this stuff that
kind of looks like gravel, you know, it looks like
a sort of black gravel. And they dumped all this
(50:51):
and it created this just giant peninsula. That part of
it was used to create the Tacoma Yacht Club. The
rest of it has now become this huge condo development,
and I'm sure that the waterfacing units have beautiful views,
(51:15):
but boy, I would not be able to live there
without thinking about what I was what I was living on.
There's also a fascinating park there called the Dune Peninsula
because Frank Herbert, the author of Dune and Tacoma, and
a lot of the stuff that he describes in Dune
(51:38):
was inspired by the pollution in Tacoma.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
In the end of this book, just to add another
example of an extreme psychopathic killer, you include a little
bit of the story of Israel Keys. What's Israel Key's
story of exposure, and just tell us a little bit
of some of the extreme behavior that he exhibits in
(52:06):
his murders.
Speaker 3 (52:09):
Israel Keys came from a very bizarre and reclusive family
that moved to a quite a remote area in the
northeast part of Washington State when Israel was just a
young kid, and there was not a whole lot out there.
(52:33):
It was near the town. The property they had was
near the town of Calville and not that far from
the Columbia River. And what I found was that one
of the things that was out there was a smelter.
The tech Cominko smelter, which is right on the border
of British Columbia and north of Calville, has been in
(53:00):
operation for decades since around the turn of the last century.
It's still in operation. It has put enormous amounts of lead,
arsenic and other contaminants into the Columbia which have all
filtered down. Have been the cause of a major international
(53:24):
lawsuit in which the Calville tribes in that area have
sued because of the contamination of the Columbia River. Israel
Keys grew up in this family that had to He
was one of the eldest, and they had to provide
I think most of their own food. I don't think
(53:45):
that they did a lot of shopping and stores. They
were sort of living in a remote cabin. I suspect
that a lot of the food that they were eating,
whatever they could shoot or hunt fish from the river
was contaminated. Israel grew up to be one of the
(54:05):
most bizarre serial killers in our history. We know very
little about what he did and how many people he killed.
He confessed to. He only named I think a couple
of his victims. He was arrested and was going to
(54:29):
go on trial for the murder of a young woman
who was working as a barista in Anchorage, Alaska, when
he abducted and murdered her, but he would never confess
to the rest of his victims, which are thought to
be maybe around eleven people. He seemed to range all
(54:51):
over the country, committed a lot of armed robberies of banks.
He committed arson. He had a plan to set off
explosions at a federal building two of the guys who
grew up with were the infamous Kiho brothers, who actually
did commit a number of federal crimes and are now
(55:13):
in jail for that. So boy, I mean, it's just
a story that you just again, you can't make this
stuff up. It is just so bizarre, and you wonder
what went into that, what supercharged the sort of rage
and murderousness of an individual like Israel Keys.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
Yes, you're right. In the two thousands, oh, pardon me,
and throughout the nineteen nineties nationwide, there were six hundred
and sixty nine serial killers in the two thousands, three
hundred and seventy one from twenty ten to twenty twenty,
one hundred and seventeen, So a dramatic, somatic drop in
(56:01):
serial killer numbers in America with no connection better than
the story and the argument that you put forth in
this book.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
Yeah, the rise and fall of violent crime, the graph
that that makes, the drawing that you can make of
the rise of crime and then it's falling off in
the nineties, and the rise of the number of serial
killers and the falling off of that. You can put
(56:34):
those graphs together and they look almost exactly the same,
and they correlate so closely also with the rise of
lead in the environment and the drop off of lead,
and I find that quite convincing. I mean, I'm not
a statistician, I'm not an epidemiologist, so I can't speak
(56:59):
to how how well this association holds up. But boy,
you look at that and you think, wow, there must
be something to this.
Speaker 2 (57:14):
Absolutely, it's a fascinating exploration and investigation and a very
very compelling argument that you put forth in this book.
I want to thank you so much for coming on
and talking about your new book, murder, Land, Crime and
Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. Can you tell
us if you have a website, do any social media
(57:36):
or where people might find out more about this book.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
Sure? Yeah, I'm at Carolinefraser dot net. That's my website.
I'm on Instagram, Twitter, and blue Sky at the moment,
and I'll be in Saint Louis tomorrow at the public
Library for an event at seven o'clock I think. And
(58:05):
I'll also be in Albuquerque the following week at Bookworks,
the bookstore in Albuquerque for another event. So I have
more details on that on my website and I'll keep
posting about that on Twitter as well, so you can
find the book anywhere and I hope people read it
(58:30):
and find it as fascinating as I did to write it.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
Absolutely. Thank you so much Caroline Fraser for coming on
and talking about murderland crime and bloodlust in the time
of serial killers. Thank you very much for this interview
and you have a great evening and good night. Thanks
a lot, thank you, good night, good night.
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