Toxins thicken the air, killers walk the streets

Time of India

26-07-2025

Was US's serial killer wave a result of industrial pollution?
In the age of true crime fandom, books about serial killers have big appeal. Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Pulitzer-winning Caroline Fraser reminds us how stomach-churning this hobby can be. There are more women being killed on a page, in one terrible way after another, than men in the entire book.
What the book investigates is why so many serial killers were roaming America in the 1970s and 80s. At the time, all this 'mindless violence' was blamed on political turmoil, dissolution of the family, on television. On black people, even though the superpredators were mostly white males.
The book offers a dramatically different answer. It was toxins that made the men toxic. Sulfur oxides wafted up the furnaces spread across the Pacific Northwest, alongside lead and arsenic. Many neighbourhoods felt like Dante's inferno. Sometimes when men got into a bathtub after smelting work, the water turned green.
But ASARCO, which operated many smelters (plus copper, zinc, asbestos mines) kept fighting off the citizens who wanted pollution controls and the scientists who worried about carcinogens. This was also the business of Rockefellers and Guggenheims. It took two great American family fortunes to build a city of serial killers, Tacoma, the book says.
It creates a sinister parallel between how all the anti-pollution objections were swept aside for decades, and how many rape-murders the serial killers were able to get away with.
Fraser completely reframes the time and space otherwise associated with baby boomers, Americana and Archie. She also enmeshes herself into this rebranding. She extends out the map of her childhood neighbourhood, centres it on Tacoma, and finds Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway also growing up near her, and Charles Manson imprisoned. In addition to the many serial killers she tracks through the book, she muses on her own father's random cruelties to his wife and children: 'I should have killed him while I had the chance.'
If the Tacoma of that time is comparable to the wasteland landscape of Dune, it's because Frank Herbert indeed drew his desert vision from the city and its smelter, which made the air 'so thick you can chew it'.
The book highlights research connecting the functional derangements caused by lead to men repeatedly beating, raping, strangling, stabbing and smothering women and children, as if compelled by some force as implacable as gravity. This fever only breaks around 1992, after regulators stop dragging their feet, leaded gasoline is phased out, and lead levels in American children and adults start declining rapidly.
MRI scans measuring adult brain volumes show that lead exposure in childhood causes very notable abnormalities in men, leading to high levels of psychopathy. Greatest volume loss is found in the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps in regulating behaviour. In scans of female subjects, red areas are relatively minor.
Change happened when everyone breathing a lot of lead shifted towards complaining about it. And when technology stepped up. In 1975, there was a newfangled experiment, instructing a computer to cross-check multiple lists of suspects, such as traffic violations near areas where women disappeared and classmates of victims. To catch Ted, that was the turning point.
An X-ray of his skull showed 'nonunion of coronal suture'. Something was literally broken in his head.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.