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Serial Killers of the Pacific Northwest: Did Toxins Make Them Do It?
MURDERLAND: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser
Ever since the first Neanderthal clubbed a fellow caveman in a random act of violence, people have puzzled over the whys behind certain homicidal acts. Crimes of passion, possession, jealousy, rage and lust can be explained. But the serial killer who murders innocents without tidy explanation has kept many people of good conscience, and no small number of cops, up at night.
Now comes Caroline Fraser, the lyrically luminescent author of books about a beloved heartland author and the odd mysteries of Christian Science, with a unified theory. It's something in the water — and in the air. She draws a clear line between the crimes committed by some of the world's most awful humans and their exposure to lead and other heavy metals from industrial pollution, primarily in the Pacific Northwest.
The effects of lead poisoning on children are well documented. The causal link between this toxic chemical element and serial killers is less so. 'Murderland' is a book-length argument for the lead-crime hypothesis — advanced by a handful of studies in the past— connecting the metal to a host of behavioral problems, including extreme violence.
'Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps delivery, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage and neglect,' Fraser writes. 'Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma? How about a little lead in your tea?'
Fraser won a Pulitzer Prize for her last book, 'Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder,' which would seem to have little in common with this one. But just as Fraser probed a dark underside to that little house on the prairie, she finds menace beneath all the surface beauty in the far corner of America where she grew up. Even Mount Rainier, one of the most sublime volcanoes on the planet, comes in for a slap against its glacial hide.
''The mountain is out,' people say, self-satisfied, self-confident,' Fraser writes. 'But it is all a facade. The mountain is admittedly 'rotten inside.' Hollow, full of gas. A place where bad things happen.' Earthquakes, epic floods, smoldering peaks lurk, just like the lead from smelters.
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