Latest news with #Murderland
Fox News
10 hours ago
- Fox News
Poisoned Minds: Caroline Fraser's Murderland
An epidemic of serial killers plagued the United States throughout the 1970s and '80s. The crimes were shocking, horrific, and vile, leading many people to ask themselves: What makes a murderer? The answer to that question may be an invisible evil – a poison that penetrated the earth, as well as the minds of these monsters. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser explores the cultural and environmental factors that gave way to this plague of violence in her new book, Murderland. Follow Emily on Instagram: @realemilycompagno If you have a story or topic we should feature on the FOX True Crime Podcast, send us an email at: truecrimepodcast@ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
What does smelting have to do with Ted Bundy? A lot, argues ‘Murderland' author
The first film I saw in a theater was 'The Love Bug,' Disney's 1969 comedy about a sentient Volkswagen Beetle named Herbie and the motley team who race him to many a checkered flag. Although my memory is hazy, I recall my toddler's delight: a car could think, move and communicate like a real person, even chauffeuring the romantic leads to their honeymoon. Nice Herbie! Or not so nice. A decade later, Stanley Kubrick opened his virtuosic 'The Shining' with fluid tracking shots of the same model of automobile headed toward the Overlook Hotel and a rendezvous with horror. Something had clicked. Caroline Fraser's scorching, seductive 'Murderland' chronicles the serial-killer epidemic that swept the U.S. in the 1970s and '80s, focusing on her native Seattle and neighboring Tacoma, where Ted Bundy was raised. He drove a Beetle, hunting for prey. She underscores the striking associations between VWs and high-yield predators, as if the cars were accomplices, malevolent Herbies dispensing victims efficiently. (Bundy's vehicle is now displayed in a Tennessee museum.) The book's a meld of true crime, memoir and social commentary, but with a mission: to shock readers into a deeper understanding of the American Nightmare, ecological devastation entwined with senseless sadism. 'Murderland' is not for the faint of heart, yet we can't look away: Fraser's writing is that vivid and dynamic. She structures her narrative chronologically, conveyed in present tense, newsreel-style, evoking the Pacific Northwest's woodsy tang and bland suburbia. Fraser came of age on Mercer Island, adjacent to Lake Washington's eastern shore, across a heavily-trafficked pontoon bridge notorious for fatal crashes. Like the Beetle, the dangerous bridge threads throughout 'Murderland,' braiding the author's personal story with those of her cast. A 'Star Trek' geek stuck in a rigid Christian Science family, she loathed her father and longed to escape. In Tacoma, 35 miles to the south, Ted Bundy grew up near the American Smelting and Refining Co., which disgorged obscene levels of lead and arsenic into the air while netting millions for the Guggenheim dynasty before its 1986 closure. Bundy is the book's charismatic centerpiece, a handsome, well-dressed sociopath in shiny patent-leather shoes, flitting from college to college, job to job, corpse to corpse. During the 1970s, he abducted dozens of young women, raping and strangling them on sprees across the country, often engaging in postmortem sex before disposing their bodies. He escaped custody twice in Colorado — once from a courthouse and another time from a jail — before he was finally locked up for good after his brutal attacks on Chi Omega sorority sisters at Florida State University. Fraser depicts his bloody brotherhood with similar flair. Israel Keyes claimed Bundy as a hero. Gary Ridgway, the prolific 'Green River Killer,' inhaled the same Puget Sound toxins. Randy Woodfield trawled I-5 in his 1974 Champagne Edition Beetle. As she observes of Richard Ramirez, Los Angeles' 'Night Stalker': 'He's six foot one, wears black, and never smiles. He has a dead stare, like a shark. He doesn't bathe. He has bad teeth. He's about to go beserk.' But the archvillain is ASARCO, the mining corporation that dodged regulations, putting profitability over people. Fraser reveals an uncanny pattern of polluting smelters and the men brought up in their shadows, prone to mood swings and erratic tantrums. The science seems speculative until the book's conclusion, where she highlights recent data, explicitly mapping links. Her previous work, 'Prairie Fires,' a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, won the Pulitzer Prize and other accolades. The pivot here is dramatic, a bit of formal experimentation as Fraser shatters the fourth wall, luring us from our comfort zone. While rooted in the New Journalism of Joan Didion and John McPhee, 'Murderland' deploys a mocking tone to draw us in, scattering deadpan jokes among chapters: 'In 1974 there are at least a half a dozen serial killers operating in Washington. Nobody can see the forest for the trees.' Fraser delivers a brimstone sermon worthy of a Baptist preacher at a tent revival, raging at plutocrats who ravage those with less (or nothing at all). Her fury blazes beyond balance sheets and into curated spaces of elites. She singles out Roger W. Straus Jr., tony Manhattan publisher, patron of the arts and grandson of Daniel Guggenheim, whose Tacoma smelter may have scrambled Bundy's brain. She mentions Straus' penchant for ascots and cashmere jackets. She laments the lack of accountability. 'Roger W. Straus Jr. completes the process of whitewashing the family name,' she writes. 'Whatever the Sackler family is trying to do by collecting art and endowing museums, lifting their skirts away from the hundreds of thousands addicted and killed by prescription opioids manufactured and sold by their company — Purdue Pharma — the Guggenheims have already stealthily and handily accomplished.' Has Fraser met a sacred cow she wouldn't skewer? Those beautiful Cézannes and Picassos in the Guggenheim Museum can't paper over the atrocities; the gilded myths of American optimism, our upward mobility and welcoming shores won't mask the demons. 'The furniture of the past is permanent,' she notes. 'The cuckoo clock, the Dutch door, the daylight basement — humble horsemen of the domestic Apocalypse. The VWs, parked in the driveway.' 'Murderland' is a superb and disturbing vivisection of our darkest urges, this summer's premier nonfiction read. Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, 'This Boy's Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.' He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
