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Chicago Tribune
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Summer books 2025: Get lost in our shelves of Chicago, spiritual or just plain weird books
Summer reading, if you ask me, should meander, without a plan. Pick up, put down, misplace, leave crusty with sand or warped with humidity. Fall is for rigor, winter for hunkering down, spring for peering ahead, but the right summer read is a promising dirt road in a field. Someday, when I open a bookstore and the big bucks roll in, I'll shelve titles in very narrow categories, ensuring no one finds anything — except what they didn't know they wanted. This summer survey will be my trial run. A lot of what's here is due to be published over the next six weeks. Some, released in spring but better for summer, are out now. Sorry, I don't know where travel books are, but over there … More Chicago Than Chicago: Soon as I finished Peter Orner's 'The Gossip Columnist's Daughter' (Aug. 12), I emailed the Highland Park native: Has there ever been a more Chicago novel? He said, living in Vermont, he gets his dose of Chicago however he can. Boy, does he: The title refers to Karyn Kupcinet, daughter of Chicago writer Irv Kupcinet. She was found dead in 1963. Orner starts there, then veers to conspiracy, Skokie, podcasts, the Cape Cod Room. It's a blast. Don't Drink the Water: Why wait to find out what dismantling environmental regulations will mean? 'They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals,' by the terrific, underrated investigative writer Mariah Blake, traces the unholy conspiracy between DuPont and the United States government to downplay the effects of indestructible chemicals in household products, tap water, etc. It's a small-town horror movie that also happens to be true. Ditto for 'Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers,' by Caroline Fraser, whose Laura Ingalls Wilder bio, 'Prairie Fires,' took a 2018 Pulitzer. Tough to classify and not to be missed: a history of the Pacific Northwest's most infamous, paired with a touch of memoir and a fascinating linking of homicidal tendencies with childhoods marked by industrial waste. Inspired by Celluloid: 'King of Ashes' (June 10), by crime writer S.A. Cosby, at the peak of his powers, nods quietly to 'The Godfather,' though at times, it's more ambitious: The controlling son of a small-town Southern crematorium owner, whose wife disappeared years ago, returns to the family business, only to find it indebted to another family, of killers. It's rousing, queasy — and being adapted by Steven Spielberg and the Obamas for a Netflix series. (Read the book first.) 'The El' (Aug. 12) wears its influence more overtly: Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., an Indigenous writer of Chicago fiction, transplants the grimy 1979 New York classic 'The Warriors' to the CTA, and a Native gang member navigating hostile territory, a very '70s Chicago, and, well … Alice Cooper. Faith and Loathing in Chicagoland: 'My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy' reads like remembering itself. Poet Edward Hirsch recounts '50s-'60s suburban Chicago through bursts of memory, dialogue, jokes, stray images, doctored wedding pictures, no one in homeroom listening to announcements, your age in relation to the construction of the Edens Expressway, etc. It's a lot of fun, gathering steam with a poignance that wallops. 'Pan' (July 22), by Chicago's Michael Clune — of the harrowing 2013 memoir about heroin addiction, 'White Out' — finds suburban Chicago childhood as an ethereal, cultural testing ground for a student convinced his panic attacks are linked to Greek myth, and a vaguely menacing clubhouse called the Barn. Just as impressive: 'The Nimbus' (June 10), the debut novel of Robert P. Baird, a University of Chicago Divinity School graduate. The setting is a Chicago campus, the premise is a child who , though like Clune, Baird grounds the uncanny in notes of faith, philosophy, resilience. Doorstop Biographies: 'Baldwin: A Love Story' (Aug. 19) is sure to devour the last days of summer for James Baldwin fans. It's the first sizable bio in decades, and Nicholas Boggs' approach (alternately inspired and frustrating) is to tell the author's life through Baldwin's relationships with lovers and collaborators. Not including William F. Buckley Jr., who famously debated Baldwin on race in 1965 (the subject of TimeLine Theatre's hit play last February). Sam Tanenhaus's 'Buckley' illuminates that episode, and more — the Whittaker Chambers biographer uses the conservative lodestar as a main street cutting through ideology, with off-ramps for Nixon, Joe McCarthy, but also Disney and the failure to address AIDS. It's a brick, and a well-paced road map to 2025. Ron Chernow, the contemporary king of doorstops (Hamilton, Washington), is back with 'Mark Twain,' which plays the greatest hits, with an emphasis on unpublished papers, Twain the iffy businessman, Twain the fame addicted, and Twain the unknowable Zelig. Spiritual Complications: If Chicago's contribution to the papacy has you curious about faith, 'The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s' is a must. Paul Elie, one of our finest thinkers on the connections between religion and culture, bookends this history with Bob Dylan's evangelical era and Sinead O'Conner's pope protest, using the intervening decade for a virtuosic revisiting of 'Last Temptation of Christ,' Madonna, Robert Mapplethorpe, Prince, making a smart argument for how the '80s introduced a new secular age. Struggling to believe is the focus of 'Sorrowful Mysteries: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century,' Stephen Harrigan's story of the 1917 'miracle' in Portugal, in which the Biblical Mary was said to have visited three children. Harrigan, mixing memoir and history, traces the fallout. Girl, So Confusing: Take a second to admire the titles: 'The Girls Who Grew Big' (June 24) by Leila Mottley, and 'Clam Down' by Anelise Chen. Inside isn't bad either: Following her viral hit 'Nightcrawling,' Mottley finds a new path for coming-of-age tales, sketches of young moms, wound together with heartbreaks and pushback. (If you're tempted to see its characters as 'reckless,' one mother warns, 'you clearly haven't ever had to learn how to massage gas out of a baby's stomach before you learned the basic laws of physics.') 'Clam Down,' billed as a memoir, tinkers so cleverly with form, I kept forgetting it wasn't fiction. After a divorce, the author takes her mother's typo-filled emails to heart: She will, indeed, down, adopting the humble crustacean as a model for her future, pulling inward. A break-up tale, natural history and family story. Totally original. A History of Violence: Bryan Burrough, whose 'Public Enemies' became a bestselling account of the Days of Dillinger (and later a Johnny Depp movie), offers a sort of prequel with 'The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild,' a fleet deconstruction of American history perhaps known better as folklore than truth. His subjects — Butch Cassidy, Dodge City, etc. — were not fables, and their reality was occasionally nastier, and Midwestern. (Wyatt Earp, a part-time Illinois bartender and pimp, was nicknamed by local newspapers 'the Peoria bummer.') 'Charlottesville,' in its own way, brings a simmering 'High Noon'-esque unease to its retelling of August 2017 and the 'very fine people on both sides' who converged over a Civil War statue. Despite being a decade removed, journalist Deborah Baker discovers a 'Gimmie Shelter'-ish, era-defining immediacy, and decades of backstory to a seismic event often reduced to tiki torches. Genre Redux: Want to read something fun this summer? Smart? But also classic? Valancourt Books, one of my favorite small presses, just reissued six works by Robert Bloch, born in Chicago, raised in Maywood, who went on to write 'Psycho,' the basis for the film. He was also one of the most influential scary writers of the 20th century. Start with short stories: 'Pleasant Dreams,' from 1960, collects 15 pulpy tales of witches, devils, ravenous houses. If you're thinking crime: Picador just started a three-year-long reissue of 70 novels by Georges Simenon, whose Inspector Maigret became known as the French Sherlock Holmes, with a little Chandler angst. Start here: 'The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien' (1931), in which the stakes are primarily Maigret's guilty conscience. Histories You Don't Know: 'The American Game,' by sports writer S.L. Price, is one of the year's best, a look at the colonialism, elitism and the future of lacrosse, from its WASPy image to an Iroquois team intent on entering the 2028 Olympics under their own Native flag. 'Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age' (July 22) hits Chicago's sweet spot: Architecture and scandal. Specifically, the friendship and whispered-about love between architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (whose best-known Chicago work is Lincoln Park's 'Standing Lincoln'). 'Dining Out,' by former Chicagoan Erik Piepenburg, begins with the Lakeview's long-gone Melrose restaurant, then reveals how LGBTQ+ patrons were shaped by diners, pancake houses, coffee shops. 'The Afterlife of Malcolm X' by Mark Whitaker is the sort of lively cultural history I'd love more of — not a biography, but a study of how one voice resonates through culture. Hollywood Histories You Don't Know: Ignore the glib title: Bruce Handy's 'Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies' is a shrewd elevation of the genre to the status of noirs and Westerns, reserving a chapter for the North Shore classics of John Hughes, and not missing anything, from Andy Hardy to 'Dazed and Confused,' 'Cooley High.' Similarly, 'Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness,' one of the year's best, skips a dull scholarly take for a sharp, clever critical reading full of drama and anecdote and surprises: Did you know that the reviled Hays Code, which shut down studio treatments of gay people (as well as profanity and violence) for 34 years, began with a meeting at Loyola University? How Well Do We Know Anyone: Catherine Lacey was a Chicago writer, but as with her previous tear-downs of fiction and biography made evident, and 'The Möbius Book' (June 17) makes thrillingly personal, rooting her is a waste: Lacey here uses the fallout of a relationship with another Chicago writer as a path to friends, faith and understanding how narratives curl, never ending. Susan Choi's 'Flashlight' is her best novel yet, and though it isn't a mystery, I hesitate to say much about its story of a kidnapped father, other than: If you feel little connection to geopolitics right now, you will after reading this portrait of a family splintering between Korea, Japan and the U.S. Fighting Illini We Have Known: The Washington Post's Pulitzer-winning critic Robin Givhan won't be the last biographer of late Chicago-based, Rockford-bred designer Virgil Abloh, but 'Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh' (June 24) sets the standard with a reverential, necessarily digressive tour of how an influential polymath, architecture student and Kanye collaborator refigured how art, inclusivity and fashion meld. Likewise, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones' 'Allan Pinkerton: America's Legendary Detective and The Birth of Private Security' is not the first history of how a Scottish native built a private security (and union-smashing) empire in suburban Dundee, but it's a fresh look at the man's complicated, contradictory politics. Your Fourth of July Read: 'Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service' doesn't shout summer, but these portraits of federal workers — by Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, Michael Lewis and others — headline commitment (NASA), brains (Department of Labor) and decency (National Cemetery Administration), with such humor, it's the civics lesson that could recruit smart people, someday. 'So Far Gone' (June 10) is 'True Grit' by way of 'Big Lebowski,' rippling in 2025 disgust. Which means it's both hilarious and desperate. The always underrated Jess Walter ('Beautiful Ruins') sculpts an indelible outcast, Rhys Kinnick, former journalist. He punches his MAGA son-in-law, ditches his cell phone and retreats to a cabin — until his grandchildren are taken by a militia. As a summer read, it's an escape, and a sharp stick in the eye. Funny Ha Ha: I hate the word 'humorous.' It's always used by the least funny people. 'That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor' is . Roy Wood Jr. of 'The Daily Show' on bombing at the Apollo. A group chat about West Virginia toilets. Grandmas who say: 'I don't like people hovering over my shoulder when I'm working.' Read slowly, savor. Same for 'Steve Martin Writes the Written Word: Collected Written Word Works by Steve Martin.' Truth in marketing: A wonderful compilation of his short novels ('Shopgirl,' 'The Pleasure of My Company') mingled with a great assortment of his New Yorker works. Sample line: 'I started with the phone book. Looking up Mensa was not going to be easy …' Thoughtfully Gruesome: Nobody's ever accused Evanston-based Daniel Kraus of phoning it in, and his latest novel, 'Angel Down' (July 29), is even more audacious than 'Whalefall,' his 2023 hit about a man inside a whale. This one, set during World War I, follows soldiers who find, yes, an angel. Kraus' prose boldly resembles a prayer — bursts of liturgy, each paragraph starting with 'And,' then fairies and gore. 'Salt Bones' (July 22), the debut novel of poet Jennifer Givhan, finds Persephone and Demeter in a parched, barbed Underworld, just shy of mythical: As children go missing on the Mexican border, a mother is seeing images of a beckoning horse-headed figure. Smart Writers Waxing on About Random Stuff for a Discrete Amount of Time: How else to describe 50 years of eclectic work from the New Yorker's Jamaica Kincaid? 'Putting Myself Together: Writing 1973 —' (Aug. 5) collects essays on daffodils, her native Antigua, Diana Ross, all in that inimitable plain-spoken voice. 'Life and Art' is a smart title for the preoccupations of novelist Richard Russo, whose great subjects (dusty towns, idiot relatives, the trouble with writing about your neighbors) get the same inviting treatment in these warm essays as they do in his rich novels, at a fraction of the length. 'The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich' (even better title) gathers a decade of stories by New Yorker writer (and Tribune alumnus) Evan Osnos on the grotesquely wealthy. A profile of Mark Zuckerberg. How to hire a pop star for a birthday party. The country club crowd's nose-holding embrace of Trumpism. Support groups for disgraced investor bros. You will throw this book across the room — albeit, . Graphic Memoirs: Alison Bechdel's 'Spent: A Comic Novel' is just vaguely fiction. It tells the story of a Vermont cartoonist/pygmy goat farmer named Alison Bechdel, whose memoir (like the real Bechdel's 'Fun Home') becomes a smash, changing her relationship to family and neighbors. It's also a funny skewering of cultural pretense — on the right and left, though most cuttingly on the left. Conversely, Jeff Lemire's '10,000 Ink Stains' (July 15) is the most straight-ahead cartoonist memoir in ages: Known for his wistfully-illustrated indie hits such as 'Black Hammer' and 'Sweet Tooth' (adapted as a popular Netflix series), Lemire mixes in work-in-progress and prose to show how a creative life swings daily from the stifling ('X-Men') to the exhilarating ('Essex County'). Not Murder Podcasts: Rich Cohen, Glencoe native, Connecticut resident, prolific chronicler of the Bears, the Cubs and the North Shore, is never short on good bingeable books. 'Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story' only resembles tabloid fodder. It's a color guard of red flags above a Connecticut town (like Glencoe, only wealthier), within a disjointed marriage, among 'American aristocracy,' leading to the ugliest of deaths. More eccentric but no less lurid: Matthew Gavin Frank's 'Submersed: Wonder, Obsession and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines,' a fascinating mash of crime narrative, psychological profiling and a peek inside the same misogynistic, all-consuming inventor culture that led to the Titan submersible implosion — a history of obsessives who, as Frank writes with a wink, 'were not always the best of influences.' Losing Touch with Reality: The hero of Lincoln Michel's 'Metallic Realms' is Lincoln, the intense No. 1 fan of a sci-fi writing group that doesn't take itself quite as seriously. Shifting between the tales they churn out and squabbles that intrude on friendships, Michel builds an elegant homage to imagination. Speaking of creativity: 'An Oral History of Atlantis' (July 29), is the first story collection by Ed Park, whose 2023 novel, 'Same Bed Different Dreams' was rightly a Pulitzer finalist. Here, life choices are charted while trying to remember a phone password. A wife on Ambien floats through a surreal mirror life. A man in apocalyptic Manhattan tries to retain any shred of normalcy, like rereading 'The Chicago Manual of Style,' in the hope that 'civilization can start anew.' Difficult Music: 'Nothing Compares to You: What Sinead O'Connor Means to Us' (July 22), the passion project of Chicagoan (and co-editor) Martha Bayne, is an overdue assemblage (by Megan Stielstra, Neko Case and others), touching on protest, resilience — the ways O'Connor's career, as Stielstra puts it, 'lives in the body.' The hard part is dissecting a legend without soiling a mystery. 'Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of 'Born to Run'' (Aug. 5), by Bruce biographer Peter Ames Carlin, shows the unapologetic awe familiar to Boss appreciation, but his meticulous recreation of a struggling artist crafting his own mythology . Likewise, 'The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World' (Aug. 5) is no addendum. Peter Guralnick's beloved two-part Presley bio was definitive, but here, a great writer complicates old accusations of exploitation lobbed at Parker, using a ton of unreleased letters. Misplaced Gems: That Nettie Jones's beuatifully scandalizing 'Fish Tales' — bought by Toni Morrison when she was a Random House editor — could be lost for 41 years seems impossible: There's enough coke, orgies and power dynamics in this fearless party-girl novel to fuel canonization for decades. While you're at it, also slip Nan Shepherd's 'The Living Mountain' into a beach bag. First published in 1977, but written during World War II, this lovely reissue recalls the ocean of Rachel Carson and woods of Annie Dillard, yet in the Scottish mountains, giving a taxonomy of place, and a stirring long stare at nature. As Shepherd writes, 'life pours back.' If You Loved 'The Studio,' You'd Love: We know Hollywood may as well be Mars. But 'The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood,' by Matthew Specktor, son of CAA agent Fred Specktor, is shades stranger, a goodbye to a lifestyle, drawing in criticism, fiction, history, family tales — excitingly original. 'Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly' (June 10) is not the gonzo Hunter S. Thompson tour of LaLa Land it's being sold as. It's oodles more measured, employing the rise and fall of Spears for a humid, sleazy invite to the ninth circle of hell, where tabloid press reside. If you've considered trailing Brad Pitt, this will change those plans. Buzzy, Buzzy: What says summer more than a novel about friendships splintering while on vacation? Hal Ebbott's 'Among Friends' (June 24) works a spell reminiscent of John Updike's, showing how class angst and way too much familiarity can sever the bonds between a pair of families at a country home. Dwyer Murphy's 'The House on Buzzards Bay' (June 24), in keeping with his underrated thriller 'The Stolen Coast,' inserts a David Lynchian dreaminess into a whodunit about a tight group of college friends reuniting on Cape Cod. There's a vanishing, then an intrusion. Tried / True / Terrific: The latest Laura Lippman, 'Murder Takes a Vacation' (June 25), is what publishing calls a 'cozy,' as in cuddly. A grandmother, assistant to Lippman's Tess Monaghan P.I., attracts an unlikely beau in Paris. Lippman, like Stephen King, or Megan Abbott, brings such an assured voice, you don't mind the familiarity. Luckily, Abbott is comfortably back with 'El Dorado Drive' (June 24), about a pyramid scheme that pulls several women into a dangerous bond. 'Never Flinch,' King's annual offering, brings back investigator Holly Gibney for another Midwest riff on hardboiled detective fiction. It's flabby, even for King, yet so reliably King — it's pretty cozy.
Time Magazine
2 days ago
- Time Magazine
Why Do So Many Serial Killers Come From the Pacific Northwest? A New Book Offers a Theory
For lack of a better term, the 1970s and '80s are often called America's 'Golden Age' of serial killers throughout the Pacific Northwest. (Its nickname, after all, is 'America's Killing Fields.') In the decades since, theories about how and why the era produced a disproportionate amount of murderous psychopaths—among them: Ted Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, the Green River Killer, and the I-5 Killer—have included everything from Eisenhower's 1954 hitchhiker-happy interstate highway system to post-World War II child abuse by traumatized soldiers to sensationalized media coverage of then-new ' true crime.' Any or all of the above may have contributed to the era's serial killer surge, as could some less obvious explanations like this one: poisonous chemicals, specifically lead, copper and arsenic, that leached into the air from industrial smelters. ASARCO in Tacoma, Wash., for example, regularly released a cloud of lead and arsenic that floated down as a white ash that killed pets and eroded paint off cars. The air was literally the color of lead and the pungent 'aroma of Tacoma' lingers to this day. Killers Gary Ridgway, Israel Keyes and Ted Bundy all lived nearby. So too did Pulitzer Prize -winning writer Caroline Fraser, just 7 years old and mere miles away during Bundy's 1974 summer murder spree. In her new investigative book out June 9, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, she thoroughly explores the so-called 'lead-crime hypothesis,' a theory that circulated first with academics before entering the mainstream in the early 2010s. Through her unique position of coming of age in Seattle during the era, Fraser's book marks the largest and most in-depth examination of the controversial theory so far. From her home in New Mexico, Fraser explains why she's convinced toxic chemicals helped cause a sudden spike in serial killers, why she got so obsessed with them to begin with and why serial killers really aren't as smart as they think they are. TIME: Your last book was a biography of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder. How do you go from that to serial killers? Fraser: This book has been in my mind for a long time. I was born and raised in Seattle and remember growing up with the presence of Ted Bundy. Even though I wasn't touched by the case directly, just having it happen so close to where I lived was a big deal. Bundy kidnapped and killed two women on the same Sunday afternoon from Lake Sammamish—just six miles from me. After that, people knew that his name was Ted, so there were posters, drawings, and police composites of his face all over the place. It was all anybody could talk about. That summer left me with a pretty strong impression of a chaos and craziness that was happening. And then there were so many others… …the Zodiac Killer, John Wayne Gacy, Gary Ridgway, Jeffrey Dahmer, Son of Sam, Richard Ramirez. Did it feel like suddenly serial killers were everywhere? Certainly by the time of Ramirez [in the mid-'80s], people were thinking, 'What the hell is going on here?' It's striking to me now that nobody was asking why. Nobody was looking at the larger pattern and asking, 'Are there more killers than before? Is there something about the Pacific Northwest?' The FBI was presenting themselves as the experts, but they weren't explaining anything about the phenomenon. Serial killers have always been with us in some fashion, but certainly not in those numbers. Many theories over the years have sought to explain. How did you arrive at yours? I figure it's got to be a combination of things, first of all, and all kinds of things can make a serial killer. Physical and sexual abuse was the leading theory of FBI profilers for a long time. A lot of these guys grew up in very, very poor environments. They often have a missing father, or an abusive father, or they didn't know who their father was at all—which they blame their mothers for. As we learn more about the brain, we're thinking more about the effects of concussion and brain damage. Some people think forceps by doctors delivering babies in the '50s caused brain damage in infants. Certain vitamin deficiencies when you're in utero or an infant can produce real deficits in terms of your brain development. All this before chemical exposures. The 'lead-crime hypothesis' posits a direct correlation between crime and lead, or as you put it, 'More lead, more murder.' What's the connection? During the post-war period, an enormous amount of lead was in the air from mainly two sources: Leaded gas, which everybody used for decades, and heavy industry like smelting. People are still debating the numbers, but it is pretty well accepted now that between 20 and 50% of the sharp rise in crime in the 1980s and '90s is attributable to lead. We know lead causes aggression. We know lead damages the brain in developing children. I don't think anybody thinks lead isn't at least a factor anymore, as there's a clear association between the withdrawal of leaded gas in the '90s and the drop-off of crime. In the '50s and '60s, geochemist Clair Patterson proved that lead exposure had caused what he called 'a loss of mental acuity.' But the effects of lead are all over the map; besides intelligence, it can affect personality. Many studies connect lead exposure to a particular kind of frontal cortex damage that leads to heightened aggression. This is observed largely in males. The higher the lead exposure, the greater the brain volume mass, and reduced brain volume has been linked to higher levels of psychopathy. Is there something specific about males from the Pacific Northwest? While it's true that there were smelters all over the country, Tacoma is particularly interesting because its smelter sits right in the middle of the city. All the emissions were being spread over not just Tacoma but the entire Pacific Northwest in this plume that was up to a thousand square miles. They measured it all the way up to British Columbia. Crime was up in all of America but it was up in Washington State by almost 30%—three times the national average. That said, and this is one of the reasons I focused on him, a lot of the idea about the Northwest Pacific comes right from Bundy. He was early in this phenomenon, and he eventually talked a lot, to the point that he was mythologized, almost glamorized. The media described him as 'terrific looking' and 'Kennedyesque.' Serial killers thrive on attention and want their names out there. How do you write about them without buying into the hype? And does hype encourage others? Serial killers care a lot about their reputations and are known to have obsessions with one another; Israel Keyes, for example, was a big 'fan' of Ted Bundy. I'm trying to paint a very different portrait of Bundy than 'very attractive genius.' In part by the Hannibal Lecter phenomenon, there's this idea that serial killers are fiendishly clever, smarter than anybody else. That's really not true. The truth is, we build these people up in our minds. We have an idea of what they're like and the power they have. Then when they're finally unveiled, they're these sad, pathetic losers. The public should see that. But would any of this make someone take up serial killing in the first place? I don't think so. These crimes are sexual in nature and something has happened that makes them sexually excited by violence and terrorizing their victims. The prevalence of necrophilia during this period is very weird. It all points to something that has gone wrong with the wiring of the brain. America's Serial Killer Database counted 669 serial killers in the 90s, 371 in the 2000s and 117 in the 2010s. Where do you think they're all going? A police officer will probably tell you that we're better at catching them now because of increased resources given to police departments. Proponents of mass incarceration will tell you they're in jail earlier and longer. Certainly forensic evidence, specifically DNA, makes identifying serial killers far easier than before, as does technology and video surveillance. But I like to think of it this way: In the same way that we've built cars that are safer to drive, we've also improved health outcomes to build better humans. Pregnant mothers take prenatal vitamins, we raise our children very differently and mental health services have greatly improved. Thanks largely to American football, we better understand the connection between repeated blows to the head and later degradation of cognition and increased aggression. Toxic chemicals including lead were phased out and banned, and then the crime rate took its largest plunge in recorded history. I don't think serial killers are going anywhere as much as we didn't grow them to begin with.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
A New Book Might Just Explain Why So Many Serial Killers Came From One Part of the Country
Growing up on Washington state's Mercer Island in the 1960s and '70s, the writer Caroline Fraser got used to hearing people puzzle over why the Pacific Northwest was such a hotbed of infamous serial killers. From Ted Bundy to Gary Ridgway, aka the Green River Killer, these criminals seemed to be a mysterious product of a particular place and time, but why? Fraser—who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder—had her own reasons for discontent with her hometown, foremost among them a domineering Christian Scientist father whom she herself fantasized about eliminating. When, during the pandemic, she finally settled down to investigate this regional anomaly—part of an astonishing boom in serial killers nationwide between 1970 and 1990—she encountered an alternate explanation, one that she learned was especially pertinent to the Seattle and Tacoma area. Fraser's new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, explores this theory of why her girlhood home was so notably rife with strange and extravagant crimes. I spoke with her about what she discovered. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Laura Miller: There's a lot swirling around in You've got the history of Tacoma, Seattle, and the greater Pacific Northwest. There's your personal history, and then there are the stories of these many criminals and murderers. But there is also an argument underlying it that I wasn't familiar with, the lead-crime hypothesis. Could you explain that? Caroline Fraser: I didn't realize when I started this book that crime in the United States was at its worst in this period that I'm talking about—the late '60s, the '70s, the '80s. Violent crime reached heights that had not been seen before. And then there was this abrupt drop-off in the 1990s. One of the theories that recently emerged to explain that drop-off was the lead-crime hypothesis. Lead exposure, especially in childhood, really affects the development of the brain, and in particular, the male brain. What can happen is that if you're exposed to lead as a young child, then you are more likely to exhibit, later, in young adulthood, impulsivity and aggression. You're more likely to commit violent crime. How were people exposed to lead, and how was that exposure diminished later? In the '70s, lead was removed from paint, but the major way that most people were being exposed to lead was through leaded gasoline. It had existed since the 1920s, but when you think about, especially in this country, the rise in commuting and in car ownership that came about after World War II—you had more people driving, and driving longer distance. I mean, virtually everybody from the late 1940s and early 1950s to the 1980s was exposed to a lot of leaded gas. When was it removed? They started talking about removing it in the mid-'70s with the creation of the EPA, but it doesn't really get completely removed until about 1986. And then on top of the leaded gas, in certain parts of the country—you focus mainly on Tacoma—there were these metal smelters emitting lead and all kinds of other chemicals. These are called primary smelters, which were basically factories or plants to produce metal. There used to be so many of these that somebody once said that at one time, everybody in the country lived within 10 miles of a smelter. They were very common in cities. They were taking metal ores, the products of mining, and burning them. The smelter in Tacoma was first a lead smelter, then it changed pretty early on to a copper smelter. The issue with burning these ores is that they contain all these different kinds of metal, some of which are desirable, like silver and gold and copper, and others which are less so, like lead and arsenic. The Tacoma smelter was one of the dirtiest smelters in the country in terms of how much arsenic it produced. It also produced a lot of lead, and it was open and operating for decades, and over those decades, it polluted 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound region. The lead-crime hypothesis connects the general rise in crime with lead exposure, but has it been connected to the rise in the bizarre, unusual crimes that you're writing about in this book? I don't think that anybody has written a general-interest book that makes the connection between serial killers and the lead-crime hypothesis. What we are starting to see, though, are some scientific papers exploring the connection between lead exposure and psychopathy. But while it isn't completely unknown in the scientific record, I wanted to make this connection in a subjective way. I mean, I can't prove, for example, that Ted Bundy committed his crimes because of lead exposure. But what I can do is show you how much lead exposure he got, because there's now this extraordinary map, this Geographic Information System map that was produced by the Washington State Department of Ecology, that maps out the lead exposure, especially in Tacoma, but also the whole plume of it as it goes up into Seattle and Mercer Island and south of Tacoma. Now you can actually see how much lead was in Ted Bundy's front yard and his backyard, and how much arsenic. When did you learn about the lead exposure aspect, both its link to crime and the amount of metals the smelter was dumping in the area? Because you grew up there! You yourself were also exposed to all of that lead. Yeah, and draw whatever conclusion you like about that. I became aware of the smelter because we'd been thinking of possibly moving back to the Northwest and were looking at property. There was a piece of property on Vashon Island, which is right across from Tacoma, and the real estate agent had said that arsenic remediation was necessary, or something like that. I thought, how could there be arsenic on Vashon Island? It's this beautiful little island that was very agricultural. They grew strawberries there. But of course, because of its location right across from Tacoma, it got exposed to emissions from the smelter. So it has had arsenic and also lead. You make it very clear in your book that there's a long history of the danger of lead exposure being minimized by industry. ASARCO, the company that owned and operated the smelter, had this horribly compromised doctor on staff who kept insisting it was just fine. The government at the time seemed so docile in the face of those assertions. It just took forever for them to really recognize what a hazard it was. And by the time they were ready to recognize it, most of the smelters were going out of business anyway, which of course is not accidental timing. I think there are only three lead smelters or primary smelters left operating in the U.S. now. It's so much cheaper to go someplace like Mexico or Peru, countries that don't have the regulations that we have. So now those are the places that are being polluted. That is very disturbing. You make a connection between the whole femicide epidemic in Ciudad Juárez and the smelter emissions down there. The thing that we're still facing here is not the primary smelters like the one they had in Tacoma, but all this recycling. Your car battery has got lead in it. Let's talk more about these serial killers you cover. There's a lot of detail about the crimes in this book, and also there has been a lot written about at least some of these people. I'm not going say that I'm not interested in reading it, because I do love true crime, but a lot of people might complain that it has already been covered extensively. How did you come to the decision to examine the crimes themselves in some depth? One of the things that I was hoping to do by looking at some of these very overfamiliar characters like Ted Bundy, for example, is to put him in a historical context. Because I think that really changes the way we see who he is and what he did. I love true crime too, and Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me was a real gateway drug for me, but the thing that most true crime does is to take just one of these killers—Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, the BTK Killer—and they look just at that one guy. I wanted to do something different, to look at a selection of them over time and how that makes us see what they're doing differently in terms of history. It begins to seem more like a social phenomenon. It's really striking in how much the culture of true crime, especially lurid magazines like True Detective, fascinated killers like Bundy, and then how subsequent killers were obsessed with Bundy in turn—were basically fans who aspired to be like him, after reading about him in books. And they're all learning things from reading about what other serial killers have done. They're learning techniques for how to hide what they're doing and how to evade detection, and how to conceal their victims so that they're not found until there's very little forensic evidence left. Was there anything you found out researching this book that really surprised you? The Tacoma connection was a surprise to me, for starters, because I had always associated Ted Bundy with Seattle, where he committed some of his more notable crimes. And the connection between Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who's not that far from Tacoma. And then when I discovered that Charles Manson had been in the area in the '60s … I was really surprised to learn that the first victim of the D.C. sniper duo was in Tacoma! But then do you worry that you're getting into a certain amount of confirmation bias? Surely you must have come across serial killers with no major lead connection? Sure. I hope I present enough of the tentative quality about this so that people can kind of make up their own mind. There are definitely other serial killers. I looked at Son of Sam pretty closely, trying to find some sort of explanation for his behavior, but couldn't really do again, the whole problem with this era is that everybody was exposed to leaded gas. Everyone was exposed. It's striking that you include your own fairly cold-blooded thoughts about getting rid of your dad as a child. I think we all have moments of … not of wanting to kill somebody, but just frustration and anger and rage, potentially. Those feelings are particularly pronounced when you're a kid, when you feel that you have no autonomy, when you feel powerless. The behavior of the serial killers is just so monstrous that there's always the temptation to think that there's nothing about them that could have ever been normal. They come to seem, I think—especially when you see this whole series of them, and the repetitiveness of their behavior—like automatons. Almost like robots that are in this kind of cycle, and they can't really control it. But I'm not trying to let them off the hook or anything. One of the most striking parts of the book is when you quote from a newspaper story covering the demolition of the smelter. One woman actually says, 'Even if it kills me, I'm still gonna miss it.' There's something so resonant about that now, at a time when a lot of people want to 'bring back' terribly dangerous industries like mining that destroy the health of the people who work in them. The community of Ruston that was right around the smokestack had developed the sense of, Oh, this is a wonderful thing, and the jobs are so well-paying. And the smelter officials had done such a good job of quashing any investigation that would have exposed how deadly it was. People were forced to choose between jobs and health. They just should not have been put in that position.
