Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

by Caroline Fraser

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Is there a bigger cause for the increased number of serial killers? Fraser thinks so, and the case she makes isn't just compelling, it's fascinating. It's true crime wrapped in science.

“Scorching, seductive . . . A superb and disturbing vivisection of our darkest urges.” —Los Angeles Times

“This is about as highbrow as true crime gets.” —Vulture

“Fraser has outdone herself, and just about everyone else in the true-crime genre, with Murderland.” —Esquire

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Prairie Fires comes a terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond—a gripping investigation of how a new strain of psychopath emerged out of a toxic landscape of deadly industrial violence

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.

A propulsive nonfiction thriller, Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593657225
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/10/2025
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for best biography of the year. She is also the author of God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, and London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in New Mexico.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

The Floating Bridge

Make a pact with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.
-Romanian proverb

Denn die Todten reiten schnell.
For the dead travel fast.
-Gottfried August Bürger, "Lenore"

Once upon a time, you could smell it, the salt water and the accelerants, the creosote, the diesel, and the benzene. Now people call it "Emerald City," unspeakable gall. Back in the day, no one called it an emerald city.

It's dark. At forty-seven degrees, thirty-six minutes north of the equator, Seattle is the northernmost U.S. city with a population of over half a million, north of Boston and Burlington, north of Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, for that matter, and on the same latitude as Zurich, Switzerland. At the winter solstice in Seattle, there are eight hours and twenty-five minutes of daylight. When you're a kid, you're waiting for the bus in the dark and coming home near dusk.

All bridges lead to Seattle, but Seattle is a bit of spume, iridescent, evanescent, an oily bubble blowing atop the waves. It's a sad place in the 1970s, a place no one wants to be. A literal backwater. Someone puts up a billboard on the way to the airport: Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights. The city lacks historical significance, confidence, political power, and pride of place. Its economy is boom and bust: Boeing and Weyerhaeuser, Weyerhaeuser and Boeing. Their contracts are always being canceled.

Its fortunes reflect the weather, a few fickle weeks of summer bracketed by months of overcast, the clouds clamping down, supplying mist and seeping rain and continuous bone-chilling cold. As a boy, my father learns by heart "The Cremation of Sam McGee," a Robert W. Service poem inspired by the Alaska gold rush, and he recites it ever after by the campfire:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

It's a funny poem about freezing to death.


Behold a lethal geography. A river of rock and ice carves the groove of Puget Sound between the mountains, gouging out Lake Washington and its mirror image, Lake Sammamish. Last gasp of the Ice Age, the Fraser Glaciation presses south down the Fraser Valley sometime between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago, five thousand feet thick where the town of Bellingham will be, thirty-five hundred feet at Seattle, two thousand at Tacoma. That’s pressure. When the glaciers withdraw, they leave erratics in their wake. Erratics are boulders the size of buildings, calling cards of the apocalypse.

The ice leaves an erratic near what is currently the University of Washington campus, eighty feet in diameter and nineteen feet high. In times past, it was used by Native people as a landmark; later, mountain climbers began using it to train: Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest, once scaled it. It is called the Wedgwood Erratic, and it lies becalmed between 28th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 72nd Street. Something, or someone, has left it there.

East across the mountains from Seattle, across the Cascades, we find a land of hanging valleys, scablands, and coulees, topographical anomalies so bizarre that geologists struggle to explain them. Unimaginable forces have been at work, violating everything known about natural erosion. What made these terrible scars? No one can say.

In 1927, a high school biology teacher in Seattle named J. Harlen Bretz delivers a paper at the Geological Society in Washington, D.C., theorizing that the weird distortions were carved by catastrophic flooding unleashed by the collapse of vast ice dams. His theory is called "preposterous." He is dismissed as "incompetent."

He is, of course, correct.

Fifteen thousand years ago, there was an event so bizarre it inspired scenes in science fiction novels. To the east, an ice dam formed between the mountains, stretching ten to thirty miles, creating Lake Missoula, a prehistoric body of water two thousand feet deep, covering three thousand square miles and holding five hundred cubic miles of water, exerting pressures of unimaginable force. At an unknown time, on an unspecified day, the ice dam failed and the water let fly.

No one alive has ever seen or heard anything like it. If there were hide-wearing humans in the area, pre-Clovis colonizers following their mammoth bliss, they likely did not survive to tell the tale. The hydraulic pressure of the flood ripped out bedrock, scouring the earth, changing the courses of great rivers, scoring the land, leaving massive rents that are still visible. Eddies of glacial silt washed up against mountainsides, still extant. Ice dams formed and failed again. The cycle was repeated dozens of times, perhaps once every half century over several thousand years. Geologists quibble, but they agree on one thing: All dams leak. All dams fail.

Spreading and contracting, glaciers leave the land black and blue, dominated by rock walls and harsh crags, lowlands covered in cedars and firs and primitive ferns the color of bruises. Rocked in the wind, the trees move of their own accord, swaying on unseen currents, lowering, watching, waiting.

The Northwest is biding its time, with five active volcanoes marching south down the Washington Cascades: Mount Baker, Glacier Peak, Mount Rainier, Mount Saint Helens, and Mount Adams. Each is an organic smelter, ready to bring forth gas, liquid rock, and ash. Civilization, such as it is, is erected on the back of this dragon, its bridges and tunnels as delicate as eggshell.

Magma, cataclysms. This is the natural path of the OWL, cutting through Seattle, passing north of Rainier, a forecast of disasters past and future. To the planet, it's all a game, Puget Sound just a "big hole" between two mountain ranges, a trough filled with immense crustal toy blocks. There is a 45 percent probability that over the next fifty years the Juan de Fuca plate, lying offshore beneath the Pacific, will cause a "megathrust," a subduction earthquake of higher than 8.0 magnitude. It will do this by trying to force its way under the Cascadia continental plate.

Beneath us lies basement rock, the lowest layer above the earth's mantle, an unstable mélange, basalt and gabbro. Rock can change its spots. Put pressure on it and it goes through a phase change, compacting, tilting, sinking, deforming.

Geologists compare the slow-motion accident that is the Pacific Northwest to a train wreck or a jackknifing tractor trailer. A block of rock we call "Washington" is hitting the wall, crumpling, folding, and faulting. Something temporarily known as "Oregon" is curling around it in clockwise rotation. A megathrust is expected every two hundred and forty years on average. It has been more than three hundred years since the last one. In the year 1700, there was a great calamity, a movement of the earth and everything upon it that caused the cedars and firs to slide upright off the island I come from. Someday, they may rise again.

"Faulting is complex and not yet understood," scientists say.

Yet we know, don't we.

The earthquake to come is expected to bury the streets of downtown Seattle under eighty feet of broken glass and crack the Grand Coulee Dam, one of the largest concrete structures in the world. It will alter the topography of islands.

It will raise a tsunami to inundate the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and Japan. Rock, air, fire, and water: they will not take no for an answer.

The movement of the earth may or may not be related to melting under the continental crust and the long-expected lahar, in which hot gases and molten lava will flow from Mount Rainier, boiling the glaciers on its face, and mud and lava will pour out to sea, following the routes of rivers to the Sound.

It is more likely than not. The lahar has happened before, some sixty times, and is expected to happen every five hundred to a thousand years. The last time was six hundred years ago. Just a blink. That's when a ragged chunk of the mountain tore off. It still appears to be missing, near the top.

The next time the lahar happens, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources expects it will cost $6 billion and the lives of the 150,000 people living on top of old mudflows in nearby towns in the Puyallup Valley if they are not evacuated in time. Schoolchildren in the town of Orting, on the slopes of Rainier, are trained to run uphill, out of the valley, when sirens go off, triggered by trip wires and sensors.

On a clear day, Rainier is stunning as seen from Seattle: star of picture postcards, a glittering, coveted view, a snow cone of brightest white against deepest blue. Diamonds, sapphires, and platinum. "The mountain is out," people say, self-satisfied, self-confident.

But it is all a facade. The mountain is admittedly "rotten inside." Hollow, full of gas. A place where bad things happen.

Bad things can happen by accident. But sometimes they happen on purpose, and sometimes they are engineered. By engineers.

Every great psychopath wants a floating bridge. In Persia, Xerxes, King of Kings, orders his armies to cross the Hellespont on pontoon bridges made of flax and papyrus. When waters rise in a storm, sending his spans to eternity, he whips the water in retaliation. He beheads his engineers.

Sometime between AD 37 and 41, Caligula plans to ride across the Bay of Baiae by lashing together ships' hulls and laying a causeway upon them. No one today knows whether he built it or not.

Fleeing the Russians, Napoleon orders three floating spans across the Berezina. His Dutch builders tear down the houses of local people to build them, but the improvised pontoons are flimsy. In the chaos of combat, thousands of soldiers and civilians perish in the icy waters.

The Washington State Department of Transportation is no less grandiose. The growing city of Seattle is packed into a narrow north-south strip of land bordered on the west by saltwater of Puget Sound and on the east by freshwater Lake Washington. The city can grow north and south, but a valuable expanse of land lies across the lake, on the east side. In the middle of the lake, a natural stepping stone, is Mercer Island.

A thirty-five-year-old engineer named Homer Hadley dreams of building a concrete floating bridge spanning Lake Washington from Seattle to Mercer Island. After traffic crosses the island, a shorter, conventional bridge on the isle's eastern shore will carry motorists to the east side of the lake. His critics call his notion "Hadley's Folly."

As early as 1920, Hadley is dreaming of his bridge. Concrete river barges come into vogue after World War I, when European cities run short of steel. During the next world war, concrete ships and barges ferry men and materiel across the English Channel on D-Day. They are deployed in the Pacific. Working for the Seattle Public School District's architectural office, Hadley proposes the idea in an earnest talk delivered to the American Society of Civil Engineers. At a time when the population is a few hundred thousand, he's pilloried by city fathers, editorials in The Seattle Times, and everyone who wants to preserve the aesthetic beauty of Lake Washington.

Mercer Island's first bridge, the East Channel Bridge, is constructed in 1923, but Hadley sees this as an insignificant span. Barely eighty feet long and made of wood, it connects the island to the east side of the lake and the rural town of Bellevue. It becomes so rickety that school bus drivers make children get out of the bus and walk on foot, a perilous crossing. "A tragedy occurred in 1937," says a local history, when a boy slipped through the railing and drowned in the East Channel. Until a second bridge across the main channel is built, the structure still leaves islanders who want to get to Seattle having to take a passenger ferry or detour twenty-two miles around the south end of the lake.

Hadley is an outspoken critic of the New Deal and its architect, FDR. Nonetheless, he does not hesitate to pursue federal money, consulting with the director of the Washington State Department of Highways, Lacey V. Murrow. Lacey, the handsome brother of journalist and radio personality Edward R. Murrow, has joined the department as an engineer in his twenties. Dressed in sharp pinstriped suits and a camel-hair coat, his looks are compared favorably to those of Clark Gable. People laugh at Homer Hadley, a squinting, bespectacled man with receding hair, a geek, an egghead, an eighty-pound weakling. They don't laugh at Lacey V. Murrow.

Lacey is put in charge of the construction of two bridges, and they're both dedicated during the first two days of July 1940. This fact tends to be elided in later accounts. Because one of the bridges falls down.

The first to be dedicated is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a suspension toll bridge, thirty miles south of Seattle, spanning the slim arm of the Sound between the industrial city of Tacoma and the western peninsula, hosting Bremerton, a critical naval base. The ceremonial dedication of this crossing begins on July 1, under blue skies. Parades and floats file through downtown Tacoma, and ten thousand people crowd the shores to hear a nineteen-gun salute. The governor pays the first toll, and there stands Lacey V. Murrow, hailed by the press as a Horatio Alger. He stands a little off to the side, jaunty straw hat in hand, his chest bifurcated by the ribbon about to be cut by officials from the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. He has just turned thirty-six, although his boss lies about his age. The press believes him to be forty-four. He is looking down, abashed. He should be.

On this celebratory day, Lacey receives a telegram from his younger brother, who's in London reporting on the Blitz for CBS Radio. Ed sends this terse message: congratulations hope you and bridges upstanding.

Ed may well have heard that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge has been fraught from funding to design. This bridge and the Lake Washington Pontoon Bridge are massive undertakings of Roosevelt's Public Works Administration, launched in the teeth of war. The impetus for the Tacoma bridge is military: the need for ready access to the Bremerton Navy Yard. But the original design put forward by Murrow's engineers, calling for heavy twenty-five-foot-deep deck trusses, is estimated to cost $11 million, deemed too high by federal authorities.

An East Coast engineer is brought in to redesign it. He drafts a thrillingly thin, graceful art deco suspension bridge: two lanes floating atop a light, eight-foot-deep deck, cutting the projected cost to $6.4 million. Washington State engineers examine the plan and declare it "fundamentally unsound." Their concerns are dismissed. The first cable suspension bridge of its type in the world, it will be built quickly, in nineteen months, leaving no time for wind tunnel testing. It will become the third-longest suspension bridge in the world, after two far heavier bridges, San Francisco's Golden Gate and New York's George Washington.

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/07/2025

What makes a murderer? Pulitzer winner Fraser (Prairie Fires) makes a convincing case for arsenic and lead poisoning as contributing factors in this eyebrow-raising account. Fraser, who was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, where smelters belted out poison for decades and a proliferation of serial killers in the 1970s and ’80s earned the region the nickname “America’s Killing Fields,” marries a poignant memoir of her Washington State childhood with a vivid catalog of crimes by Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and others. Throughout, she forges links between ballooning 20th-century crime statistics and declining health outcomes due to pollution, noting that the so-called “golden age” of serial killers came to an end in the ’90s as leaded gasoline was banned, smelters shut down due to decreasing profits, and the Environmental Protection Agency stepped up pollution controls. While it initially sounds far-fetched when, for instance, Fraser links brutal violence on Mexico’s borders—where 500 women were murdered between 1993 and 2011—to a rise in unregulated factory towns, her methodical research and lucid storytelling argue persuasively for linking the health of the planet to the safety of its citizens. This is a provocative and page-turning work of true crime. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media Group. (June)

Publishers Weekly

The Seattle native Caroline Fraser digs into the strange affinity of some of America’s most notorious murderers for the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and ’80s. As she follows the terrifying careers of serial killers including Ted Bundy, she investigates the social and environmental factors that may have made this rain-soaked region such a fertile breeding ground for violence and mental illness.” —Wall Street Journal

“Fraser begins with a simple true-crime curiosity — why did the Pacific Northwest have so many serial killers in the ’70s and ’80s? — and expands her gaze to encompass the recent history of American industrialization and the hidden consequences of environmental degradation. The result is a scientific re-examination of Ted Bundy and his ilk, and the toxic chemicals that may have rotted their brains.” —The New York Times

“In Murderland, Fraser returns to her own native landscape, the Pacific Northwest, to explore why the region has produced such a large number of serial killers. In this brooding and often brave book, the author finds evil afoot, but the worst monsters aren’t who you’d guess.” —The Boston Globe

“Scorching, seductive . . . 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 . . . Murderland is a superb and disturbing vivisection of our darkest urges.” —Los Angeles Times

“This is about as highbrow as true crime gets.” —Vulture

“In this noir-ish reportage on the serial killers produced by the Pacific Northwest (along with the implications of its environmental wreckage), Fraser gives David Lynch a run for his money.” —Vanity Fair

“Fraser has outdone herself, and just about everyone else in the true-crime genre, with Murderland . . . Fraser bird-dogs the trails of the Green River killer, Ted Bundy, the I-5 killer, the Hillside Strangler, and others, leading the way with splendid research. Look for Murderland to garner Fraser new awards.” —Esquire

“From Ted Bundy to the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler and even Charles Manson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Prairie Fires charts the uncanny explosion of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest through the ’70s and ’80s. It reads like a novel, with all of the juicy details and propulsive plot we love in our favorite thrillers.” —People

“The sharp, incandescent book tells a gripping, unconventional history of crime and industrial wrongs, including a toxic legacy of lead and arsenic from a Tacoma smelter that may have contributed to the monstrous murders.” —Seattle Times

“Murderland is not for the faint of heart . . . Riveting . . . [Fraser] has a terrific eye for telling — and, usually, horrifying — details. Fraser’s book has outrage and attitude.” —Minnesota Star-Tribune

“Murderland is perfect for true-crime lovers—and even true-crime critics . . . We haven’t yet had enough of true-crime books about notoriously infamous serial killers like Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and the Night Stalker. At least not if the author is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist like Fraser, whose microscopic lens and flair with words are always enticing.” —AV Club

“Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser returns with Murderland, a true crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest . . . It’s a fascinating investigation into how a new strain of psychopath emerged out of a toxic landscape of deadly industrial violence.” —Town & Country

“A strange and compelling tale . . . Initially, Murderland seems as crazy as the killers it portrays. But Fraser, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has the skills to pull it off, and once she gets going, the theory she espouses seems plausible.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

“[Fraser] makes a case that isn't merely convincing; it's downright damning, showing how lead seeped into literally every aspect of life for those who lived near a smelter—and even for those who didn't—via leaded gas and paint. Fraser follows the exploits of the similarly deadly and devastating serial killers and ASARCO (American Smelting and Refining Company) in a narrative that is gripping, harrowing, and timely.” —Booklist (starred review)

“What makes a murderer? Pulitzer winner Fraser (Prairie Fires) makes a convincing case for arsenic and lead poisoning as contributing factors in this eyebrow-raising account . . . her methodical research and lucid storytelling argue persuasively for linking the health of the planet to the safety of its citizens. This is a provocative and page-turning work of true crime.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A provocative, eerily lyrical study of the heyday of American serial killers. From the 1940s through the 1980s, the number of serial killers in the U.S. rose precipitously, and the Pacific Northwest was, disproportionately, home for them . . . Fraser’s book is an engrossing and disturbing portrait of decades of carnage that required decades to confront. A true-crime story written with compassion, fury, and scientific sense.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“A blend of memoir, biography and history, Murderland is [Fraser’s] argument for why she had so many murderous neighbours: uniquely high lead poisoning. The lead-crime hypothesis is not new. Many scientific studies have fleshed out how childhood lead exposure is associated with aggression, psychopathy and crime . . . But Fraser is the first to apply the theory to America’s serial killers. Drawing from a large array of data, she makes her case with conviction . . . Murderland reads like a true crime thriller.” —The Times (UK)

“This book is a mapping, of murderers and their victims, yes, but also of the battle between nature and society, a battle staged out on the edge of America and in the hearts of the people who live there. It started by trying to understand why so many killers come from the Pacific Northwest but by the end it had cracked open the most taboo corners of the American psyche. This story is a menace and a beauty. It left me deeply unsettled—by the idea of monsters, by the myth of free will, and by all the realms of cause and effect that remain unexplored.” —Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

From the Publisher

★ 2025-03-08
A provocative, eerily lyrical study of the heyday of American serial killers.

From the 1940s through the 1980s, the number of serial killers in the U.S. rose precipitously, and the Pacific Northwest was, disproportionately, home for them; Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway (aka the Green River Killer), Jack Spillman (aka the Werewolf Butcher), and more hailed from the region. Observers attributed this to mere coincidence, or perhaps a side effect of the gloomy climate. Fraser (Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, etc.), a Pulitzer Prize winner and Northwest native, suggests a more direct culprit: the region’s high concentration of smelters, which released derangingly high levels of arsenic and lead into the atmosphere. (Notable serial killers elsewhere in the country had similar backgrounds; Dennis Rader, aka BTK, grew up near a smelter in Kansas’ “lead belt.”) Fraser’s book layers the evidence for this argument (known as the lead-crime hypothesis) precisely but with a novelistic structure, braiding together biographies of the killers (Bundy most prominently and prolifically), the growth of firms like mining and smelting companies ASARCO (controlled by the Guggenheim family), tragic incidents on a precarious floating bridge connecting Seattle and Mercer Island, and Fraser’s own recollections of growing up in a time and place when young women were inordinately targeted and killed. She depicts a lot of death; Fraser is determined to make the reader see the worst of the killers’ actions, in vivid but unsensationalistic detail, to underscore the ever-escalating crises that mining and smelting businesses tried to underplay, pay off, or ignore. By the ’90s, as bans on leaded gasoline took effect, smelters closed, and the EPA set stricter pollution standards, the number of serial killers dissipated. Fraser’s book is an engrossing and disturbing portrait of decades of carnage that required decades to confront.

A true-crime story written with compassion, fury, and scientific sense.

Kirkus Reviews