Not shying away from the "crime" in "true crime"

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Essentially, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers is Caroline Fraser making the argument that the rise of serial killers in the 1960s and 1970s is because of pollution. She largely focuses on sexual serial killers in the Pacific Northwest, linking their depravities to the presence of smelters and leaded gasoline. She largely focuses on Ted Bundy, that most quintessential of serial killers, but discusses many others, including the Green River Killer, I-5 Killer, BTK, and Night Stalker.

Unlike the trend in recent true crime, Fraser very much focuses on the killers, their lives and upbringings--logically, since she's arguing that the pollution in their childhoods helped make them the monsters they became. She intersperses their stories with that of her own upbringing just outside Seattle, as well as with the story of ASARCO, a mining, smelting, and refining company. There's also a lot about the bridges around Seattle, particularly the dangerous Lacey V. Murrow Floating Bridge. Like, there is just a LOT of discussing the various accidents on it.

In detail. Fatal accidents, non-fatal accidents. Fraser writes about what happened in a lot of them. Similarly, she does NOT shy away from getting into the details of what the serial killers did to their victims. I read a lot of this book in a fairly compressed amount of time, and I going to the point where I just kind of let the horrors wash over me; it's really too much to contemplate.

And it felt unnecessary. Fraser's language at times was a bit flowery for me and the way she wrote about some of the attacks and murders and deaths struck me the wrong way. The level of detail she gave just seemed gratuitous. It was a LOT to read.

What Fraser did well was make the argument that companies like ASARCO should be regarded as equally evil as men like Ted Bundy. They knowingly polluted the air, the water, the land; they covered up the proof. They killed many more than the serial killers could dream of.

Did Fraser succeed in making the connection between companies like ASARCO and the rise of depraved serial killers? It's hard to tell because the book is case after case of correlation, which isn't the same as causation. Fraser focuses on the Pacific Northwest (and, for some reason, something called the Olympic-Wallowa Lineament, basically a "zone of crustal weakness" [p. 3], which Fraser refers to as "a route wreathed in bodies" [p. 4], as though the ground itself causes evil), but doesn't do a good job of comparing the emissions in Tacoma to those of similar facilities in other parts of the country (except El Paso). Plus, there are a lot of other reasons we've seen fewer serial killers (though how they're defined seems nebulous at best) in the past 30 or 40 years, like the increase of security cameras and people having phones on them and the "stranger danger" narratives of the 1980s that have been ingrained in children for years.

Still, I appreciated having the narrative laid out for me, and I honestly didn't know a ton about Ted Bundy (just sort of the broad strokes of his story and whatever I learned from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story). The book was engrossing, I'll certainly give it that. An interesting addition to the true crime canon.