Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

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.

REVIEWS

“Meticulously researched . . . A great writer can make art of the most grotesque material, and Ms. Fraser does. As crushing as many of the stories are, we are held in thrall . . . In a climate where killers can be romanticized, Ms. Fraser performs the necessary service of showing them as the troubled, pathetic and deeply dangerous people they are. If her need to find causation is honorable, and the lead-crime conclusion perhaps even true, one should not mistake this for compassion, which Ms. Fraser reserves for the killers’ victims and for the land itself, which was not given a choice in abetting those it poisoned.” —Wall Street Journal

“The product of vast research into the correlation between violent behavior and neurological damage associated with high levels of environmental pollutants (lead, asbestos, arsenic) in the blood, [Murderland] is an amalgam of true crime reportage, visionary muckraking in the tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and a startlingly candid memoir of Fraser’s girlhood in the Seattle area in ‘the time of serial killers’—both individual and corporate . . . A damning inventory of rapacious industrial pollution and sadistic serial killers . . . Though Murderland might be cataloged as ecojournalism, it is also a multi-true-crime narrative related in a breathlessly propulsive manner. Folded into the charges against corporate polluters like ASARCO are passages that fairly spring off the page . . . Commemorating the many victims of serial killers, many of them unnamed, unknown, Fraser’s prose is lyrical, elegiac.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Murderland [is] an extraordinarily well-written and genre-defying blend of memoir, social and environmental history, and forensic inquest . . . Fraser’s portrayal of the [Guggenheim] family is akin to my colleague (and friend) Patrick Radden Keefe’s genealogy of the Sacklers, in his book Empire of Pain . . . Fraser’s argumentative style is one of association, a vast crazy wall studded with murders and smelters and industrialists, yoked into patterns with skeins of gripping red yarn . . . Murderland is something of a moody masterpiece. Fraser is an outstanding social, cultural, and environmental historian, and she has an effortless way of turning pontoon bridges into villains.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 978-0593657225
Pages: 480