Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every week,
Speaker 1: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 1: journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 2: Good Evening. Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of
Speaker 2: Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in
Speaker 2: American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body
Speaker 2: dumps in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But
Speaker 2: in the nineteen seventies and eight, Bundy was just one
Speaker 2: perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder
Speaker 2: across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and
Speaker 2: nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall
Speaker 2: of an epidemic of serial killing? As Murderland indelibly maps
Speaker 2: the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers
Speaker 2: in Mayhem, The Green River Killer, the I five Killer,
Speaker 2: the Nightstalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson. Fraser's Northwestern
Speaker 2: death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an
Speaker 2: overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in ted
Speaker 2: Bundy's Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper,
Speaker 2: and arsenic smelters in the world, but was hardly unique
Speaker 2: in the West. As Fraser's and Vents instigation inexorably proceeds,
Speaker 2: evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only
Speaker 2: sickened and blighted millions of lives, but also warped young minds,
Speaker 2: including some who grew up to become serial killers. Murderland
Speaker 2: transcends true crime, voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on
Speaker 2: a profound quest into the dark heart of the real
Speaker 2: American berserk. The book you were featuring this evening is Murderland,
Speaker 2: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, with
Speaker 2: my special guest, Pulitzer Prize winning author Caroline Fraser. Welcome
Speaker 2: to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 3: Caroline Fraser, thanks for having me, happy to be here.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, and congratulations on murder Land.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you. It was a fascinating project to write,
Speaker 3: although it took me in some unexpected directions.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about the origins before we get into
Speaker 2: this incredible story. But just tell us how you came
Speaker 2: to be the author of this story, How you came
Speaker 2: to be again, the author of Murderland.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in Seattle,
Speaker 3: in a place called Mercer Island, which is a suburb
Speaker 3: of Seattle in the middle of Lake Washington. As I
Speaker 3: was growing up, some of these things happened. You know.
Speaker 3: I was thirteen in nineteen seventy four when Ted Bundy
Speaker 3: began committing the crimes that would be attributed to him,
Speaker 3: although I think he actually started much earlier than nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy four, But in any event, I certainly remember that time.
Speaker 3: And in the years after that, people began asking the
Speaker 3: question why are there so many serial killers in the
Speaker 3: Pacific Northwest? And this was, you know, something that came
Speaker 3: up over and over again in the press. The newspapers
Speaker 3: would revisit this question every you know, couple of years
Speaker 3: and print lists of how many serial killers there were
Speaker 3: in the region. And I'd always kind of wondered about that,
Speaker 3: like what accounted for this? Was it really a thing
Speaker 3: or was it some kind of you know, urban legend.
Speaker 3: So that was sort of in my mind for a
Speaker 3: long time, and I worked on other projects, very different
Speaker 3: kinds of things. But during COVID particularly, I was looking
Speaker 3: for something that I could work on from home, and
Speaker 3: I began looking at that question again and just trying
Speaker 3: to investigate both the number of serial killers and their
Speaker 3: individual stories in the Northwest and see where that led.
Speaker 2: You. Right early on in this book that you are
Speaker 2: an amateur cartographer and you draw lines and make maps.
Speaker 2: Tell us about your early map that you did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, I had seen on various websites.
Speaker 3: It's well known where Ted Bundy grew up in the
Speaker 3: city of Tacoma. For example. He wasn't originally from there.
Speaker 3: He was born in Vermont and spent a couple of
Speaker 3: years in Philadelphia, but then ended up about the age
Speaker 3: of five in Tacoma. And so I looked at where
Speaker 3: he was living in Tacoma. I was struck by the
Speaker 3: fact that another very prolific and well known serial killer,
Speaker 3: Gary Ridgeway, was also from that area. That he grew
Speaker 3: up just a couple miles east of SeaTac the airport
Speaker 3: just north of Tacoma. And then another thing that I
Speaker 3: learned about more recently was the fact that Charles Manson
Speaker 3: had spent a significant amount of time being incarcerated on
Speaker 3: McNeil Island, which is just off of Tacoma. So then
Speaker 3: I had these three points on the map of where
Speaker 3: these three guys were, and it was really quite striking
Speaker 3: how close to each other they were. And that was
Speaker 3: a map that sort of sent me back to the
Speaker 3: drawing board, if you will, to think about the question
Speaker 3: of is there anything these guys could have been exposed
Speaker 3: to that would have led to where they ended up.
Speaker 2: You read about another map, they call it the Owl.
Speaker 2: Tell us about this owl and its relation to what
Speaker 2: you were just speaking about.
Speaker 3: The owl refers to the something that's called the Olympic
Speaker 3: Wallawa Lineament, which came into being when a cartographer, a
Speaker 3: man who drew maps professionally back in the forties. He
Speaker 3: was drawing a map of Washington State and the northwest,
Speaker 3: very very detailed and quite beautiful map. You can still
Speaker 3: see it online. As he was finishing this map, he
Speaker 3: happened to kind of glance across at sideways and saw
Speaker 3: a line that goes from the very top of the
Speaker 3: northwest tip of Cape Flattery. That's really the north westernmost
Speaker 3: point of both Washington State and the United States. And
Speaker 3: this this line, this depression in the map that he
Speaker 3: noticed kind of cut southeast down across the state of
Speaker 3: Washington and kind of carved it in two. And he
Speaker 3: was so intrigued by this, which was really just created by,
Speaker 3: you know, a kind of depression in the land. He
Speaker 3: was so intrigued by this that he called it the Owl,
Speaker 3: the Olympic Wallawa lineum and he began theorizing about what
Speaker 3: it might be. It probably he thought it was probably
Speaker 3: a fault line. I think most people now think he
Speaker 3: was probably right about that. There are many, many fault
Speaker 3: lines that cut through Washington State, and many of them
Speaker 3: have only been discovered recently with the kind of light
Speaker 3: art technology that can see beneath the surface. And it
Speaker 3: has been discovered and is quite a cause of concern
Speaker 3: that there are so many fault lines in Washington, particularly
Speaker 3: lying under very heavily populated parts of Seattle, that it
Speaker 3: is felt that this could create quite a terrible situation
Speaker 3: if there's another really big earthquake, the way there was
Speaker 3: about seven hundred years ago. So I used the Owl
Speaker 3: as a kind of image of both the perils of
Speaker 3: the natural world in that region, which were certainly in
Speaker 3: some ways taken advantage of by these serial killers, because
Speaker 3: one of the things that both Bundy and Ridgeway, for example,
Speaker 3: did was to take their victims out into the woods
Speaker 3: and dispose of their bodies in places where they would
Speaker 3: not readily be found, and that made it particularly difficult
Speaker 3: for any forensic investigation to take place. So the owl
Speaker 3: is really kind of a metaphor for the hazards of
Speaker 3: this region.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about some of the writing you have in
Speaker 2: a chapter called the Smelter. First off, tell us for
Speaker 2: people that don't know what a smelter is. And you
Speaker 2: take us to Philadelphia and you posit that you're not
Speaker 2: quite sure if it's Lloyd Marshall or Jack Worthington, the
Speaker 2: father of Ted Bundy. But you take us to Philadelphia
Speaker 2: and the smelters and the situation there. You say, the
Speaker 2: city is full of smelters. Tell us what this is.
Speaker 2: You've called it a commercial volcano. Tell us what smelters are,
Speaker 2: their purpose? And Philadelphia and Ted Bundy's childhood.
Speaker 3: Ted Bundy of course never really knew who his father was,
Speaker 3: and I think this was a source of great kind
Speaker 3: of anguish and rage for him. He was born in
Speaker 3: a foundling home in Vermont. He was the product of
Speaker 3: some kind of either illicit relationship that his mother had
Speaker 3: or we don't know exactly, but she was sent to
Speaker 3: this home where nuns would take care of babies that
Speaker 3: were born. Legitimately, she left him there for a couple
Speaker 3: of months, then she took him home with her to Philadelphia,
Speaker 3: which was called the City of Smelters because it had
Speaker 3: more smelters than just about any other place, although I
Speaker 3: will say that at the time smelters were just everywhere.
Speaker 3: They were in every major American city, and what they
Speaker 3: were doing was producing metal. A smelter is designed to
Speaker 3: take in these rocks or ores from mines, the kinds
Speaker 3: of ores that have metals within them, and then they
Speaker 3: melt them down and this produces all kinds of different
Speaker 3: metals because the ores contain all these sort of associated
Speaker 3: chemicals and metal, So they contained stuff like lead, copper, arsenic, cadmium,
Speaker 3: and many many other metals, and they're burning them in
Speaker 3: order to separate the metals so that they can separate out.
Speaker 3: For example, silver evaluable metal. Gold, lead copper was very
Speaker 3: valuable so a lot of these these smelters specialized in
Speaker 3: one or the other metals, but produced all kinds of stuff,
Speaker 3: a lot of which was going up the smokestack, and
Speaker 3: Philadelphia's had because after the war it was producing so
Speaker 3: much from it smelters that had a great deal of
Speaker 3: lead pollution in Philadelphia, where where Ted spent a couple
Speaker 3: of formative years. And then when Ted and his mother
Speaker 3: went and moved to Tacoma, where her cousin lived, they
Speaker 3: were moving to another place that had an very very
Speaker 3: prominent smelter that belonged to the American Smelting and Refining
Speaker 3: Company or a SARCO. And that smelter was right in
Speaker 3: the middle of a very popular area, and Ted lived
Speaker 3: always within just a few miles of that smelter. And
Speaker 3: the thing that you have to know about lead is
Speaker 3: that it is associated and this has been proven by
Speaker 3: a number of scientific studies with aggression and violence in
Speaker 3: the people who were exposed to it, especially children. It's
Speaker 3: very dangerous for children to be exposed to lead because
Speaker 3: it really changes the development of their brain and their
Speaker 3: frontal cortex, and it causes you know, there's kind of
Speaker 3: a time lag of about twenty years. But if a
Speaker 3: child is exposed to lead at a young age and
Speaker 3: has that as part of their makeup, then by the
Speaker 3: time they're a teenager or a young adult, they may
Speaker 3: be showing some of the neurological signs of light exposure,
Speaker 3: which include violence, impulsivity, sort of an inability to control
Speaker 3: their behavior.
Speaker 2: You read about Charles Manson and his stay at McNeil
Speaker 2: Island prison, what is its proximity Tacoma to Tacoma and
Speaker 2: also how was Charles Manson and other prisoners exposed to
Speaker 2: lead and other chemicals from the smelters.
Speaker 3: Mcdeil Island is about. It was, for instance, about seven
Speaker 3: miles I think from where Ted Bundy was living. There
Speaker 3: was another maybe five miles to the smelter, so it
Speaker 3: was within about a ten or twelve mile radius of
Speaker 3: the smelter and its smokestack. So it was getting some
Speaker 3: degree of the fallout from that smoke stack. And the
Speaker 3: thing that was unique about McNeil Island is that the
Speaker 3: prisoners on the island were working in agriculture. They had
Speaker 3: heard of cattle, They had crops that they were raising,
Speaker 3: so they were raising all the food that they were
Speaker 3: consuming on the Islands, and the water that they were
Speaker 3: drinking was also from sources on the island, so they
Speaker 3: had to have been exposed to some degree to the
Speaker 3: fallout from that smoke stack. It's probably worth noting that
Speaker 3: Charles Manson, by the time he ended up on McNeil Island,
Speaker 3: was already an incredibly troubled individual. I'm not trying to
Speaker 3: say that what he did was entirely down to lead.
Speaker 3: He had a terrible experience as a kid and his mother,
Speaker 3: his teenage mother, ended up in jail when he was
Speaker 3: just three or four years old. He had been in
Speaker 3: and out of institutions all his life, born in a
Speaker 3: really poor coal mining town in the east, so he
Speaker 3: obviously had many many strikes against him. But I don't
Speaker 3: think the lead probably helped.
Speaker 2: You talk about some of the early effects that were
Speaker 2: seen by people that were working in the industry producing
Speaker 2: these chemicals, and just people their families and people in
Speaker 2: proximity to these factories as well. You say Ted Bundy's
Speaker 2: family in Philadelphia was only about four miles or less
Speaker 2: than four miles away from one of these plants. So
Speaker 2: what was some of the first things in the nineteenth
Speaker 2: or the twentieth century that people noted and what was
Speaker 2: the result of this sort of indication that there is
Speaker 2: some side effects to this industry.
Speaker 3: One of the principal products that was contributing led to
Speaker 3: the atmosphere early on was leaded gas. Leaded gas was
Speaker 3: developed in the nineteen twenties, although it wasn't under as
Speaker 3: heavy use then as it would be later. But immediately
Speaker 3: when the Company's Standard Oil and DuPont and so forth
Speaker 3: that we're developing leaded gas, when they started producing it
Speaker 3: in large quantities, they made some mistakes really in they
Speaker 3: didn't realize how grievously it was going to affect the
Speaker 3: guys who worked in these plants. Two or three occasions,
Speaker 3: they caused such severe lead poisoning in their workers that
Speaker 3: people they started having hallucinations, became quite violent and rapidly died.
Speaker 3: There were a number of people who died in several
Speaker 3: incidents in these plants, and some people, some of these
Speaker 3: workers who were so terribly affected didn't die, but were
Speaker 3: affected really for the rest of their lives. They saw hallucinations.
Speaker 3: Sometimes they called them the you know, the butterfly men,
Speaker 3: because they were constantly sort of seeing hallucinations of things
Speaker 3: flying around and would wave their hands at them. And
Speaker 3: they continued, some of these guys to work at the plants,
Speaker 3: but they were essentially really damaged emotionally and mentally by
Speaker 3: what they'd been through.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now. It's very interesting you spoke about this
Speaker 2: incredible effect of working with these chemicals and that being hallucinations,
Speaker 2: and I think that's very important for the case that
Speaker 2: you make in this book. And it's very interesting too
Speaker 2: that one of the principal criminals psychopathic killers that you
Speaker 2: focus on in this book is Gary Ridgeway and his
Speaker 2: proximity to Ted Bundy and McNeil Island and Charles Manson.
Speaker 2: But tell us also, as you write Gary Ridgeway was
Speaker 2: experiencing hallucinations as well. So tell us a little bit
Speaker 2: about Gary Ridgeway, where he lived near Seattle and the
Speaker 2: hallucinations that he experienced.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Ridgeway grew up just a couple miles east of
Speaker 3: SeaTac at a time when aircraft jet aircraft were flying
Speaker 3: with leaded gas. He also lived in close proximity to
Speaker 3: a couple of major highways, including I five, and as
Speaker 3: an adult he began working at the Kenworth truck plant
Speaker 3: as a painter. He was somebody who sprayed the cabs
Speaker 3: of big trucks and painted them at a time when
Speaker 3: those paint formulations probably included lead, because lead had been
Speaker 3: removed from house paint by that point, by you know,
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies, but there was an exemption that was
Speaker 3: carved out for commercial paint applications which would have included
Speaker 3: what he was doing. So he was he was exposed
Speaker 3: to lead in you know, at least two or three ways.
Speaker 3: And I'm not sure about the hallucinations, but he certainly
Speaker 3: did begin behave in a profoundly kind of robotic way,
Speaker 3: almost by doing the same things over and over and
Speaker 3: over again, capturing women who he'd picked up sex workers,
Speaker 3: runaway girls, enacting on them sort of the same behavior
Speaker 3: again and again. He did like to have sex with
Speaker 3: women outside, so he would often take these women out
Speaker 3: in the woods to have sex with them. When he
Speaker 3: was not able to do that when he had to
Speaker 3: take them to his house. He had one wall of
Speaker 3: his bedroom covered in a sort of silk screen photographic
Speaker 3: image of the woods, so that he could feel like
Speaker 3: he was having sex in the woods. In his House. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he was an incredibly sort of robotic individual who captures
Speaker 3: that sense. I think the a lot of these serial
Speaker 3: kills had of just being trapped in this kind of
Speaker 3: cycle of violence.
Speaker 2: Did you single out these examples of especially aberrant crimes
Speaker 2: and criminals such as Ted Bundi, Charles Manson, Gary Ridgeway,
Speaker 2: and then later on you write about Jerry Brutos and
Speaker 2: also Israel Keys. But did you single out these people
Speaker 2: to demonstrate something specifically related to these chemicals? In other words,
Speaker 2: are there extreme crimes related to what you consider extreme poisoning?
Speaker 3: Yes, I think to some extent. I was looking first
Speaker 3: of all at a lot of the serial killers who
Speaker 3: came from the Northwest, and looking at their proximity to
Speaker 3: either letted gat sources of gas with highways, or smelters.
Speaker 3: And then I began sort of opening it up and
Speaker 3: looking at some other places, like, for example, because I
Speaker 3: had spent a certain amount of time explaining the history
Speaker 3: of Asarco, the smelting company which was owned by the
Speaker 3: Guggenheim family, I looked at another smelter that they had
Speaker 3: in El Paso and asked myself, well, were there any
Speaker 3: infamous serial killers associated with El Paso, because I didn't
Speaker 3: know of any. As soon as I got into the
Speaker 3: research on that, immediately it turned out that Richard Ramirez,
Speaker 3: the so called Nightstalker, that he had grown up in
Speaker 3: El Paso, again only a few miles from the Asarco smelter,
Speaker 3: which was a huge landmark in that town and ultimately
Speaker 3: polluted quite a bit of El Paso and of the
Speaker 3: CEO DoD Warrez on the other side of the border.
Speaker 3: So that to me was very fascinating. So yes, I
Speaker 3: did tend to focus on individuals who I could tie
Speaker 3: to this chemical exposure. There are certainly other serial killers
Speaker 3: whose exposure I can't figure out, or you know, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe is a mystery, somebody like Son of Sam and
Speaker 3: those figures. You know, it's it's harder to tie them
Speaker 3: to this. But I think you also have to realize
Speaker 3: that during this period you were born, between the say,
Speaker 3: the nineteen forties and the nineteen eighties, everybody, no matter
Speaker 3: who you are or where you lived, everybody was exposed
Speaker 3: to letted gas.
Speaker 2: You talk about that Richard Ramirez's family just to lend
Speaker 2: some credibility to this exposure. You said the entire family
Speaker 2: had behavioral problems, at school and also physical ailments, but
Speaker 2: especially had all of them had behavioral problems cited at school.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sort of a tragic tale because there were
Speaker 3: I think five kids in that family, and all of
Speaker 3: them showed some kind of pretty severe physical and emotional illness.
Speaker 3: Their mother was exposed to a lot of really damaging
Speaker 3: chemicals from working in a boot factory in El Paso
Speaker 3: when she was pregnant with Richard, and the father was
Speaker 3: somebody who was quite violent himself and visited a lot
Speaker 3: of of violence on the kids. Again, this brings up
Speaker 3: the question of how much of this might have been led,
Speaker 3: how much of it might have been other other exposures
Speaker 3: and other events, Because the FBI, for example, in doing
Speaker 3: their work on profiling, has often pointed out how many
Speaker 3: serial killers have had either physical or sexual abuse or both,
Speaker 3: maybe head trauma from beatings or other accidents or other
Speaker 3: sources that can cause neurological damage as well. So there's
Speaker 3: a whole host of things that may go into creating
Speaker 3: these patterns of behavior, and we it's very very difficult
Speaker 3: to tease them apart.
Speaker 2: You do state this case, though, that this predominance of
Speaker 2: West Coast serial killers and also the correlation between the
Speaker 2: proliferation of industries that spew this lead, arsenic, copper, all
Speaker 2: of these toxic chemicals. Yes, you write that also to
Speaker 2: sort of muddle the entire statistics, I imagine is lead gasoline.
Speaker 2: But you do state the case of the increasing industries
Speaker 2: and the chemicals that are spewed from their smokestacks, but
Speaker 2: also the fight for and recognition of these chemicals as
Speaker 2: toxins and the fight to have them removed. You talk
Speaker 2: about the formation of the EPA and before that, initiatives
Speaker 2: to try to clean up this industry that people recognize
Speaker 2: as absolutely dangerous.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean one of the really disturbing elements of
Speaker 3: the story is that from the very beginning, even in
Speaker 3: the nineteen twenty, there were physicians who were telling industry
Speaker 3: representatives and government officials that they should never, never, never
Speaker 3: allow let it casts to be sold, and that they
Speaker 3: should do everything that they can to lower the amount
Speaker 3: of lead in the environment, not increase it. Because it
Speaker 3: was well known that lead is a you know, led
Speaker 3: is one of the chief poisons that we have known
Speaker 3: about for centuries, for millennium. I mean, the Greeks and
Speaker 3: the Romans knew that it was very bad and arsenic.
Speaker 3: I mean, everybody knows that arsenic is a poison. And
Speaker 3: one of the things that happened during this period is
Speaker 3: that industry really developed all the techniques that we would
Speaker 3: be familiar with from our own time in terms of,
Speaker 3: for example, the bacco industry. You know, the ways in
Speaker 3: which industry tried to make these chemicals seem benign, like
Speaker 3: they weren't really a problem, like they existed naturally in
Speaker 3: the environment was one of the claims, which that's not
Speaker 3: really true, and it's not true because we haven't. You know,
Speaker 3: it took human beings to bring them out of the
Speaker 3: environment and to make them much more potent in their
Speaker 3: you know, inorganic arsenic, for examples, different than the arsenic
Speaker 3: that you find in dirt or sometimes in water or
Speaker 3: in shellfish. Inorganic arsenic is a product of industry and
Speaker 3: is much much more poisonous than organic arsenic. And so
Speaker 3: all the kind of misinformation that was being put out
Speaker 3: bond liberately by these corporations that stood to gain from
Speaker 3: smelters and leaded gas really did, as you say, muddy
Speaker 3: the water for decades and provided an excuse for what
Speaker 3: they were doing, which was really you know, a wholesale
Speaker 3: medical disaster, because things like lead and arsenic do not
Speaker 3: just cause the kind of behavior that I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: Lead causes all kinds of other diseases, causes heart disease,
Speaker 3: it's associated with als, it is something that you know
Speaker 3: can cause all kinds of respiratory problems, and likewise with arsenic.
Speaker 3: Arsenic is associated with lung cancer. So there are really
Speaker 3: serious health effects across the board from all these chemicals,
Speaker 3: and basically they were being foisted on the American public
Speaker 3: and around the world under basically the corporations were just
Speaker 3: lying about their effects and trying to convince people that
Speaker 3: these things were safe. They were not safe, and we're
Speaker 3: going to be dealing with the cleanup of these things
Speaker 3: for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now. You read about the Clean Air Act
Speaker 2: and Water Quality Improvement Act teen seventy and in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy one the Surgeon General decide no child should have
Speaker 2: blood level blood lead levels exceeding forty micrograms. In your research,
Speaker 2: you write about far exceeding that recommendation.
Speaker 3: It took me a really long time for the govern
Speaker 3: were meant to kind of catch up, i think, to
Speaker 3: where the medical community already was because there was so
Speaker 3: much pressure coming from industry. But yes, the creation of
Speaker 3: OSHA for worker safety, the creation of the EPA, and
Speaker 3: all the different regulations and legislation that was passed to
Speaker 3: clean up our air and water, those things all began
Speaker 3: running right into and against the interests of the smelting
Speaker 3: companies and the companies that were selling lioded gas. And
Speaker 3: there was a real period of ten fifteen years where
Speaker 3: they were engaged in a struggle political struggle really to
Speaker 3: try to prevail to enact safety regulations that would really
Speaker 3: try to reduce the amount of lead that kids, especially
Speaker 3: were exposed to. And this took, you know, an unconscionably
Speaker 3: long time, and it really was quite incremental. You can
Speaker 3: see the CDC over the decades lowering the amount of
Speaker 3: lead to which children can be exposed from you know,
Speaker 3: sixty to forty to thirty to you know ten, and
Speaker 3: now it's at three point five micrograms per desc leader
Speaker 3: of blood. But even that is considered too much because
Speaker 3: there really is no safe level of lead in the environment,
Speaker 3: and no safe level of lead to which children can
Speaker 3: be exposed, and this presents a huge problem for the
Speaker 3: government because trying to lower the amounts of lead in
Speaker 3: the environment is so expensive. You know, you're looking at
Speaker 3: all of the old lead pipes that are in public
Speaker 3: schools and old lead paint that are that's in military housing,
Speaker 3: and just I mean, the problem is so widespread that
Speaker 3: it costs millions and millions of dollars to address it.
Speaker 2: You're right that in Tacoma the crime rate rises twenty
Speaker 2: percent in nineteen seventy four, and you write never has
Speaker 2: the number of violent crimes been higher in America in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 3: Yeah, nineteen seventy four I think as a real watershed year,
Speaker 3: both for the rate of violent crime in Tacoma, in
Speaker 3: the Northwest and across the country. And it is perhaps
Speaker 3: not coincidentally the year in which Ted Bundy begins this
Speaker 3: kind of series of of extremely high profile abductions disappearances
Speaker 3: of women. Of course, we didn't know then who he was.
Speaker 3: We wouldn't even know part of his name until July
Speaker 3: of seventy four, when he abducted two women from Lake
Speaker 3: Samamish on a hot July afternoon during an event in
Speaker 3: which thousands of people had gathered on the beaches of
Speaker 3: Lake Samamish, and he somehow abducted two women in separate
Speaker 3: events on that same day. And that's when the kind
Speaker 3: of news really exploded across the area, because that was
Speaker 3: kind of the culmination of a number of other abductions,
Speaker 3: including a couple of women in Seattle. And on that
Speaker 3: day a number of people heard him say my name
Speaker 3: is Ted, and so that was the first time anybody
Speaker 3: had a name for him, and the police were able
Speaker 3: to develop a couple of several composite drawings of his face,
Speaker 3: including one that was recognized both by his girlfriend and
Speaker 3: by a number of other people who knew him, including
Speaker 3: Anne Rule, the true crime writer, who had met him
Speaker 3: while volunteering at a rape crisis center in Seattle.
Speaker 2: Yes, very very interesting. You write that Ted Bundy lived
Speaker 2: near astonishing high measurements of two hundred and eighty three
Speaker 2: hundred and forty and six hundred and twenty parts per
Speaker 2: million of lead from this rust and smokespac that he
Speaker 2: lived nearby.
Speaker 3: Doubtless was exposed to lead, because we know now from
Speaker 3: the very detail GIS map developed by the Department of
Speaker 3: Ecology in Washington State we know how much lead was
Speaker 3: in his front yard and his backyard and how much
Speaker 3: arsenic and it was much higher than normal, So we
Speaker 3: know he was exposed. The question remains how much did
Speaker 3: that exposure influence his behavior.
Speaker 2: It's a very interesting point though, as well as getting
Speaker 2: back to Ted Bundy that you you said that Ted
Speaker 2: Bundy was reading True Detective magazine. Of course later he
Speaker 2: works with alongside and Ruhl, who is an author coincidentally
Speaker 2: writing for those same type of magazines.
Speaker 3: Yes, she says that he asked her once for copies
Speaker 3: of some of the magazines that she'd had articles in
Speaker 3: because he wanted to use them in his so called research.
Speaker 3: I mean, he was supposedly, for a short time was
Speaker 3: helping out with some research that was being developed about
Speaker 3: rape statistics in Seattle. Yeah, I mean it's just some
Speaker 3: extraordinary you can't even make out these kinds of things.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, he read about nineteen sixty one, Jerry Brutos marries
Speaker 2: a seventeen year old in Corvallis, Oregon, and Jerry Brutos
Speaker 2: suffers blackouts. Reportedly tell us a little bit about where
Speaker 2: he is in proximity to the industries and near Tacoma.
Speaker 2: Tell us about Jerry Brutos.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Brutos didn't have a particular Tacoma connection. But one
Speaker 3: of the things that I found out about him from
Speaker 3: Anne Rule's reporting in her book lust Ca about Jerry
Speaker 3: Brudos was that he grew up in South Dakota, not
Speaker 3: far from what would later become a superfund site for
Speaker 3: its dumping of lead arsenate pesticides. One of the things
Speaker 3: that the companies were doing to sell the arsenic that
Speaker 3: they had left over from their smelting activities was to
Speaker 3: develop arsenic into a whole bunch of different kinds of pesticides.
Speaker 3: And when Jerry Brudos was growing up, like many rural
Speaker 3: farm kits, those chemicals were in heavy usage and a
Speaker 3: lot of kids were exposed that way, and I suspect
Speaker 3: that he might have been as well, since he lived
Speaker 3: so close to what would become a superfund site where
Speaker 3: the water had been contaminated with these kind of chemicals,
Speaker 3: and he had a number Like Richard Ramirez and his siblings,
Speaker 3: Jerry Brutos had a number of strange diseases and symptoms
Speaker 3: as a young kid. Also, as a young kid, he
Speaker 3: developed a fetish for women's footwear for high heeled shoes.
Speaker 3: He had a very harsh mother who punished him for
Speaker 3: wearing women's clothing and shoes. They then moved to Oregon
Speaker 3: and he became a sort of completely out of control
Speaker 3: character who would approach women in parking lots on the
Speaker 3: street and eventually did kill several women he encountered and
Speaker 3: was very interested in making lead paper weights from parts
Speaker 3: of their bodies.
Speaker 2: Incredible, that uses as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: the messages. You're right about that lead exposure correlates with
Speaker 2: higher adult crime rates, but you talk about that in
Speaker 2: starting in nineteen ninety two, the crime rate starts to fall.
Speaker 2: What is the correlation with lead and other chemicals and
Speaker 2: the fight to have these chemicals recognized as the dangerous
Speaker 2: elements that they are.
Speaker 3: Leaded gas was removed from the market beginning in the
Speaker 3: mid eighties, and that removal was complete by the early
Speaker 3: to mid nineties. In this country, it had just become
Speaker 3: so apparent that lead was a danger in the environment
Speaker 3: and to human health, and they eventually succeeded the health
Speaker 3: community in convincing Congress and regulatory agencies that it had
Speaker 3: to be removed. So at the same time, the smelters
Speaker 3: started going out of business because the prices of metals
Speaker 3: had started to go down. They hit a real high
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy four for various reasons, which meant that
Speaker 3: many of the smelters were kind of running flat out
Speaker 3: in the mid seventies. But then prices started to be
Speaker 3: affected and went down, and because of all the regulations,
Speaker 3: basically many of them just could not stand business and
Speaker 3: make a profit anymore. And so the Tacoma smelter closed
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty six, and many of the other smelters
Speaker 3: around the country closed around the same time during the
Speaker 3: mid eighties, and that led to a very sharp drop
Speaker 3: off in the amount of lead in the atmosphere and
Speaker 3: also in our blood levels. So you start to see
Speaker 3: it go down very sharply in children's blood led levels, fortunately,
Speaker 3: and in everybody's And so that was when the so
Speaker 3: called lead crime hypothesis was born, because scientists looked at
Speaker 3: the drop off of lead in the environment and the
Speaker 3: drop off of crime and associated the two. And it's
Speaker 3: been debated ever since. You know, there are other hypotheses
Speaker 3: that point to other reasons why this might have occurred.
Speaker 3: There were a lot of police associations, for example, claimed
Speaker 3: that it was because policing increased and had a lot
Speaker 3: more resources and more people or being incarcerated. There's also
Speaker 3: a theory about abortion that has been very well publicized,
Speaker 3: but for reasons that I think I try to explain
Speaker 3: in the book a little bit. I think the leed
Speaker 3: crime hypothesis does have these other things may be a factor,
Speaker 3: but I think that the lead crime hypothesis has emerged
Speaker 3: as kind of a leading contender that in answering that question.
Speaker 2: You write that lead exposure in childhood is linked to
Speaker 2: brain volume loss. Where the subjects reach adulthood, the effects
Speaker 2: are particularly notable. You write in men, why is that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the answer to that is still a bit of
Speaker 3: a mystery. I think that there are genes that have
Speaker 3: been implicated in this. In other words, if you're a
Speaker 3: male and you have lead exposure, and you have a
Speaker 3: certain genetic component that that may influence how you react
Speaker 3: to the lead exposure. But I think there's still a
Speaker 3: lot of work going on trying to explain that. It
Speaker 3: certainly is apparent from the MRIs. There's a guy who
Speaker 3: published a book a few years ago, Adrian Rain, called
Speaker 3: the Biology of Violence and He reproduced a number of
Speaker 3: these MRI images the scans in his book, and you
Speaker 3: can see that there is a sort of more marked
Speaker 3: difference between men and women, which is not to say
Speaker 3: that women don't have neurological effects from lead exposure. They do.
Speaker 3: Their effects seem to be organized more around impulsivity. And
Speaker 3: there are graphs that show, for example, a rye in
Speaker 3: teenage pregnancy during the seventies and eighties that correlates to
Speaker 3: the rise in juno delinquency and violent crime.
Speaker 2: But is there again, I'm probably asking the question again,
Speaker 2: but is there some form or deuced recognize an extremity
Speaker 2: and to the serial killers that you write about in
Speaker 2: this book, the prolific serial killers that are on the
Speaker 2: West Coast, and the profound effect of lead and other chemicals.
Speaker 2: Is there a correlation to the extreme nature of these
Speaker 2: particular psychopathic killers.
Speaker 3: Well, I think there is. And one of the things
Speaker 3: that I find so inescapable is the really bizarre nature
Speaker 3: of some of these crimes, yes, which don't seem to
Speaker 3: fit a mold either before or since. I mean, there
Speaker 3: was just something so unhinged about some of these guys
Speaker 3: and what they were doing. Really there was you know
Speaker 3: many of these crimes were sexual in nature. The kind
Speaker 3: of violence was so extreme, the sexual nature was extreme,
Speaker 3: and the extent, you know, just the sheer number of
Speaker 3: people who were involved. I mean Ridgeway for example. I
Speaker 3: think he pled guilty to forty eight or forty nine murders,
Speaker 3: but is suspected of far more, maybe twice as many
Speaker 3: as that. So there's something about that that just feels
Speaker 3: different and looks different. And I'm not a scientist, so
Speaker 3: I can't really line up what we know about le exposure,
Speaker 3: but I will say that they have now started to
Speaker 3: do some studies that show a connection between psychopathy and
Speaker 3: lead exposure, and that there seems to be a higher
Speaker 3: rate of psychopaths who have led exposure versus the general public.
Speaker 2: You talk about write about the Arisco the refinery, the
Speaker 2: smelter company, based on lawsuits, is going bankrupt in two
Speaker 2: thousand and nine. It yields the biggest landmark settlement in
Speaker 2: American history, one point seven billion. And you write, the
Speaker 2: money goes to nineteen states, Washington State getting the line's share,
Speaker 2: or a bigger share of one hundred and eighty eight million.
Speaker 2: This is about arsenic in lead. And you write, about
Speaker 2: that an area that was full of arsenic and lead.
Speaker 2: They built a luxury hotel and condos in that area.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's a very bizarre, bizarre phenomenon. I I
Speaker 3: personally can't go to that area and not see what
Speaker 3: used to be there. In part because Asarco the company,
Speaker 3: while it was in operation, they actually created a giant
Speaker 3: peninsula of land from the slag the waste products of
Speaker 3: the mining. Once they had you know, separated the metals
Speaker 3: out of it, they would dump all this stuff that
Speaker 3: kind of looks like gravel, you know, it looks like
Speaker 3: a sort of black gravel. And they dumped all this
Speaker 3: and it created this just giant peninsula. That part of
Speaker 3: it was used to create the Tacoma Yacht Club. The
Speaker 3: rest of it has now become this huge condo development,
Speaker 3: and I'm sure that the waterfacing units have beautiful views,
Speaker 3: but boy, I would not be able to live there
Speaker 3: without thinking about what I was what I was living on.
Speaker 3: There's also a fascinating park there called the Dune Peninsula
Speaker 3: because Frank Herbert, the author of Dune and Tacoma, and
Speaker 3: a lot of the stuff that he describes in Dune
Speaker 3: was inspired by the pollution in Tacoma.
Speaker 2: In the end of this book, just to add another
Speaker 2: example of an extreme psychopathic killer, you include a little
Speaker 2: bit of the story of Israel Keys. What's Israel Key's
Speaker 2: story of exposure, and just tell us a little bit
Speaker 2: of some of the extreme behavior that he exhibits in
Speaker 2: his murders.
Speaker 3: Israel Keys came from a very bizarre and reclusive family
Speaker 3: that moved to a quite a remote area in the
Speaker 3: northeast part of Washington State when Israel was just a
Speaker 3: young kid, and there was not a whole lot out there.
Speaker 3: It was near the town. The property they had was
Speaker 3: near the town of Calville and not that far from
Speaker 3: the Columbia River. And what I found was that one
Speaker 3: of the things that was out there was a smelter.
Speaker 3: The tech Cominko smelter, which is right on the border
Speaker 3: of British Columbia and north of Calville, has been in
Speaker 3: operation for decades since around the turn of the last century.
Speaker 3: It's still in operation. It has put enormous amounts of lead,
Speaker 3: arsenic and other contaminants into the Columbia which have all
Speaker 3: filtered down. Have been the cause of a major international
Speaker 3: lawsuit in which the Calville tribes in that area have
Speaker 3: sued because of the contamination of the Columbia River. Israel
Speaker 3: Keys grew up in this family that had to He
Speaker 3: was one of the eldest, and they had to provide
Speaker 3: I think most of their own food. I don't think
Speaker 3: that they did a lot of shopping and stores. They
Speaker 3: were sort of living in a remote cabin. I suspect
Speaker 3: that a lot of the food that they were eating,
Speaker 3: whatever they could shoot or hunt fish from the river
Speaker 3: was contaminated. Israel grew up to be one of the
Speaker 3: most bizarre serial killers in our history. We know very
Speaker 3: little about what he did and how many people he killed.
Speaker 3: He confessed to. He only named I think a couple
Speaker 3: of his victims. He was arrested and was going to
Speaker 3: go on trial for the murder of a young woman
Speaker 3: who was working as a barista in Anchorage, Alaska, when
Speaker 3: he abducted and murdered her, but he would never confess
Speaker 3: to the rest of his victims, which are thought to
Speaker 3: be maybe around eleven people. He seemed to range all
Speaker 3: over the country, committed a lot of armed robberies of banks.
Speaker 3: He committed arson. He had a plan to set off
Speaker 3: explosions at a federal building two of the guys who
Speaker 3: grew up with were the infamous Kiho brothers, who actually
Speaker 3: did commit a number of federal crimes and are now
Speaker 3: in jail for that. So boy, I mean, it's just
Speaker 3: a story that you just again, you can't make this
Speaker 3: stuff up. It is just so bizarre, and you wonder
Speaker 3: what went into that, what supercharged the sort of rage
Speaker 3: and murderousness of an individual like Israel Keys.
Speaker 2: Yes, you're right. In the two thousands, oh, pardon me,
Speaker 2: and throughout the nineteen nineties nationwide, there were six hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty nine serial killers in the two thousands, three
Speaker 2: hundred and seventy one from twenty ten to twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: one hundred and seventeen, So a dramatic, somatic drop in
Speaker 2: serial killer numbers in America with no connection better than
Speaker 2: the story and the argument that you put forth in
Speaker 2: this book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the rise and fall of violent crime, the graph
Speaker 3: that that makes, the drawing that you can make of
Speaker 3: the rise of crime and then it's falling off in
Speaker 3: the nineties, and the rise of the number of serial
Speaker 3: killers and the falling off of that. You can put
Speaker 3: those graphs together and they look almost exactly the same,
Speaker 3: and they correlate so closely also with the rise of
Speaker 3: lead in the environment and the drop off of lead,
Speaker 3: and I find that quite convincing. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 3: a statistician, I'm not an epidemiologist, so I can't speak
Speaker 3: to how how well this association holds up. But boy,
Speaker 3: you look at that and you think, wow, there must
Speaker 3: be something to this.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's a fascinating exploration and investigation and a very
Speaker 2: very compelling argument that you put forth in this book.
Speaker 2: I want to thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: and talking about your new book, murder, Land, Crime and
Speaker 2: Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. Can you tell
Speaker 2: us if you have a website, do any social media
Speaker 2: or where people might find out more about this book.
Speaker 3: Sure? Yeah, I'm at Carolinefraser dot net. That's my website.
Speaker 3: I'm on Instagram, Twitter, and blue Sky at the moment,
Speaker 3: and I'll be in Saint Louis tomorrow at the public
Speaker 3: Library for an event at seven o'clock I think. And
Speaker 3: I'll also be in Albuquerque the following week at Bookworks,
Speaker 3: the bookstore in Albuquerque for another event. So I have
Speaker 3: more details on that on my website and I'll keep
Speaker 3: posting about that on Twitter as well, so you can
Speaker 3: find the book anywhere and I hope people read it
Speaker 3: and find it as fascinating as I did to write it.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Thank you so much Caroline Fraser for coming on
Speaker 2: and talking about murderland crime and bloodlust in the time
Speaker 2: of serial killers. Thank you very much for this interview
Speaker 2: and you have a great evening and good night. Thanks
Speaker 2: a lot, thank you, good night, good night.