Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 5: We're joined today by Caroline Fraser, author of Murderland Crime
and Bloodlust in the Time of serial Killers, here to
talk to us about her new book and her amazing
research into serial killers and the link with industrial Caroline,
thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3: We are so thrilled to have you. Thank you excited
to be here.
Speaker 5: Can you start by telling us a little bit about
your life as a writer, and about your previous books,
especially about your amazing book Prairie Fires, which is another
one of my favorite.
Speaker 6: Oh sure, yeah. My previous book was Prairie Fires, a
biography of Laura Ingles Wilder, which was pretty heavy and
the history and the ecological connections between her life and
the settlement of the Great Plains. And I had a
lot of fun working with that material. I had written
about ecology and the environment before in another previous book
called Rewilding the World, and that's when I started to
learn about some of these connections. And you'll see that,
even though Murderland is obviously a very different book than
Prairie Fires, I think you will see if you read it,
kind of through line of that ecological history between all
three of those books.
Speaker 2: One of the things I'm really curious about is you've
been a successful writer for a number of years. The
environment a bit of a through line, certainly. I think
social consciousness is part of your writing as well. How
do we get from there to serial killers? It's not
like you're a true crime author.
Speaker 6: Oh that's true. And I think all I can say
about that is that this is something that I have
been interested in for a really long time because I'm
from the Pacific Northwest, and this question that has been
hanging out there for all these years, of why are
there so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest has
just been something that has always fascinated me, in part
because when I was growing up there, it was in
the seventies and the whole Ted Bundy thing was happening,
and so that was before anybody knew who that was.
I was reading about those disappearances and abductions and murders
in the newspapers and just being both riveted and terrified
by the whole phenomenon. I don't think anybody really knew
what to make of it then, and so this has
been with me for a long time. And after I
wrote Prairie Fires, COVID happened a couple years later, and
I was stuck at home and had a lot of
time to just play around on the internet and look
for stuff, and I started looking into this question in
part because I had already written a few little pieces
of what became the book. I didn't really know what
I was going to use them for, but I really
had started at years earlier.
Speaker 5: There are, of course, nobody in the True Crime space
who isn't familiar with they named Ted Bundy. There may
be people who were unfamiliar with the glut of serial
killers in the area. And in fact, when you opened
the book and you started naming a bunch of names
and serial killers, there were ones that I had to
look up because I wasn't familiar with them. So for
any of our listeners who may be unfamiliar with ones
other than Bundy and the Green River Killer, can you
just run down really quick some of the array of
killers that showed up in the Pacific Northwest during the
seventies and eighties.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Sure.
Speaker 6: On the first page of the book, I give this
list that derived from big feature that ran on the
Seattle Post Intelligencer a while back. And those are just
the guys who came up with or the press assigned
them colorful names like the Beast of British Columbia or whatever.
But yes, in the book, I do talk about at
least a dozen of these guys who are operating in
the Northwest during this period. Bundy, Gary Ridgeway, the Green
River Killer, Warren Leslie Forest never got a name of
his own, and most people wouldn't be able to tell
you what he did, but he was operating at the
same time as Bundy, and a lot of his murders
were assigned to Bundy because people just didn't really know
about this guy. There was a man named William Costin
who killed several women south of Seattle. Robert Lee Yates,
who many people will remember from Spokane, Jack Owen Spilman,
the Third Randy Woodfield, the I five Killer, the Hillside Strangler,
ended up in the Northwest after getting started in Los Angeles, Israel.
Keyes really horrible guy named Joseph Edward Duncan, cereal rapist
and murderer. And there was even a guy who was
growing up down the street from me on Mercer Island
named George Waterfield Russell Junior. When I started compiling the
evidence for this theory, I was shocked at how many
there were.
Speaker 3: I don't understand, Siri, I was shocked.
Speaker 6: Before.
Speaker 3: She's always listening.
Speaker 5: One of the most common questions that arises in any
discussion about serial colors is whether it is nature or
nurture that ultimately forms them.
Speaker 3: I like the fact that you've taken that.
Speaker 5: Question one step further as your basis from murder Land
and have asked the question about whether environmental factors might have.
Speaker 3: A hand in shaping serial colors.
Speaker 5: Was it ges during COVID that idea came to you
or had it been percolating for a number of years.
Speaker 6: No, it really was in the last during COVID, and
maybe a couple of years earlier than that that. I
had discovered some links between the stuff that was going
on in terms of crime, especially in the city of Tacoma,
and an infamous leads and copper smelter that was located
in Tacoma. And I had never anybody who's ever been
to Tacoma knew that it smelled really bad. But it
was a place of incredibly heavy industry, and there was
this thing called the Aroma of Tacoma, which everybody joked
about because there were so many factories and refineries and
Poulp mills and all this stuff. But a few years
ago I became aware that this smelter that was there
was known for emitting tons and tons of lead particulates
and arsenic and these things are not only poisons, but
lead is, as you may know, associated with increased violence
and aggression. And I began to wonder about that. Was
there any link between the high crime rate in Tacoma,
which it's the city has also been famous for, and
these emissions.
Speaker 2: I was in the skeptical category initially, and Kristen was
a few steps ahead of me, which happens a lot.
At first, I was like, couldn't you make a case
that it's the rainy weather and too much coffee and
other things that the Pacific Northwest is famous for. But
then once you start laying out how bad the industrial
pollution was, and there is some significant research into cause
and effect between lead exposure and children, young people struggling
with behavioral issues and violence. So once you start to
make your case, I realized maybe I shouldn't be writing
this off so quickly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think that I'm trying to walk the fine
line between assigning too much influence to lead but also
pointing out the significant amount of research that already exists
that does associate lead exposure in children with violence, instability,
aggression in young adults when there's a twenty year lag,
and it's been demonstrated in many studies that this is
true that especially in males, it often expresses itself in
and this is all related to the frontal cortex and
certain deficits that people who have this exposure can show
in the development of their brain and also in their behavior.
But that said, there's a lot of other things that
doubtless go into creating these incredibly violent individuals. They're often,
as the FBI has always said, there's a history of
physical abuse, maybe sexual abuse, even head trauma, something we're
seeing a lot now with the attention to football type injuries.
That people who have head trauma then can develop aggression
in their behavior. So, you know, any kind of individual
who's had a really tough childhood, maybe grew up in poverty,
maybe was exposed to violence as a child. The lead
exposure on top of it, I think can maybe hyper
put this into kind of hyper drive or whatever. It
can really increase the likelihood that there might be violence
in this individual's behavior.
Speaker 5: You would reference that there is some research out there
about the link between violent behavior and environmental factors. What
material did you find yourself relying most heavily on for
your research as she wrote the book, And one of
my favorite things to do is look at end notes
and bibliographies whenever I read a really interesting book. You
had to have been working with an absolute density of
material here. How much did you rely on and how
much time did you spend researching before you started writing.
Speaker 6: Oh, there are a lot lot of scientific studies out
there and papers. There are whole suites of studies affiliated
with certain scientists. I talk about a couple of these guys,
Claire Patterson, for example, who was at Caltech, who did
a lot of the early LED research, and really pointed
out that everybody who's born in this modern era anywhere
from World War II to the nineteen eighties, was exposed
to a significant amount of lead just through leaded gasoline,
which of course was for sale until started being withdrawn
in the mid eighties, but is still around in the
US until the early to mid nineties. So everybody's exposed
to that. If you lived near a smelter, you were
probably exposed to much more. There's a lot of research
that went into that that I looked at. There are
a couple of really great books about the street of
lead in the US. There's a great book about Flint, Michigan.
More recent things about lead in the water and so forth.
So I spent a lot of time doing that. He said,
how much research do you do before you start writing?
And I did quite a bit before, because it was
a pretty steep learning curve for me. I am not
a scientist, not an epidemiologist, and the kind of thing
that I'm writing about is no epidemiologist would ever make
the connection between an individual killer and lead exposure the
way that I'm doing. I chose to try and tell
a story about this by focusing on certain individuals who
lived into Cooma. For instance, Bundy grew up Intocoma, Gary
Ridgeway just a few miles north. So to me, that
was what was interesting, was to try to draw that connection.
But of course it's something that most scientists would not
be comfortable with.
Speaker 2: It sounds like you're comfortable putting out what initially might
feel like a provocative premise and then you actually your
history chops are really showing here when you start to
analyze these individuals and the history of their heinous behavior.
But you were comfortable with putting this out there as
an interesting and as I said, provocative proposal.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: To me, it was the foundation of that was this
map that had been developed in Washington State by the
Department of Ecology, which enables you to look up individual
addresses everywhere in Tacoma and in the one thousand square
mile plume of pollution that was produced by this smokestack
at the Esarko Smelter, and the fact that we could
pinpoint where, for example, Ted Bundy lived and how much
lead was in his front yard and his backyard. That
made me feel like, Okay, we can take this leap,
even though it is a leap and it is provocative
and I can't prove it. I can't prove that, you know,
what Ted Bundy did was related to lead, but I
can certainly point to the fact that we can see
how much he was exposed to I was even more
struck by this with Gary Ridgway, who I think was
exposed in multiple ways. Both as a child, his brother
remembered him playing in a pile of copper tailings, which
are completely saturated with these poisons. He grew up just
east of SeaTac Airport and all the jet fuel at
that time was full of lead. He grew up next
to two major highways, another risk factor for lead poisoning,
and he worked as an adult for decades at the
Kenworth Truck Plant, painting the cabs of trucks with paints
that involved with So there's a lot there we can't
necessarily make that leap, especially if we're a scientist. But
I figured I'll tell the story, let people talk about it,
debate it, and maybe this will create a kind of
better understanding of the kinds of environmental problems we're creating
for ourselves.
Speaker 5: I mean, you certainly got numbers on your side. I
was just I ended up marking all over the books
I was flipping through while you were talking and trying
to find my highlighted passages. You're referencing the sheer numbers here,
he said, there are fifty five serial killers in nineteen
forty seventy two and nineteen fifty two, seventeen in nineteen sixty,
and by nineteen seventy there are six hundred five by
nineteen eighty seven hundred sixty eight.
Speaker 3: The numbers don't lie. That's incredible.
Speaker 5: It was looking at the numbers that made me go, oh,
my god, there really is something here.
Speaker 6: It's very striking. And the other thing that's really eye
popping about those numbers is that rising curve correlates almost
exactly to the rise in violent crime in the US
in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and then in the
mid nineties with the removal of leaded gas and the
closure of smelters, all of a sudden, the rate of
violent crime and the number of serial killers drops off
sharply in the US.
Speaker 5: And I really liked the fact too that you were
able to carry some of this over to Britain as well,
and talked about.
Speaker 3: The fact that the areas that had.
Speaker 5: Multiple serial killers, the Yorkshire Ripper and so on and
so forth, those also were in high industrial areas. I
started reading this and going, Holy cow, this has become
a grand unified theory read for serial killers.
Speaker 3: And I love it because it works. It suddenly made
so much sense.
Speaker 5: I was just enthusion about this to my friend justin
yesterday and he was like, I got to read this book.
This sounds fantastic because he can see it like he
understands it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think it really was my blowing.
Speaker 6: Interested in the pull lead thing. I've within the past
five years or something, I've seen people tweeting about it,
about the baby boomers and how they're prone to being
angry and flying off the handle and all that sort
of stuff because they were all exposed to lead.
Speaker 5: You use the term crazy wall in your first chapter,
and I we're all familiar with this image of a
wall or a bulletin board or a whiteboard and the
red string and all the connected information, and I love
the image. Did you have a crazy wall while you
were writing?
Speaker 7: And so what did it look like? It must have
been to see that I have the crazy room. It's
an entire space. Yeah, I didn't, As you can say,
I don't have a whole lot of wall space in here.
I did start working with maps, some of which were
online and some folding paper maps and looking at kind
of the connections. But it was hard to put all
this stuff together in one thing because, for example, that
map that I was talking about, the GIS map that
Washington has developed, is so incredibly complex you can't really
print that out. I did include in the book a
little snapshot of map that shows the full extent of
the smelter plume, But it's really hard to work with
those things in a physical printing it out or drawing
on it or something. You really have to use them online.
Speaker 2: As you gathered all this material, then what was your
writing process?
Speaker 6: Like I relied really heavily in this book on a timeline,
on timelines of different decades, which I also did for
prairie fires. Because when you're writing a biography, of course,
you're proceeding for the most part chronologically, and you really
have to keep track of what happened when and where
the person was. And so I had very elaborate timelines
by year, by decade, and those really helped in terms
of doing the kind of day to day writing. And also,
I think one thing I've always found is that when
you're writing, all of a sudden you realize, oh, I
don't know this I don't know this person looked like,
or I don't know how to describe this place, or
I'm missing some key piece of information. Then you have
to stop and find that so that you don't get
too far ahead of yourself. So yes, you do a
lot of research at the beginning to try and feed
into what's going to be the narrative. But then as
you go along you're having to do a lot of
additional research. And that was really true with this book
as well.
Speaker 2: So you don't skip In other words, you get to
that place where you realize, oh, I need more information
about this person or that situation, you don't just skip ahead.
Your tendency is to apply the brakes stop and then
go put your research or hat back on.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because I think I'm too obsessive, and you can
really go wrong if you proceed without looking for the
additional information that you need. You can get off the
track or make mistakes that you don't want to have
to go back and fix later, because that just makes
everything more complicated, is what I've found.
Speaker 5: You've spent most of your time here chronicly, Bundy. Were
you able to speak to some of the detectives and
people related to the case.
Speaker 3: Did you have access to case file information?
Speaker 5: How much down the path of true crime and into
our neck of the woods did you have to go
to be able to write this really well?
Speaker 6: Yeah. The lead detective in Washington, a guy named Bob Keppel,
had actually died a few around the time I was
starting to think about this, so I didn't have a
chance to talk to him. Fortunately, he had written a
great deal about his experience of working on the case,
his lack of experience. He was actually refreshingly honest for
a detective and an investigator, I found, and he'd written
a whole book about interviewing Bundy, ostensibly for the Green
River killer case, but really hoping to find out more
about Bundy's own murders, and I think that he had
probably as good a feel for Bundy as almost anybody.
There was another FBI guy who interviewed him as well.
But I didn't want to do a lot of sort
of investigative research in the sense that I didn't want
the Bundy narrative to completely take over the whole book, because,
for one thing, he's been written about so much, and
really wanted to write about him in a way that
worked against the glamorization of Bundy. You know that he's
somebody who has been There are so many movies and
TV shows and so forth about him that emphasized that
he was a genius or people have put him on
a very strange pedestal, and so one of the things
I wanted to do was to cut against that and
really just factually stick to what he did and how
he did it, and through that try to get at
the personalities and the sort of strange neurological background of
these guys, because so much of what they do is
almost robot It's not Yes, there is some planning that
goes into it, but there's also just a lot of impulsivity.
They see an opportunity and they take it. So I
wanted to give it a different view of serial killers,
starting with Bundy.
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Speaker 5: Were there ever times when, due to the enormity of
the complexity or just the darkness of the case. Were
there ever times that you needed to just step away
and be like, I got to take a couple of days.
Speaker 3: I can't do this anymore. Did you just plow through?
Speaker 6: There were certain things that were really difficult to describe
or to write about. Especially they're all horrible, they're all
really dark, but the things that involve kids and the
torture of children, those things were really difficult to write about. Fortunately,
there war aren't a lot. There were more than I
would have wanted to write about. They were spaced out
so I didn't have to do that all at once.
But yeah, I mean, there are definitely moments when you
think I'm gonna go take a walk something, I mean
something where you just really have to change your mindset
because it is very disturbing.
Speaker 5: Material time to go pet a puppy or have a
cup of coffee or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is along those lines. It's very striking that
you're perhaps best known for this very successful book on
Laura Ingles Wilder. Did it feel like a similar process
for you as a writer dealing with this very heavy material?
Speaker 6: If you look at Prairie Fires, I think that you
will see that there's some pretty disturbing material.
Speaker 3: In there as well. It's different, but.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean it does begin with an introduction that
describes the Dakota War of eighteen sixty two. Am I
write about that eighteen sixty two? I think so, which
was a horrific event that involved some people call it
a massacre, like six hundred white settlers were murdered, and
during a short period. It was a huge event in
the life of Wilder, so that she ended up referring
to it a couple of times in the Little House
in the Prairie.
Speaker 2: But I feel like that was largely forget that's largely
been forgotten by history.
Speaker 6: Yeah, in Minnesota, it's very well known, and certainly the
tribes that were involved. It ended in this horrific mass
hanging of a number of Dakota men who were involved
in it, and the hunting down and killing of Little Crow,
the chief that was in charge of it, and was
really a kind of horrific chapter in American history, and
people outside of Minnesota often aren't aware of it. It
was so fascinated by that that I really felt it
was important to include a description of that. And there's
a lot of darker chapters of Wilder's life and her
daughter's life as well. They went through a lot lost children.
So I don't think of Laura's life as a kind
of narrative of sweetness and light. It really wasn't it.
And in fact, I think the Little House books are
somewhat darker when you read them as an adult and
when you enjoy them when you're a kid, And I've
done both. I loved her books as a kid, but
was startled, I think when I re encountered them as
an adult, with how much kind of loss and suffering
are in those books, it's maybe not as big a
leap as people might think.
Speaker 3: I don't want to.
Speaker 5: Spoil the book, because we do want people, of course
to read it and buy it. Can you give us
maybe one or two of the most interesting conclusion that
you reached about the Pacific Northwest serial killer glut that
you found as you researched and wrote the book. If
you were going to highlight it for somebody who wanted
the cliff notes version, what would you say two or
three of the best and most interesting things that you learned.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: One of the things that shocked me was in looking
really closely at nineteen seventy four, which was the year
when Bundy started to really ramp up his activities and
abduct all these women in the area, that there were
at least six serial killers operating in the state of Washington,
mainly in that I five corridor, And that to me
was really just a really startling kind of statistic that
I think goes to the suggestion that there really was
something going on in the area at that time. And
then another thing that really I found owhelming was how
weird a lot of these murders are, and murderers that
we're not just talking about something where somebody's committing a
lot of crimes that got out of hand, or that
it were where there was money involved. These were sexual
murders of a particularly grotesque and almost unimaginable kind, many
of them involving necrophilia, And that to me also says
something about what was driving this phase of this is
referenced in the subtitle of the book Bloodlust. There does
seem to be something really strange going on here. Not
that there haven't been murders of this kind before. Everybody
always talks about Jack the Ripper, and there are a
couple of other instances from history that involve this kind
of really brutal mayhem and sexual mayhem. But I think
we do you have to take another look at this
period and really recognize that these things are off the scale.
Speaker 5: Here's the sixty four thousand dollars question. If we looked nationwide,
not just the Pacific Northwest, would you expect to find
similar trends in other highly industrialized areas of the country.
If we were to look at Chicago or Detroit ter
Saint Louis, for example, would we see that same uptick?
Is there a way to expand this research out to
much bigger than it is? I really think you might
be onto something here.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I think that you could expand it, and I
think you might find more instances of this. About fifteen
years ago, Reuters did a whole series of reports on
lead smelters and lead exposure and pollution in major American cities,
and they did map GIS maps that are similar to
the one I was using in Washington for places like
Chicago and Cleveland and Cincinnati and Detroit and Philadelphia so forth.
All these cities saw a huge ramp up of production
over the period of World War II, and you do
see a lot of serial killers being born in that era.
So yes, I think you might see that I was
trying to do a little of that in looking at
the city of El Paso, for example, because El Paso
is another city that had a huge lead smelter right
in the middle of the city, and of course el
Paso is really two cities. It's El Paso on our
side of the border and Ceodad Warrez on the Mexican side,
and so Warres got a huge amount of that lead pollution.
You then see a lot of femicides as they were
called in Warres in the eighties and nineties, the sort
of wholesale murder of women. Several hundred women are murdered
in that period. It's very difficult to do reporting on
that on what trying to tease out what was cartel
violence versus what was serial killers. There may have been
three or four serial killers at work in that area.
But we certainly do know that Richard Ramirez, the nightstalker
who is famous for all these murders, he committed in
Los Angeles. He grew up in El Paso, not very
far from the smelter.
Speaker 2: Taking Kristen's question, and now you've expanded it to at
least include Mexico, would we see these same patterns in
heavily industrialized and polluted cities across the globe.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there are people who have, I think, begun looking
at this question. One of the people who I talk
about a little bit is research of the guy who
contributed the graph that's at the back of the book.
He wrote a paper or a book called I'm Blinking
on the name of it Lucifer, that Lucifer curves, Lucifer curves.
He has looked at the history of the UK, for example,
there are certain areas of the UK have many decades
and indeed centuries of association with lead poisoning that do
seem to have a higher number of serial killers. So yes,
I think you could do this research. It's hard to
do it for places like Russia, for example, which is
said to have a city rostov on Dawn that has
more serial killers than anywhere else and also has significant
pollution because it's hard to access those kinds of records
unless you're fluent in the language. I think places like
China probably have real problems with lead because they didn't
have the regulatory structure that we have the legislation. There
are reports that people became came really outraged areas where
the population was very angry about lead pollution and what
it was doing to their kids. So I think they've
tried to pull back and do some controls on their plants,
but I have to think that they have some history
of this as well. But we're probably never going to
know about it because those places are not going to
be there's no reporting coming out of their legal system
is not like ours. Yeah, I think you probably could
do reporting on this in Europe and places where you
could access records, but maybe not in areas that are
really heavily controlled.
Speaker 2: Do you feel like murder Land could actually be sounding
a cautionary note because I have a concern that, if anything,
we seem to be stepping back as a country now
from environmental concerns and the significant strides we've made in
terms of cleaning up our environment. Now there seems to
be a movie of foot too. Oh, let's scrap all
that stuff. We're not going to have these kind of restrictions.
Do you feel like Murderland sounds a cautionary note there?
Speaker 6: I certainly hope that it does. One of the things
I just read about yesterday that I found deeply horrifying
was the news that the Trump administration is hoping to
roll back regulations on asbestos.
Speaker 2: I read that as well.
Speaker 6: The company that I talk about that had the smokestacks
in Tacoma and al Paso, which is a Sarco, the
American smelting and refining company. The reason that they went
bankrupt was because of asbestos. They were mining asbestos in
Canada for years and just set it loose on an
unsuspecting populace in the same way that they were setting
lead and arsenic pollution loose. And the idea that we're
going to be rolling back regulations on things that everybody
knows are poisonous and cause all kinds of cancer is
just astonishing. The thing about I'm talking about lead in
terms of what it does neurologically to your brain, but
it has all kinds of other effects too. It is
believed to be responsible for a lot of the rise
in heart disease in this country. It's associated with als,
it can cause all kinds of havoc with different parts
of your body. Man, the idea that we're going to
let go of the controls that we have when we
don't even have a fully operational system that is controlling
particular pollution which is now shown to be causing all
kinds of asthma and other diseases, that's just unreal. I
just can't even believe that.
Speaker 2: As someone whose older brother, who's a retired Navy doctor
and an epidemiologist by trade. My older brother is now
undergoing treatment for stage four life dung cancer is never smoked.
They believe that Richard's condition, which is very serious, is
as a result of his service aboard US Navy ships
which were riddled with asbestos. Back then. Part of his
job was to try to protect his Navy A Marine
Corps personnel from exposure to environmental hazards like asbestos. But
as he explained, every time they moved bulkheads or cut
pie the ship was riddled with asbestos, and those personnel,
including Richard, who was then a ship's doctor. They were
exposed to asbestos, so the hazard is very real, and
all these years later it catches up with people like
Richard and people he served with who were exposed to asbestos.
The idea that we're going to have scrap regulations and
restrictions on something that's already been proven to have impacted
millions of people's lives, it's insane.
Speaker 6: It is insane, and it's horrifying. I'm sorry to hear that.
And the idea that we have politicized all of these
facts that we know about things like asbestos and are
just moving ahead as if it's a political issue, not
a medical issue, is horrifying.
Speaker 3: Carolyn.
Speaker 5: There are obviously going to be people who are skeptical
about your claims about the link between lead and the
development of serial killers. What is your response for the
people who are going to push back against your findings,
Because there.
Speaker 3: Will be people who will do that.
Speaker 5: What would you say to them who say, I don't
see it.
Speaker 6: Obviously, everybody's entitled to their opinion and their reaction. It's
always fascinating to write a book and to put it
out into the world and you get all kinds of
different takes, and so it's fine with me if people
don't want to adopt this theory. I wanted people to
know about it because the leed crime hypothesis. I didn't
make it up. It existed, right, And I hope people
talk about it. I hope they debate it. I hope
they think of things like the whole history of the
tobacco industry and how much money that industry spent to
try to control the narrative around We don't know if
smoking causes cancer. There's nothing that really proves that. I
would encourage skepticism in both directions. Yes, we can't prove this,
and it's okay to talk about that. On the other hand,
there's a lot of really interesting data that's out that
are out there, and I think that we can start
looking at this as a potential problem.
Speaker 5: The book is Murderland, Crime and Bloodlust in the Time
of Serial Killers? Carolin, Where can everybody find your book?
Speaker 6: All over the place? In bookstores, in Amazon and in
independent bookstores. I always liked people to go chop at
their local bookstores as well. I'm online on Twitter, on Instagram,
and blue Sky. My website is Caroline Fraser dot net
and There's a lot of links to interviews and so
forth on that site, so if you want to learn more,
just check that out.
Speaker 5: The book is fascinating. We can't thank you enough for
joining us today. We really appreciate it. Oh, I appreciate it.
It's a great discussion.
Speaker 3: Thank you that is going to do it for this
episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for listening.
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.