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.
Speaker 3: Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly
and I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: 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 industrial pollution. Caroline,
thank you for joining us today. We are so thrilled
to have you.
Speaker 5: Thank you excited to be here.
Speaker 4: 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 favorites.
Speaker 5: 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 murder Land is obviously a very different book
than I think, you will see if you read it,
a 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's a bit of a through line, certainly, and I
think social consciousness is part of your writing as well.
But how do we get from there to serial killers?
It's not like you're a true crime author.
Speaker 5: Oh that's true. And I think the 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'd 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 it years earlier.
Speaker 4: There are, of course nobody in the true crime space
who isn't familiar with they named Ted Bundy. But there
may be people who are 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 of 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 Ted 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 5: Yeah. Sure. 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 Forrest who 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, Keys really horrible guy named
Joseph Edward Duncan, serial 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.
It was when I started compiling the evidence for this SERI,
I was shocked at how many there were.
Speaker 3: I don't understand, Siri, I was shocked.
Speaker 2: Sorry, she's always listening.
Speaker 4: 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: And I like the fact that you've taken.
Speaker 4: That question one step further as your basis for murder
Land and have asked the question about whether environmental factors
might have a hand in shaping cereal colors.
Speaker 3: When did was.
Speaker 4: It gest during COVID that idea came to you or
had it been percolating for a number of years.
Speaker 3: No, it really was.
Speaker 5: 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, that 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 colt 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.
And 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 North pip 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, and so once you
start to make your case, I realized maybe I shouldn't
be writing this off so quickly.
Speaker 5: 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 leag
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. You know
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. 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 4: 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 you 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 just density
of material here. How much did you rely on and
how much time did you spend research before you started writing.
Speaker 5: Oh, there are a 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 cal Tech, 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 history 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 in Tacoma. 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: But 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 the putting this out there
as an interesting and as I said, provocative proposal.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: To me, it was the foundation of that was this
map that had been developed in Washington State by the
Department of ecollege, 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 exactly 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. As 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 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 4: 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. But 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
and nineteen sixty, and by nineteen seventy there are six
hundred five, by nineteen eighty seven hundred sixty eight. The
numbers don't lie. That's incredible. It was looking at the
numbers that made me go, oh my god, there really
is something here.
Speaker 5: 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 4: And I really liked the fact too that you were
able to carry some of this over to Britain as well,
and talked about the fact that the areas that had
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 for serial killers, and I love
it because it works.
Speaker 3: It suddenly made so much sense.
Speaker 4: 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 5: Interested in the whole lead things. 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 4: 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 3: And so what did it look like?
Speaker 5: It must have been to see that I have a
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 on line 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 map that shows the
full extent of the smelter plume, but it's really hard
to work with those things in a physical by 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 like?
Speaker 5: Yeah, 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: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
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mindover Murder. So you don't skip 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 your hat back on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because I think I'm too obsessive, and you can
really go wrong. You can 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 comporable, is what I've found.
Speaker 4: So you've spent most of your time here chronically. And Bundy,
were you able to speak to some of the detectives
and people related to the case. Did you have access
to case file information like 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 5: 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. But fortunately he had written
a great deal about his experience of the 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 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
I 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's 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 robotic. 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, and so
I wanted to give it a different view of serial
killers starting with Bundy.
Speaker 4: Were there ever times when due to the normality, 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, I can't
do this anymore.
Speaker 3: Did you just plow through?
Speaker 5: 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 weren't a lot of 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
I 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 material.
Speaker 4: Time to go pet a puppy or have a cup
of coffee or something like that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah it is, Bill. Did you want to Yeah,
maybe we're with number seven.
Speaker 2: Maybe yeah, along those lines. It's very striking that you're
perhaps best known for this very successful book on Laura
Ingalls Wilder is did it feel like a similar process
for you as a writer dealing with this very heavy material?
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 2: It's different, but.
Speaker 5: 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? But
which was a horrific event that involved some people call
it a massacre, but 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. Until you covered it.
Speaker 5: 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 kind of horrific chapter in American history, and people
outside of Minnesota often aren't aware of it.
Speaker 4: It was so.
Speaker 5: 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, And in fact,
I think the Little housebooks 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 are in those books, It's
maybe not as big a leap as people might think.
Speaker 3: I don't want to spoil the book.
Speaker 4: Because we do want people, of course to read it
and buy it. But can you give us maybe one
or two of the most interesting conclusions 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 are.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: 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 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
another thing that really I found forwhelming was how weird
a lot of these murders are, and murderers that were
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 have to take another look at this period and
really recognize that these things are off the scale.
Speaker 4: So I guess 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 or 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.
Speaker 3: Because I really think you might be onto something here.
Speaker 5: 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 in lead exposure and pollution in major American cities,
and they did maps 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 and
so forth. All these cities saw a huge ramp up
of production over the period of World War Two, 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 Warres
on the Mexican side, and so the Warrez 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 and 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: So, 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 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: There are people who have, I think, begun looking at
this question. One of the people who I talk about
a little bit is the research of the guy who
contributed the graph that's at the back of the book,
and he wrote a paper or a book called Now
I'm Blinking on the Lucifer Lucifer curves Lucifer curves, and
he has looked at the history of the UK. For example,
there are certain areas of the UK that 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 problem with lead because
they didn't have the regulatory structure that we had the legislation.
There are reports that people became really outraged areas of
the where the population was very angry but 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 and 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 movement 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 5: 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 a stusta.
Speaker 2: I read that as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, for what you know, 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 caused
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 disease in this country,
and it's associated with als. It can cause all kinds
of havoc with different parts of your bodies. 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.
Speaker 2: Believe that, 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 lung 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, and it's funny.
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 pipe, the ship was riddled with asbestos,
and those personnel, including Richard, who was then a ship's doctor,
they were exposed to asbestos. So it 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
scrap regulations and restrictions on something that's already been proven
to have impacted millions of people's lives, it's insane.
Speaker 5: It is insane, and it's horrifying. I'm sorry to hear that.
And it just the idea that we have politicized all
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 2: Yeah, it's one quick thing, and then christ I'll go
back to you. We're at forty seven minutes, so we
have to steer towards the close.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, we're I was headed there.
Speaker 4: Hey, Carolyn, 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 will be people who will do that,
What would you say to them who say, Eh, I
don't see it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, 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 lead 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 be skeptical. 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 4: The book is Murderland, Crime and Bloodlust in the Time
of serial Killers? Caroline, Where can everybody find your book?
Speaker 5: 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 Carolinefraser 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 4: The book is fascinating. We can't thank you enough for
joining us today. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Oh, I appreciate it. It's a great discussion.
Speaker 4: Thank you that is going to do helle it for
this episode of Mind Ever 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.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.