Caroline Fraser
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, well, I started thinking about this a long time ago.
The book's called Murderland.
Yeah, the book is Murderland.
And I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s around the time when there were a lot of
you know, serial killers beginning to pop up.
And there always had been this question, why are there so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest?
And so that was the question I was really thinking about.
And the premise as it emerged from the research that I did and from some of the facts that I learned about what was happening in the Northwest in this run up to the 1970s
is that there may be a connection between the lead pollution that was prevalent in the area because of smelters and leaded gas
and serial killers because lead, of course, as we I think most people now know, has a connection to heightened aggression and violence in the people who've been exposed to it.
So that was what emerged to me gradually over the years.
I mean, I didn't know a lot about this when I started.
I knew about the serial killers, but I didn't really know about the whole lead story.
And that came about...
you know, I learned about it in part because of some murders.
I mean, I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a lovely place.
Unfortunately, New Mexico has a high rate of homicides.
In part, it's because it's a poor state and doesn't have a big tax base and has, you know, some issues with
drug and alcohol addiction.
And a few years ago, maybe 2008 or something like that, some people, a couple of people were murdered down the street from me.
And I live in a very peaceful neighborhood.
And that was something that really made me start thinking about
the issue of maybe, you know, it might be a good idea to think of moving back to the Pacific Northwest, which I wanted to do anyway because I have family up there.
And a few years later, because of that, I was up in the Northwest and looking at real estate ads.
And at this point, I didn't really know anything about the smelter or the
But I was looking at property on Vashon Island, which if you know anything about the Pacific Northwest is in Puget Sound.
It's right across from West Seattle.
It was quite rural when I was growing up there.
And I came across a real estate ad that said, and this is just for undeveloped property, and it said, arsenic remediation may be necessary.
And I thought, wow, what could possibly have caused so much arsenic pollution on Vashon Island that you would have to get it remediated?
I mean, that just seemed crazy to me.
And I was so curious about that and I looked it up online and, you know, within minutes discovered that there had been an infamous lead and copper smelter in the city of Tacoma, which is just south of Vashon Island.
And so Vashon received a lot of the pollution from that smelter.
And so that began a whole process of kind of learning about what happened here, you know, what happened in this region.
And I also knew, because I'm sort of really interested in serial killers, as I mentioned, and had been for a long time, reading about them and reading about Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway and
And I knew that both Bundy and Gary Ridgway, who was the Green River killer, had grown up in Tacoma at the same time that the smelter is, you know, the smelter had been operating there since the 1880s, 1890s, so for a very long time.
And I could see that a lot of news media had been devoted to looking at what had happened in this region.
You know, there was a whole map, a GIS map, geographic information systems that allowed you to look up individual events.
Houses, you know, residential homes in Tacoma and see how much arsenic and lead pollution was in the yards.
So I discovered that you could actually look up the house where Ted Bundy grew up and see how much lead was in his front yard and his backyard.
And the more I read about lead pollution and lead, the association with aggression and violence, the more I wondered, is there a story to be told here about this issue?
The issue of serial killers is one that I kind of introduced as the most extreme example.
But most of the research that's been done has focused on aggression, juvenile delinquency, for example.
There are long-term studies that look at
Kids who were exposed to lead, including in relatively small amounts, and then what happens to them later, you know, by the time they're, you know, teenagers or young adults.
And they have shown a very strong association with, you know, problems with learning, ADHD, and as I said, delinquency and crime.
Yeah, and the leaded gas is particularly tragic because that was essentially a kind of horrific experiment that was conducted on generations of kids in this country and adults because everybody was exposed to that.
Obviously, some people more than others, if you lived –
next to a major highway or something like that, you are getting more of it than if you maybe lived somewhere else.
Although I think rural people were also exposed because of the kinds of machinery and stuff that's used on farms and so forth.
It was a terrible idea, and they knew that at the time.
You know, the companies, the corporations, the people who introduced it, Standard Oil, DuPont, et cetera, they knew.
the dangers of this they were told by medical doctors who said yeah who said this will expose everybody to you know more lead than than human beings have ever had to deal with before and and they just did it to stop the engines from knocking
They did, and apparently there were alternatives, but the alternatives, which were like ethanol, were not something that could be patented and were not products that you could make money off of.
And so all these corporations chose to do this.
I mean, it's really almost unreal to think about the moral failure.
I mean, failure doesn't even seem strong enough.
Yeah, and they did for decades because, you know, this began in the 20s and 30s.
In the 1800s, they probably weren't thinking about stuff like that.
They didn't have data on it.
But by the time the companies really got up and running and the smelter in Tacoma was owned by a company called Asarco, which was the American smelting and refining company owned by the Guggenheim family.
It's a total kind of whitewashing the reputation.
And they were among the earlier corporations to do that and totally successfully.
It has something to do with explosives, right?
I mean, the same thing happened with
The guy who invented the leaded gas formula, Thomas Midgley, who was really a terrible guy.
He invented the leaded gas stuff.
He also invented chlorofluorocarbons, you know, the stuff in refrigerants that cause the— Ozone layer hole?
The hole in the ozone layer.
So like two of the most devastating discoveries, scientific discoveries in the 20th century are down to the sky.
And he was awarded the highest medal from the American Chemistry Association, which he still holds.
I mean, even though he became really ill as a result, I think, of working with this –
Tetraethyl, it's called, the substance that was added to leaded gas.
And he, you know, went to Florida to try and heal himself of this, which I don't think you can do.
I don't think going to Florida heals lead exposure.
But yes, and he developed something which was called polio.
He became unable to walk, and he invented this whole bizarre kind of system of pulleys that he could use to –
lift himself out of bed, and eventually he strangled to death in this sort of harness thing, which it may have been suicide, it may have been an accident, kind of unclear.
Yeah, I think that that has to do with the fact that women deal with fear, you know, fear of, and it may be very, you know, nebulous.
It may be kind of unclear what, you know, but a lot of women have just had the experience of fear.
being afraid walking alone at night or walking through a parking lot or, you know, or they've had direct experience of, you know, some kind of male violence or aggression, you know, at home, domestic violence.
I think there's a whole gamut of experiences that women have had to one extent or another that feed into that.
And for me, it was growing up just a couple of miles from the places where Ted Bundy began abducting women in the winter and summer of 1974.
And everybody knew there was somebody out there.
This is at a time when the term serial killer wasn't even really in use yet.
People didn't really understand the phenomenon.
It was still kind of an unusual term.
And this was happening.
You know, women were disappearing from dorm rooms or their rooms at University of Washington.
They were disappearing off the street.
And then they weren't seen again for weeks, for months.
You know, in the July of 1974, I was 13.
And on a really hot Sunday afternoon in 1974, two women disappeared from a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish, which was about 10 minutes from my house.
And so having had that experience of being around at that time, it was incredibly, you know...
It was both really disturbing, but also I just really wanted to understand what was happening.
Yeah, I never really wanted to write a book that was just about serial killers.
I mean, I think that's been done.
Lots of people have done that and done a good job.
I mean, Ann Rule, the woman who wrote the first book about Ted Bundy, who knew Ted Bundy.
Yes, she worked with him at a rape crisis clinic in Seattle.
He was very interested in doing research on rape.
Because, of course, he was something of an expert, so...
That was why that book was such a phenomenon because she knew him before anybody had identified, you know, anything in him.
She was friends with them.
She gave him, you know, a ride to the Christmas party.
Well, the thing that we don't really know about Ted Bundy is when he started killing.
He would never answer that question.
And one of the cases that I talk about that really is part of what made me want to write this book is a case of an eight-year-old girl who was abducted in Tacoma.
In 1961, in August of 1961, Anne Marie Burr.
And he was 14 at that time.
And he is now one of the principal suspects, I think, behind her abduction.
So that may have been his first murder.
No, but one of the things that I think the FBI was discovering when they started doing all this investigation of the pasts, the childhood of serial killers, was that this starts really young, that the fantasies and the obsessions with – I mean some of them famously do –
torture or kill the family pets and so forth.
With Ted, that wasn't the case.
I think with him, one of the things you see is that he never knew who his father was.
illegitimate at a foundling home in Vermont.
And his mother left him there for a couple of months before she went back and kind of retrieved him.
And that's a common factor with a lot of these guys.
They don't know their dad.
They don't know who he is maybe.
Or they have a very bad relationship with the parents.
There's maybe abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse.
We don't know that about Ted Bundy in terms of the abuse factor.
But he remains, I think, really puzzling to people for that reason because you don't see some of the usual signs with him.
Well, he talked a lot about, you know, various people were able to interview him.
The detective in King County in Seattle who was in charge of the investigation, he was actually quite young when he took this on.
I think it was his first major case as a detective that
He eventually was able to interview Ted Bundy in prison when he was on death row.
Bundy, for a variety of reasons, wouldn't talk about anything that he did except hypothetically in the third person because he was still trying to work the legal system.
And so he didn't want to admit to what he'd done.
I mean, it was sort of like O.J.
Simpson or something.
He would say, well, if somebody was going to do this, here's what he probably would have done.
And so there was a lot of that up until the very last days of Bundy's sojourn on death row.
And then he finally began confessing.
in the last two or three days in an attempt, I think, to get the governor interested in perhaps extending his life because he could give information about where bodies had been left and so forth.
But that didn't convince the governor of Florida.
Yeah, there really are, as I discovered, a really kind of extraordinary number.
And it's hard to talk about these numbers simply because we don't know what a normal number of serial killers in a given population.
There are several cases that have never been resolved.
You know, there's something called the dismemberment murders.
Yeah, up in the Northwest where, you know, various feet and things were found washing up on shore and
Nobody could figure out who they belonged to.
Oh, I remember that.
It may be another thing that you're thinking of.
And they could have just been, you know, bodies of people who drowned because that's, I think, what happens in some cases.
So I think that's a sort of question mark.
There are a couple of others.
There's one in Idaho that they've never solved.
So there are those cases.
But even aside from those, I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at the year 1974 because it seemed really active in terms of what was happening with serial killers around the country and in the Northwest.
And it was famously the year when Bundy...
really kind of broke free of any restraints he might have
once had and began abducting women basically kind of like once a month during that year.
And in 1974, I found at least six active serial killers in Seattle or along the I-5 corridor who were all kind of working at the same time.
And that seems like a lot to me.
And just looking at Tacoma,
The rate of violent crime really skyrocketed in 1974 and in the mid-'70s.
It's just started going up and up and up.
And you see this, unfortunately, across the country.
The rate of violent crime in the 70s and 80s rose to heights that had not been seen before.
Well, there are various theories that have been put forth.
I mean, people have pointed out that in the mid-'70s was when the baby boom generation, which was large in terms of its population density, increased.
Those people had started to kind of come of age.
They'd entered the period when you're most likely to commit crimes, which is your 20s or 30s.
And so there was that.
There was a lot of economic uncertainty.
There was a recession.
Nixon was in the White House early on in the 70s.
There was the Vietnam War.
there had been a lot of violence during the 60s.
And so people point to those factors as contributing to this as well.
But I think also, you know, based on the science that's being done, you do need to look at the toxins that were becoming really, really prevalent.
Lead, cadmium is another heavy metal that's very similar to lead in the body in terms of its association with aggression.
Zinc, manganese, all these things were being— Zinc?
I don't know that it's associated with aggression, but it's one of these things that was forming the exposure to particulate pollution, which is now associated with all kinds of health problems, you know, heart problems.
I mean, lead is a toxin.
And so you put it in the body and it becomes, you know, it's very...
Easy for that to reach your brain.
And what happens is that, you know, especially if you're exposed to a lot of this stuff, you can be sick in all kinds of ways.
You can get heart problems.
It's now been associated with various forms of dementia, Alzheimer's, diabetes.
So there's a lot of things that lead can cause, but they have shown statistically that the increase in lead in the population in the air in the mid-70s really may have contributed to a rise in violent crime.
Well, they invented the stuff in the 1920s.
But, you know, just thinking back to those early decades, not that many people had cars.
You know, and there was a big depression, of course, in the 1930s.
So there's not a lot of driving happening in terms of what we see now.
I mean, yeah, it just wasn't as big of a deal.
It was, you know, rare to have one car available.
Much less, you know, two or three.
And then during the war, you had, I mean, the war, World War II is really interesting to look at in terms of lead because I have a sort of little chapter about this because
During World War II, gasoline, of course, was rationed.
You know, they needed all of it for the war effort.
But the war effort itself raised the amount of metals.
All these metals, lead, copper, et cetera, were needed so intensively for the war that they began to be produced more than at any other time in world history.
And so the pollution from that, you know, from producing all these, you know, tanks and vehicles and planes and everything that they needed was really going to form the basis of what would become the Superfund program because a lot of the Superfund sites in this country can be traced back to
And so that's when a lot of the stuff started entering the environment.
And once it's there, it's really hard to get rid of it.
I mean, that's the problem with lead.
It doesn't wash away.
It doesn't go anywhere.
hangs around and becomes, you know, part of our environment.
It becomes dust that is, you know, in people's houses or their attics.
And that, I think, is what people eventually started, you know, when after the war, people started driving lots and lots more, you know, in the 50s and 60s.
This country particularly was doing really well economically and everybody was buying cars and driving them for the first time, you know, en masse.
And so it really becomes, I think, a heavy burden.
pollutant around that time.
And so by the 70s, the kids who had been born in the 50s, they're starting to show the effects of lead poisoning.
Yeah, I mean, you definitely see, you know, what happened in Tacoma is very well recorded now.
Another city where this happened was El Paso, Texas, because Osarco had another major smelter accident.
in El Paso that had started in the 1890s and had been spewing this stuff out for decades.
But all of the smelters during the war were kind of, they weren't taken over by the government, but the government introduced all kinds of price fixing and so forth to make it not possible for these companies to raise prices.
And a lot of the stuff was requisitioned for the war effort.
So in El Paso, by the 1970s, they were starting to discover that this whole area around the smokestack of the smelter was heavily lead contaminated.
I thought, well, El Paso, that's interesting.
But there were no serial killers in El Paso.
And so I Googled that.
And like, you know, within a minute, I discover that Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, grew up in El Paso, not very far from the smelter.
And, you know, we associate him now with Los Angeles because that's where he committed most of his murders, but he did not grow up there.
Yeah, when you start looking up, okay, well, what's the crime rate, the violent crime rate in El Paso?
And yes, that starts going up in the 1970s.
And so there does seem to be an association with this.
There's a guy named...
Rick Nevin, who is an economist and social scientist, and he put together a paper about this, which was published online, that includes about 45 graphs of all these different –
You know, showing the rise in violent crime, the rise in teen pregnancies, which is sort of how women come into it.
The impulsivity seems to have perhaps led to a real rise in teen pregnancies in the 70s and 80s, which, you know, if you remember, that was kind of a big thing then.
I think that was in the 1960s, early 60s, that that first becomes available.
I can't tell you exactly what year.
But yeah, I mean, I'm sure that there is some... There's a bunch of other factors.
And of course, people always point out, well, not everybody in...
and El Paso became a serial killer, which of course is true.
I mean, you know, as I say somewhere in the book, a little –
Extra lead may have been something that maybe they had a lot of other factors to begin with, abuse, poverty.
In the 1950s, a lot of babies were delivered with forceps, which caused brain damage in a certain percentage group.
So I think you're looking at a lot of different things that contributed to trauma to the brain.
I think now they're really focusing on that in terms of CTE and brain damage.
We see that now in football players who've had head trauma repeatedly, that this causes...
can cause violence and aggression.
Not making great decisions about what you're doing.
And I think – It's so twisted.
But what these things were were these giant primary smelters to melt rock.
It was like taking the rocks from mines that were full of all these different metals, including arsenic.
This is where the arsenic came from.
But they were full of metals like lead and copper and silver and gold and melting those rocks in these giant furnaces.
And all of this put off an enormous amount of pollution, you know, particulate pollution that was going up the smokestack.
And they were, you know, the companies that ran these things were keeping all the valuable metals that they could for themselves, you know, the silver and the copper and all of that.
And so they did have filters on them, but...
One of the things that happens sometimes with these smelters is that they would kind of fail or the filters would fail.
There's this horrifying example in Idaho.
It was a company called Bunker Hill that was one of the largest silver mines, I think, in the world.
And they had a lead smelter in this town called Kellogg, which is right on I-90.
If you've ever driven...
you know, from Missoula, Montana or something like that to Seattle.
You've driven through this place.
And they built, you know, this giant smelter facility to handle all the stuff they were pulling out of the mines.
And in 1973, they had a fire in their filtration building that destroyed most of the filter.
That was the thing that was supposed to keep lead from going up the smokestack.
And there were kids in this town.
There was an elementary school right across the street from the smokestack.
And the descriptions of that school are so horrifying because the teachers used to think that sometimes that the facility had caught fire because there was so much smoke.
But in fact, it wasn't – there wasn't – it was just what the smokestack was putting out.
But after that filter failed, that company, which was owned by Gulf and Western at the time, did a kind of back-of-the-napkin calculation of what those kids' lives were worth because they –
felt like, okay, we're going to get sued if we keep running the plant without filtration.
But is that really going to matter?
Because these kids' lives are probably only worth about $11 million a piece.
And our profits are such that it makes more sense to keep operating regardless of what happens to these kids.
And we know this because of the lawsuits that were ultimately filed because, you know, they did end up in court.
And there were kids, there was a baby who was more lead poisoned than any human being that the doctors had ever seen.
Yeah, I mean, it was a nightmarish thing.
I used to live in New Jersey right by the...
Right by the Liberty State Park, which a bunch of the acreage of that was off limits to people because it was so polluted.
And I remember, you know, because you could actually walk from my apartment in Jersey City to Liberty State Park, but you had to go by this, you know, place that was crushing cars, one of those facilities where they...
And I mean, there was all this heavy industry there and pollutants.
And you had to walk across this little wooden trail over a stream to get to the park.
And the water was that color.
I mean, it was like this disgusting, you know, color not found in nature.
And you just looked at it and thought...
I mean, that's what happened with the SARCO.
You know, once the EPA had sort of got started and the various Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed and passed.
legislation about what you could do in the workplace, because, I mean, imagine what it was like to work in these smelters.
It just basically became illegal to operate them, and the companies could no longer afford to do it, so they all pretty much went out of business in the 1980s.
But it is just an incredible sort of time in America because it was like, well, what's the tradeoff here?
You know, the profits are worth much more than people's lives.
And that place, the Coeur d'Alene, you know, there's a town city called Coeur d'Alene in Idaho, but there's also this giant park.
And all that pollution from Bunker Hill, from the mines, from the smelter, it all went down river and is now sitting at the bottom of Lake Coeur d'Alene.
And that's been a Superfund project for many, many years, but they...
really can't clean that up because it's the kind of thing where you try to remove the sediment that's full of all the lead and stuff, and it stirs everything up.
And so it's really, really almost impossible to clean a lot of that stuff.
Yeah, it's definitely the poor communities that get the worst of all of this.
I mean, it's murder.
And that's why I called it Murderland.
You know, I think that the behavior of these corporate actors was as bad.
I mean, it's, you know, maybe pernicious to compare.
But I think that, you know, people have come to see that the ways that corporations have behaved is murderous.
You know, that they're not...
I mean, aside from just the issue of taking responsibility, they're just going to go ahead with what they want to do and make the profits that they want and leave us to pay the price.
And that, I think, is something that in a sane world would have to change.
We would have to look at what a corporation wants to do before they start doing it.
You know, and figure out, okay, well, if they want to proceed with this, how do we prevent the damage that could occur?
And if they can't figure out how to prevent it, they shouldn't be operating.
Yeah, it's now very difficult to figure out how many people were directly and indirectly harmed by these smelters because of the destruction of evidence.
Many of them had sort of people on staff whose job it was to put out false information.
In Tacoma, there was a guy, a doctor at the smelter,
who wrote false papers saying that, oh, the workers aren't being harmed by exposure to arsenic, when in fact his numbers showed that people who worked at the plant were dying
of an elevated percentage of lung cancer.
And he suppressed that information.
He said their deaths were from heart failure, which everybody dies of heart failure.
So he basically was falsifying the information from their death certificates and publishing papers
designed to make it look like arsenic wasn't a poison.
I mean, it's, you know, what you said about the lying is really true.
And this is what you see in serial killers, you know, that they lie about everything.
They lie about stuff they don't even need to lie about.
It's just, it's their... It's their MO.
They're just so inured to it and they want to get away with what they're doing.
Yeah, I think that kind of psychopathy is maybe more common than we would like to think.
Well, I think it can be brain damage.
I mean, what happens to the frontal cortex of these kids who are exposed to lead and cadmium is that certain parts of the brain fail to develop correctly.
And you can see the deficits, the little holes that are supposed to be full of something that helps you
make good decisions, you know, the part of your brain that helps you control yourself and control your behavior.
That's kind of missing in some of these kids.
And they have shown now that the effects are worse in men than they are in women, that the
You know, the damage to the frontal cortex, the neurology is more marked in men, and they can see this on the MRI scans.
And I think there's, you know, I don't know that they know why that's happening, but it does seem to be, you know, a real effect that they're writing papers about.
Yeah, I mean, it obviously is some incredibly important discovery, what they make of that and how it's all going to come out in the wash in terms of what can be done to help kids who have these issues.
That, I think, is another story.
And one of the things that sort of blows my mind is that we've known for centuries, for eons, that these things are bad.
I mean, the Romans and the Greeks knew that lead caused people to go crazy.
I mean, they had people who worked with lead in foundries and things then, and they knew it was a problem.
We've known that arsenic is a poison since forever.
And yet, you know, comes along the 20th century and somehow these corporations are telling communities, including the community on Vashon Island, you know, oh, arsenic is really not a problem.
You know, the human body just excretes it naturally.
You know, all kinds of just –
Crazy arguments were being put forward to justify what they were doing.
I mean, there actually are two kinds of arsenic.
There's organic arsenic, which you can get from seafood.
And if you're eating a lot of.
You know, shrimp or sardines or whatever, it can build up.
And I think that that form of arsenic is less toxic and less of a problem.
You definitely don't want it.
I mean, as your doctor said, don't do that.
Yeah, but the stuff that they were producing at the smelter in Tacoma was what's called inorganic arsenic.
And that's the stuff they used to poison rats.
And they used it for insecticides and things.
Very heavily, you know, during the 40s and 50s, they were putting it all over apple orchards and cherry orchards and cotton crops.
So those places were then contaminated with arsenic.
And Washington state now has four plumes of this pollution.
The big one was in Buget Sound from the smelter.
which was like 1,000 square miles of Puget Sound that was contaminated.
But also Wenatchee, which is over in eastern Washington, where they have all these apple orchards.
There's another plume there from those pesticides and insecticides.
And there's a couple more.
There's another plume up in Everett where there was what they called an arsenic kitchen.
The Rockefellers used to own mines up in the Cascade Mountains.
And they had a smelter in Everett that was then bought by the Guggenheims and they moved their arsenic kitchen to Tacoma.
But it left all this pollution in Everett.
And so they discovered all these people had built houses and condos and things on top of where the arsenic kitchen had been, which that stuff was never cleaned up.
And so they had to...
I think they had to buy those properties and remediate so-called.
In Tacoma, what they did, that was where the worst of the pollution was because the smokestack was sitting right near the water.
The smokestack was blown up in the 90s.
Yeah, they exploded the smokestack.
They closed the plant in 1986.
They claimed that they cleaned the inside of the smokestack, but –
So, yeah, in Tacoma, they carted away tons of soil.
They took, you know, they went into people's yards.
They tested all of the yards and told people, OK, you're going to have to replace the soil.
And so, yeah, they went in and they, by this point, ASARCO had declared bankruptcy and the EPA eventually had to take over the whole thing.
But they, you know, the EPA got an unprecedented environmental bankruptcy settlement out of ASARCO, which was close to $2 billion.
I think it was the highest settlement that they'd ever gotten.
But it had to clean up about 20 different Superfund sites, including the one in Idaho, in Coeur d'Alene, which they've been working on that for decades.
years and still haven't finished.
But in Tacoma, they actually did replace the soil in many, many people's yards.
But, you know, they run out of money.
I mean, I think on places like Vashon, a lot of that was on the southern part.
I think you could request soil replacement in some of these places, but it wasn't necessarily guaranteed, depending on where you live.
Yeah, and of course they have to take that soil somewhere.
So in Tacoma, they took it to some special landfill.
But, I mean, one of the really crazy things that happened as a result of closing the smokestack there was that they took that arsenic kitchen that I was talking about, the one that had been up in Everett, and some of the most contaminated parts of the buildings that were part of the whole smelter compound,
And the Osarko promised that they were going to take all that stuff and put it somewhere else.
I don't know where they were going to put it.
But they said they were going to take it.
But then they went bankrupt.
And so they didn't remove it.
And instead, they created this very bizarre kind of
pit where they put all the worst stuff, including a bunch of the soil, the contaminated soil from Everett and the arsenic kitchen, and they put it in a sort of super heavy-duty plastic-lined
you know, garbage bag, essentially.
I mean, if you can imagine like the largest garbage bag in the world, they put all this stuff in it and they capped it with soil.
And that thing is sitting there, you know, still, even though they have now, you know, they cleared off the whole area where the compound was, where the factories and the furnaces were, and they built condos on top of that.
But behind the condos is this giant hump of contaminated stuff in a giant plastic garbage bag.
Well, there's a very small historical display with some photographs and materials about the smelter that's in one of the buildings on the way to the public bathroom.
So presumably if the people who are buying condos there know anything about it, they probably are aware of the history.
But they think it's –
And in a sense, it has been cleaned up.
I mean, but... In a sense.
Well, they have a lot of stuff that they've done.
I mean, in the book, I talk about, you know, Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune, he was from Tacoma.
And in fact, the stuff in Dune about the pollution and what has happened to the planet, you know, that he dramatized, a lot of that came from his disgust with the smelter.
And a planet that had basically destroyed its whole environment.
And now they have developed this whole little park.
The condos are on one end of this, what used to be the smelter property, and then on the other end, on top of this slag land.
The slag is the stuff that's left over after you've pulled all the metal out of the rocks.
There's the stuff that, once it's cooled off, looks like gravel, and it's called slag, but it isn't really gravel.
I mean, it's contaminated with all the stuff.
It's contaminated with arsenic and...
And so they built a park that's called Dune Park, and it's dedicated to Frank Herbert.
And it's this little walking trail.
And the whole thing, I think, is developed in such a way that it's kind of lined with plastic.
And there's a plastic liner, you know, on the
shores to keep stuff from leaking out.
And, like, if you live in one of those condos, you can't plant anything that will be larger than a, you know, small shrub, in part because of the plastic liner thing.
I've never heard that there's polio that's asymptomatic.
Yeah, I think that a lot of this environmental stuff has become so overwhelming to people that they kind of tune it out.
It's like, what are we going to do about it?
There's nothing we can do, so let's just pretend it's not happening.
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things in my mind when I kind of wanted to develop the whole thing about, you know, talking about serial killers, and violence and aggression and where that might have come from.
I, you know, I wanted to talk about all that and I didn't want to just use it as a kind of Trojan horse to introduce all the stuff about pollution.
But I did think it was a way to get people maybe to think about these issues differently.
who might not otherwise want to do that.
And I think people are interested in the history of how they might have been exposed.
When I did a reading up in Seattle a month or so ago, everybody was talking about where they grew up in relation to the smelter, like how close they were to it.
And, you know, what they might have experienced as a result.
And that, I think, is one of the interesting things about the Tacoma story is that many poor people were directly exposed.
You know, the people who worked at the smelter, they lived right around the smokestack.
So they got the worst of it.
But there were a lot of other communities in the area, including Mercer Island, where I lived.
grew up, which is now kind of a famously wealthy, you know, some of the, you know, Microsoft people have houses there.
Or, you know, I think Paul Allen had a house there.
And it was when I was a kid growing up there, it was a well-to-do upper middle class place.
One of the things I look at in the book is some of the really bizarre crime that happened on the island at that time.
That you wonder, was this, you know, in any way related to, you know, some of these things we're talking about, the rise in poverty?
lead in the air from leaded gas because Mercer Island is crossed by I-90.
I-90 comes down out of the Cascades and crosses Mercer Island, which is sitting in the middle of Lake Washington.
And ends up in Seattle.
And so Mercer Island had a lot of pollution from I-90.
And it also was in the plume from the Tacoma smelter.
And while I was growing up there, some weird shit happened.
Well, I lived on a street that was close to I-90 and was actually kind of ran over the top of a tunnel that enclosed I-90 on part of the island.
And down the street from where I grew up was growing up another young guy named George Waterfield Russell who turned out to be a serial killer.
Killed three women on the east side where Bellevue is.
And so that is really kind of a striking moment.
You know, you don't expect serial killers to come from that kind of a neighborhood, not very far away from where Russell grew up.
This other guy was also, who went to my high school, as did Russell, was growing up, who became one of the worst arsonists in Seattle history when he burned down his parents' warehouse and killed several Seattle firefighters.
So there were those two.
There was a guy in my class at the high school who was obsessed with his ex-girlfriend and he worked at a facility that used dynamite and he stole some dynamite and blasting caps and he went and blew up her dorm building.
And there was another kid who went to my junior high who decided he was so depressed he was going to kill himself.
And he drove his car at like 100 miles an hour.
It actually wasn't his car.
It was like his girlfriend's sister's Camaro or something.
And he drove it, you know, at a million miles an hour into the wall of the junior high gymnasium and destroyed the gymnasium.
So all this stuff is happening, you know, in a period of time, you know, and in a place that you wouldn't think would have that level of crime.
And that kind of crime.
You know, I don't really know how to answer that.
I mean, I think that there was...
One of the things that I remember about the high school, for example, was that there was a lot of kind of creepy behavior going on in terms of food fights and just a lot of stuff I don't think you see as much now.
I mean, this is completely anecdotal, so I can't support any of this, but it just felt to me like when my niece and nephew were growing up that –
that they were less troubled as youth, you know, than we were in the 1970s.
You know, they were growing up in the 90s, you know.
And I think there is a little bit of that.
I mean, there are – can't prove it, but I think that –
It may be true that all the jokes about the baby boomers being crazy because of lead exposure, there may be a little bit of truth to that.
And I hope that one of the things my book might be able to do is to encourage people to just think about this in their lives.
And I think a lot of people are now much more aware of lead.
I mean, that thing that you were showing earlier about the Bunker Hill thing, it said that five micrograms per deciliter of lead was the – they've now lowered that to 3.5.
And it really should be zero, you know, because there is no amount of lead that's safe.
in terms of exposure.
I think it just, if the federal government comes out and says it's zero, then that triggers all kinds of things that have to happen.
And it makes parents freak out because, you know, they might take their child to a doctor and have them tested and find out there's some
You know, if it's not zero, then what are we going to do about it?
I mean, they always say the dose makes the poison.
And I suppose that that's true.
And the government is not, you know, completely blameless in all of this either because, you know, in terms of lead, for example, one of the places that I think people are really concerned about is the schools, you know, public schools.
Public school buildings were built, you know, often decades ago.
So they're old and they have old –
They have lead pipes.
And so there's, you know, there are real questions about how much the government is going to be on the hook for replacing all of this stuff that has to happen, which is, you know, so much money in order to do that.
They have occasionally kind of tiptoed up to this.
I think the Biden administration did say that they were going to spend millions of dollars to try and do work at schools.
Now, I think that's all in question.
So, yeah, it's a kind of a frightening period right now because the EPA is being defunded in a lot of ways.
I'm sure the EPA is not a perfect agency.
I'm sure they've made mistakes, but they're the ones.
And it's the EPA that's responsible for the Superfund program, which is in large part responsible for cleaning this stuff up.
But they're being defunded, you know, and so...
Who's going to do that?
Who's going to clean up, you know, the areas that have radioactive, you know, legacy pollution from World War Two, Hanford and all of that?
I mean, that stuff's been going on for decades and it's not finished.
Yeah, I mean, and there's got to be some kind of, you know, government intervention and stuff like this.
There has to be the responsibility because the corporations walked away.
And so they can't, you know, ASARCO still exists, but it's now operating out of Mexico.
Yeah, that's a whole story.
Oh, so this is even World War I. Yeah.
All that chemical stuff that they were using.
I know a lot of people have said things to me like, how did you write this book?
And I think they're talking about the serial killer part of it.
That's another part of it, yeah.
Which, you know, it is really disturbing stuff.
But we did do the right thing in terms of, you know, now every country in the world that was selling leaded gas has taken it off the market.
So that was a good thing.
We made some progress.
You know, again, this guy's graphs that he published show this.
Who's this guy again?
He wrote this book called Lucifer Curves, which contain all these different graphs that show this.
And what he has shown is that there's one of them in my book that he let me reproduce.
You know, the violent crime rate goes up and up in the 70s and 80s.
And then when they remove the leaded gas, the crime rate falls off a cliff.
And it's the same thing with serial killers.
The number of serial killers in the 70s and 80s and 90s goes up to the highest that we've seen, you know, about 700 operating in this country during that period.
And then it just drops off.
And that's why they call that the golden age of serial killers.
And now it's like, you know, 50 to 100.
So I think there always have been serial killers throughout history.
I mean, there's Jack the Ripper.
But this guy talks about that whole period because that was the Industrial Revolution.
That was a period when there was a lot of lead paint being produced in England.
And so Jack the Ripper may have had a little bit too much lead.
led on top of whatever else was wrong with them.
I mean, we don't even know who he was.
And coal includes a lot of compounds that are really dangerous to breathe.
There was a whole thing that happened in London in the 1950s where they got –
I don't remember why this happened, but, you know, I mean, it was a really difficult time for that country after World War II.
There was, you know, economically, they were really struggling.
And I think they got, during one war,
winter in the 1950s, they got some really bad quality coal delivered to London, which caused this horrific smog event, essentially, that was so heavy that people were killed just trying to cross the street because you couldn't see anything.
Yeah, it was like there was a whole episode of The Crown.
That was devoted to this.
It was while Winston Churchill was prime minister.
And, you know, when I was a kid and read books about England in that, you know, in the earlier, like Charles Dickens or whatever, you know, we would talk about fog all the time in London.
And I just thought fog, oh –
That's from the ocean or something.
And it was smog from industry and from coal fires.
And I think they paid kind of a terrible price.
The Great Smog of 1952.
And a lot of people who had asthma died, you know, because it was so terrible.
The air was just so terrible.
There was a similar event in Pennsylvania.
Yeah, I think Puget Sound had a problem that was caused by sort of the geography of the area because, you know, Puget Sound is kind of a trough between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Mountains.
And so it's a low area.
Certain times of the year, everybody used to heat their houses with wood fires, with Franklin stoves and stuff like that.
So not as many people use that anymore.
And like when I was a kid, I remember the skies being really gray a lot, you know, especially during the winter.
And I think part of that was from the smoke kind of settling in that Puget Sound trough between the mountains.
And they would tell people sometimes they would –
They'd have a fire ban.
They couldn't use your wood stove.
Because of the air quality.
And now I go to, you know, the Northwest and to Puget Sound, and the air looks so much better.
I mean, and it's like during the summer, it's just...
Like, I don't remember it being like this.
So, I mean, that's just my experience.
But I think it's true that the air quality is better.
Yeah, I mean, it's just undeniable, I think, now.
And I think it's much, you know, people are really moving away from having wood stoves and fireplaces for that very reason.
I mean, so, you know, we are doing the right things in some respects.
I mean, you know, we're moving away from heating houses with wood.
We're, you know, we stopped, you know, putting lead in paint.
We stopped the leaded gas.
Yeah, I mean, I am not an expert on this, but I am really concerned about what I've read.
In part because I have a gas stove.
Yeah, and I like cooking on gas, but I've been really concerned about what I've read and also about the, you know, again, the industry suppression issue.
evidence about this stuff.
And, you know, just the whole thing of calling it natural gas.
Did we really fall for that?
I mean, it's kind of heartbreaking if it turns out to have been, you know, as concerning as they're saying.
I mean, and I think, you know, as homo sapiens, we're either going to get on top of this stuff or it's going to get on top of us.
And all the stuff they're talking about now with plastics in the body.
I mean, I read something this morning that said that we're walking around with a plastic accumulation in our brains of enough plastic to make a spoon.
And it's like, well, that can't be good.
I mean, I'm not an expert on the plastic stuff, but everything you're seeing about it is really alarming.
And you just have to think that unless we stop using this stuff, unless we remove it from production, we're going to be in real trouble.
I haven't followed the metal.
It's like a Rube Goldberg thing or something.
I mean, and it just makes you wonder, do we have to go back to some sort of really primitive form of existence like everybody rides donkeys?
Yeah, I mean, that must be like the— Make sure that's true.
Yeah, I remember, you know, I'm old enough to remember when they delivered milk, you know, in glass bottles to the house.
And they had these little paper caps on them.
But I now wonder, you know, if those were sort of... Coated.
Yeah, I mean, there have been people who say, well, why isn't everybody in Tacoma a serial killer and things like that, which I think is kind of the wrong focus.
I mean, I'm just trying to introduce a description of sort of the most extreme version of what might have happened.
And again, I don't make those kinds of claims.
I mean, we can't, for example—
show that Ted Bundy did what he did because of lead.
All I'm trying to show is that he was exposed to a significant amount of lead.
And we know that from the testing of his house and his yard.
And so I'm just saying, think about what that might have done.
what it might have contributed probably wasn't the only reason.
There was probably a whole suite of reasons why he did what he did with all of these guys.
But Gary Ridgway, you know, again, he grows up two miles from Sea-Tac, from the airport, at a time when they were using lead in jet fuel.
And so he's also right by two major highways.
And what does he do when he grows up?
He goes to work at a truck factory painting trucks.
With a spray gun, and that paint has lead components.
So he's got it coming and going.
I mean, his brother talked about how they used to play on a slag pile from the copper mine in Idaho.
And so I think he's a guy who clearly has to have come into contact with more lead than was good for him.
Now, does that mean that's why you did it?
You know, and he's, you know, his whole story.
History involves so many victims.
I mean, he pled guilty to something like 48 or 49 murders, but they've tied him to probably around 78 or 79, and that's probably an undercount.
I think it's worth thinking about.
That's what I'm saying.
I think it's worth thinking about what lead contributed to crime during that period.
And I wanted to tell the story in a way that was...
kind of subjective and personal and not in an academic way.
I mean, there are some great academic histories of lead exposure and the history of lead industries in this country.
I didn't want to do that because it's been done and because, you know, I think people...
When they're reading something for, I wouldn't say entertainment, but they want to find something compelling and absorbing and learn something.
And this, I thought, was a way of, in Murderland, of presenting this material in a way that people could kind of say, oh, I didn't know about this.
What happened with lead during World War II, I didn't know about what it could do to kids and how that might show up years later in their lives.
It's kind of overwhelming, you know, to see it suddenly kind of be in people's hands and they're reading it and they're asking you questions.
And, yeah, I mean, the funny thing about writing a book is that while you're writing it and doing the research, it's kind of your own private Idaho, you know, it's your own private world.
little playpen where you get to make all the decisions and, you know, make all the choices.
And then, you know, editors get involved and all these other, you know, people at the publishing house and they start saying, well, what about this?
And that's always sort of terrifying because you realize, oh, I haven't thought about all the
You know, ramifications.
I need to, you know, do all this fact checking and make sure everything's right.
And, you know, so that's a real, you know, hump to get over to just make sure that, you know, you've gotten everything nailed down as much as you can.
And that's all great.
But then it enters people's hands and they're reading it.
And sometimes, you know, when you publish a book, people have really different responses than you even imagined.
You know, I mean, you can't control it anymore.
It's just out in the world doing its thing.
And it's interesting.
It's always sort of really interesting.
You know, I just heard from...
a woman who's the daughter of a guy who worked at the smelter in Tacoma.
And I had been in touch with her briefly because her father was an incredible rabble rouser when he worked at the smelter.
He was working for the union and did all the stuff to bring the whole arsenic thing together.
uh to light to you know show that the um plant doctor who he called the plant quack was lying about the stuff and and you know he was sort of a hero in this whole story because he published you know he had this little newsletter that he published from his kitchen table um
And he was so funny, so great.
And he really, you know, cared about the guys that he worked with.
And so he, I think, helped compile a whole list, which was called the death list.
There's a copy of it in the Tacoma Library, Asarco Records, that listed all the guys who worked at the smelter who died of various cancers pretty young.
you know, like at age 55 or something.
And so, you know, when you hear from somebody like, you know, that woman or other people who, you know, lived in Tacoma and remember this whole era, it's really gratifying.
I mean, it's really great to know that you put something on the record that will help people understand the history of this stuff.
I mean, that's the goal, you know, to try to, you know, just... I mean, I hate to use the term raise awareness because it's such a cliche, but, you know, you do hope that people come away from reading something like this and think, oh, you know, maybe I should have my water tested or maybe I should, you know...
be concerned about the playground where my kids are playing.
Well, I appreciate being here.
I did not, but... Did someone else do it?
Yeah, they did a great job on the cover.