Caroline Fraser

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

the lead issues.

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.

Beautiful little

It was quite rural when I was growing up there.

Beautiful place.

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.