Caroline Fraser

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?

Yeah.

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.