Caroline Fraser's new book explores the potential link between environmental pollution and the emergence of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s and 1980s.
Focusing on Tacoma, Washington, Fraser examines how lead pollution from the ASARCO smelter may have influenced notorious criminals like Ted Bundy, suggesting a connection between lead exposure and increased crime rates.
Were the notoriously prolific serial killers spawned by the United States Pacific Northwest region in the 1970s and 1980s a product of a highly polluted environment?
In her latest book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser probes this link between crime and environmental pollution as she profiles the lives of the men who made the scenic region consisting of the states of Washington and Oregon, a byword for rape, slaughter and murder almost 50 years ago.
Fraser particularly focuses on the port city of Tacoma in Washington, located along the Puget Sound roughly 30 miles (48 km) from Seattle. It was known for its American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) copper smelter, which operated for nearly 100 years.
“Air pollution from the smelter settled on the surface soil of more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound basin. Arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals are still in the soil as a result of this pollution,” the Washington State Department of Ecology says on its website.
In a review on Harvard University’s website, Jacob Sweet notes that Fraser wrote in her book about how “Much of Tacoma, with a population approaching 150,000, will record high lead levels in neighborhood soils but the Bundy family lives near a string of astonishingly high measurements of 280, 340, and 620 parts per million.”
“Though Fraser doesn’t explicitly support the lead-crime hypothesis, the core of the idea — that greater exposure to lead results in higher rates of crime — remains central,” writes Sweet.
In her book, other serial killers are also found to be living in or near highly polluted areas. For instance, as Sweet writes, Gary Ridgway also grew up in Tacoma.
The notorious Charles Manson spent 10 years at a nearby prison, where lead seeped into the soil.
Another killer, Richard Ramirez, also grew up near an ASARCO smelter, though hundreds of miles away in El Paso, Texas.
Children growing up in such areas are especially at risk, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology, because their bodies are still developing and they put dirty hands and toys in their mouths.
Indeed, as Sweet notes in his review, Fraser notes cites the work of economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes in the final chapter of the book. Reyes concluded in her dissertation that lead exposure correlates with higher adult crime rates.
“As Fraser’s investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of western smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives, but also warped young minds, spawning a generation of serial killers,” notes a description by publisher, Hatchette.