“The true crime lies in what we’ve done with the place” Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
Living abroad in Scotland has meant making a promise to my parents in Oregon that we make an annual pilgrimage home, bringing my daughter back in order to shellac, layer by layer, year by year, a core set of memories of tractor rides, bird watching, beekeeping, and summer evenings on the porch. In the midst of these full days, I try to sneak out for a walk in the long evenings.
My father still lives in the same house where I grew up and walking in any direction is not so much an exploration but a return. I am checking in on the little and big changes of a neighborhood I have known longer than any other landscape. They are also foraging trips—an excavation of every neglected cherry tree and blackberry bush on the roadside, gorging myself every time. These moments of scavenging are some of my most content moments of being. They are filled with the genuine pleasure of coming across abundance and being in no particularly hurry to do anything else. Such moments also capture a more general sense I have of environmental excess in the Willamette Valley: it is place that feels capable of growing so much, so effortlessly, that I can eat my way around the neighborhood.
This year, my walks were also spent in the thrall of Caroline Fraser’s Murderland piped in through my headphones. Part history, part memoir, part true crime chronicle, Fraser tears apart the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, precious limb by precious limb. Against the backdrop of the Cascade Mountain Range, Murderland lays out the case for understanding the Pacific Northwest, particularly the industrial hinterlands of Tacoma, Washington, as home to an inordinate amount of serial killers due to decades of lead and arsenic emissions deposited into its air and soil. Listening to this thrilling account amidst my nostalgia-soaked evening itineraries curdled the fruit I was eating, turning it into toxic remainders of years of highway exhaust filtering into the subsoil. My presence on the street’s narrow shoulder suddenly felt vulnerable to both the intended and unintended violence of the rural American road.
Many scientific studies have shown that lead exposure, especially in childhood, impedes brain development and can often manifest in disruptive and violent behaviors. Murderland takes this to its most gruesome conclusion by arguing that such persistent exposures created a cohort of men who became fixated on inflicting perverse and egregious harm on (mostly) women, giving the Pacific Northwest one of its most enduring and macabre reputations. Furthermore, Fraser contends, if we are to agonize as a society over the violence and depravity of serial killers, we must point a finger at the industries who saturated the environment with the residuals of their production, as well as the laws that permitted them to do this. Communities built around such industries and the men who found employment, identity, and meaning in working grueling jobs – are kept in the dark about the nature of the sacrifices they were unwittingly making. These industries, Fraser compellingly writes, were accessories to murder—exchanging the health of others for their profits—particularly in the 1970s when commodity prices for copper and lead surged.
Following Fraser as she constructs her case is the abiding pleasure of Murderland. Her writing is utterly propulsive; the reader is immediately spirited through time and space collecting snapshots of evidence. Murderland begins as a geological journey through the pre-history of the Pacific Northwest—evoking a place that is teeming with tremulous fault lines and at the mercy of active volcanos just below the surface (“organic smelters”). Fraser’s builds her argument from the earth’s core rather than the ground up. What we might temporarily call the Pacific Northwest is not built on solid ground: “civilization exists by geologic consent.” We then move ahead a few millennia to the bungling bridge construction of the Tacoma Narrows and Mercer Island Bridges. These ribbons of steel and concrete connect an archipelago of communities around Puget Sound and seem to collect lethal accidents as the toll price for passage. Next, we are looking in on to the tumultuous home life of Ted Bundy before peering in on Fraser’s own childhood at the mercy of her father’s erratic eruptions. We soon learn she develops a desire to murder him. In another chapter, we learn about the amassing fortunes of the Rockefellers and Guggenheims as they buy up copper smelters across the US and belch lead and arsenic particulates from the world’s largest smokestack affixed to the American Smelter and Refining Company’s (ASARCO) Ruston plant, at the tip of Tacoma’s North End.
Each one of these stories is affixed on Fraser’s “crazy wall”, which is her shorthand for the photographs and evidence “cops push pins into [on] wall maps, trying to find the pattern, to analyze, to snatch a cloud and pin it down.” Sometimes, they are literally stringing the evidence together. If we are following along and constructing our own, Fraser advises us to “spare some string for the smelters and the smoke plume”. She is slowly accumulating evidence that life in the postwar Pacific Northwest was unfolding in a landscape pockmarked by pollution strong enough to rewire the brain.
Fraser’s builds her argument from the earth’s core rather than the ground up.
If the crazy wall is Fraser’s metaphor for Murderland, this is an insight worth taking seriously. First, she is telling us that the book is an alternative map that has been missing from the societal conversation about serial killers: we must put things into the same frame that we have previously understood to be part of entirely different stories. In this regard it is revelatory to discern the fatal embrace that communities can find themselves in with the environments and industries that also sustain their livelihoods. Fraser shows how these toxic feedback loops, beyond the more proximate harm of cancer clusters and superfund site clean-up campaigns, have seismic effects on broader American culture without ever being detected. When corporations hide their toxic secrets, those unaware of the Faustian bargain are left looking in all the wrong places for the answer. What damage is incurred in enduring such deception while coping with the violence it creates?
But Fraser is also telling us something about herself in choosing this image. The close-up shot of the “crazy wall” in the Hollywood crime film is often used to signal that the investigator is in too deep–singularly obsessed with their pursuit of the culprit. Such obsession leaves them uniquely clear-eyed but also unable to let anything go. Fraser’s crazy wall is a collection of histories both personal and public that amount to much more than a case against arsenic and lead. As I listened to Murderland on my evening walks, or in the car driving towards Crater Lake, or while checking the wildfire forecast absent-mindedly on my phone, it struck me that the book’s real ambition was to draw our attention to the terror and exhilaration that emerges when a gap begins to widen between the surface and depth of things. And suddenly, you’re able to peer in.
This gap appears between Fraser’s volatile father at home and his public presentation of self. It is the widening chasm between who Fraser is becoming in her teenage years and who her parents think she is. But it is equally the gap between the dark core of corporate malfeasance and the PR campaigns of dissembling and denial. It is the extravagance of private wealth built on the substrate of a toxified public. And it is perhaps most catastrophically, a geologic space between the lively fault lines of the Olympic-Wallowa Lineament (OWL) and the Pacific Northwest’s sylvan exterior.[1] As Fraser writes, “the OWL conveys the nature of the place, hinting that what lies beneath is dishonest, deceptive, given to false front.”[2] In sum, this gap is the veneer of humane progress and the pulsating violence that festers somewhere below much of America. Eventually, something will burst forth.
Writing environmental history means picking at the edges of beautiful landscapes to get at what is beneath. When I finally get purchase and begin to peel back the corner, I realize the scenery has been papering over histories of violence, displacement or the persistent chemical warfare of industrial and agricultural life. Nevertheless, it’s still disorienting to consider that things are not what they seem in my personal itineraries as well as my professional interests.[3] Years ago, I realized the place I called home was built on waves of indigenous dispossession and racial exclusion. I also understood that Oregon’s reputation—on display most acutely in various Portland airport gift shops—as a place of wilderness and progressivism cracked along class lines. I grew up in a university town that prided itself on the political and sensorial divide between “us” and the nearby towns that housed lumber mills and the persistent stench of a paper plant. But in some naive way, I still believed in the water, the soil, and the air. I have clung throughout my life to the idea that I grew up somewhere removed from the slow violence of pollution as some sort of reflection of its own virtue.[4] I spent my first year of college in California’s inland empire and associated my alienation and homesickness with the veil of smog that obscured the San Gabriel Mountains a few mornings a week. Never mind that I grew up a few miles from the Willamette River at a time when fish stocks were dying out from the run-off of the lumber industry. The agricultural abundance of the Willamette Valley reflects a century of seasonal applications of fertilizers and pesticides. The biggest pollution revelation of recent years for my hometown is the unrelenting expansion of the local dump, Coffin Butte, which is now producing a toxic leachate of heavy metals and PFAS that is settling into the soil and groundwater while also emitting illegal levels of methane.[5] The dump’s expanding girth lies just over the hill from my father’s house. Twenty-five years ago we named our neighborhood orchestra the Coffin Butte String Quartet in laughing homage to what seemed at the time to be an innocuous hill of local municipal waste. Reading about the campaign against the dump now, it is organized by familiar faces from my childhood turned by circumstance into activists and organizers. Now, there is no clean feeling…no space of refuge.
I also understood that Oregon’s reputation—on display most acutely in various Portland airport gift shops—as a place of wilderness and progressivism cracked along class lines.
Murderland made personal for me the ongoing public reckoning with the disorienting excess left behind when corporations and states try to bury or disperse their industrial remains. What Fraser adds to this picture is that such dispersals do not just injure bodies, but they remake minds. She also makes us dwell, unresolved, in the gray area where victims of toxic pollution become perpetrators of horrific violence.[6] With her “crazy wall”, Fraser also reminds us that tidy narratives and straightforward diagrams of harm will not do. Landscapes are ultimately an unwieldly unit of analysis because they are so diffuse and layered. This is a strength as much as a shortcoming of studying them. Landscapes force a reckoning with the messiness of life and the lack of consensus that confronts any such inquiry, professional or lay.[7]
It strikes me that a recent surge in environmental history books on toxicity have been written as the public has also lost faith in any collective vision of reality, which has also felt most fundamentally like a remaking of minds. Across the political spectrum, one thing is agreeable to all: a sense that things–food systems, health, technology, climate — are not as they seem, and perhaps they never have been. Who are we and what is happening to our bodies and our world and who, for goodness sake, is to blame? There are too many diverging answers to these questions for the center to hold. This ambient unease has also come to mark my trips home. Do I still know my neighbors who watched me grow up or do we all of a sudden live in two very different worlds? Is my moral outrage about the present shared by my family? Such fissures are a given, but they are cracking ever wider apart. Everyone is trying to discern the truth while living atop the volatile sediment of 20th century inequality and industrialism.
We are also living in the remains of lead. If lead is a 20th century poison–after all, Fraser tells us that lead levels and crime rates begin to fall in 1992–we seem to be in the zombie sequel. This is the case with Coeur d’Alene Lake in Idaho that Fraser writes about towards the end of Murderland. A century ago, heavy metal slag from mining was dumped into the region’s watershed and ended up settling on the lake’s bottom. The slag remained in a somewhat stable state until more recent development has created low-oxygen conditions which has released toxins from the lakebed back into the water. This is the story of Flint, Michigan’s water crisis. The lead pipes have been there all along, but a switch in where the city’s water was sourced caused the pipes to corrode and lead to leach into the municipal water supply. This is also the story of the recent Los Angeles fires which, in consuming thousands of 20th century homes and businesses, has released untold residues of lead, arsenic and mercury in the soil. If these are temporal time bombs we will continue to reckon with, there are spatial ones too. I wonder if Fraser would be keen to meet Phyllis Omido, a Kenyan woman who has successfully campaigned to shut down a lead smelting plant in the coastal town of Mombasa, where the heavy metal was being extracted from used car batteries no doubt shipped from around the world to a place poor enough to accept the insidious risk of such an enterprise?[8]
Our current necropolitical moment can feel novel to those of us stuck inside of it. As if we’re helplessly rattling around in the trunk of a serial killer’s car with no way out. Fraser does not offer comfort, but she reminds us that the original crime happened years ago. Down to the cellular and the geologic, the clues bubble up from below the surface. In the uneasy grace of family vacations, we fashion our own layers of memory uneasily over the gaps.
All photographs by the author.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic%E2%80%93Wallowa_lineament
[2] 3
[3] Arsenault, Kerri. Mill Town: Reckoning With What Remains. St Martins Press, 2020. Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Vintage Books, 2001.
[4] Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
[5] Jaclyn Moyer, “Where the Garbage Goes” High Country News, June 1, 2025 (https://www.hcn.org/issues/57-6/where-the-garbage-goes/)
[6] Known more broadly in social science research as the lead-crime hypothesis.
[7] Vincanne Adams calls this jumble of epistemic uncertainty around toxic substances (and how it moves in the world) “the swirl”: Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke University Press Books, 2023). Michelle Murphy’s classic, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers is also relevant here. (Duke University Press, 2006).
[8] Pearce, Fred. “‘East African Erin Brockovich’ Wins Prize for Closing Polluting Lead Smelter.” Environment. The Guardian, April 20, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/20/east-african-erin-brockovich-wins-prize-for-closing-polluting-lead-smelter
