The Unifying Theory of Serial Killers

Why did so many serial killers stalk the Pacific Northwest in 1970s and 80s? In her new book Murderland, author Caroline Fraser presents a compelling theory.

From October 20, 1970 to April 21, 1973, the coastal tourist town of Santa Cruz, Calif. was plagued by a trio of prolific mass murderers. John Linley Frazier slaughtered Dr. Victor Ohta, his wife Virginia, and two young sons, and medical secretary Dorothy Cadwallader in the Ohtas’ hillside home with ocean views and dumped their bodies in their swimming pool. Herbert Mullin murdered 13 people in Santa Cruz and the south bay from October 1972 to April 1973. And Ed Kemper raped, murdered and desecrated 10 young women between May 1972 and February 1973. Dubbed “The Co-Ed Killer” by the press because he found most of his victims on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz, where his mother worked and was able to get him a campus security sticker for his car.

Before 1970, Santa Cruz was best known for its Beach Boardwalk amusement park with its Giant Dipper roller coaster and the life-sized automaton Laffing Sal that still creeps out kids in the arcade. After 1970, its district attorney Peter Chang called it “the murder capital of the world.” While there have always been serial killers going back to at least Jack the Ripper in 1888, why was there such a concentration of them in Santa Cruz in the early 70s?

Locals blamed the still-new University of California campus, and the hippies it attracted (even though they were mostly the victims). Donald T. Lunde, a Stanford psychiatrist who examined Frazier, Mullin and Kemper, speculated in his book The Die Song (1980, Norton) that it was the closing of state mental hospitals by then Governor Ronald Reagan that led to Santa Cruz’s serial killer epidemic. Prior to Reagan, many of these human monsters would have been institutionalized. After Ronnie, they were free to roam the UC campus and dump their kills in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Ted Bundy

While Reagan’s cruel penny-pinching may explain the proliferation of serial killers and other ultra-violent crimes throughout California in the 1970s and 80s, what about the wave of even more excessive murderers who emerged from the Pacific Northwest during those decades? The most famous of them, Ted Bundy, raped, murdered and defiled the corpses of at least 20 young women across seven states from 1974 to 1978. Gary Ridgeway, best known as the Green River Killer because he wasn’t identified by DNA profiling until 2001, killed anywhere from 49 to more than 90 women from 1982 and 1998 in the area between Tacoma and Seattle, Wash. And there are so many more like them that we have barely even heard of because serial killings were so common at the time.

In her new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers (2025, Penguin Random House), Pulitzer Prize winning author Caroline Fraser blames it on lead. “Lead is a vampire,” she writes. “Invite it in and it will drink your blood forever.” Wine makers in ancient Rome boiled their grapes in vats lined with the stuff for added sweetness and it drove Nero and Caligula to madness. The tetraethyl lead additive was added to gasoline in the 1920s to keep car engines from knocking. I definitely huffed the stuff when my mom filled the tank of her Pontiac Bonneville full of ethyl at the Esso station. Gas stations had a sickly sweet smell back then.

“Chemically, it (lead) resembles calcium and is taken up rapidly in the bodies of children as their bodies are forming,” Fraser explains. Recently—at least in some corners of Bluesky—leaded gasoline is blamed for Gen X breaking for Trump in the 2024 election, but Bundy and Ridgeway absorbed far more of from growing up in Washington than what can be blamed on your mom’s station wagon.

Ted Bundy’s mother moved to Tacoma when Ted was three where he grew up under the plume of the American Smelter and Refining Company (ASARCO) smelter in Ruston, Wash., which belched 630 tons of arsenic and 200 tons of lead out of its smokestack in 1953 when Bundy was seven-years old. Ridgeway grew up a few miles north of Tacoma. At the age of 12, he is slow and wets the bed while the Tacoma smokestack pumps out 226 tons of lead. Charles Manson, already well on his way to a career of pimping and thieving, also spends four years in the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island across from South Tacoma where he breathes toxins from the smokestack and eats fruits grown in the contaminated land on prison grounds. As if all that wasn’t enough, Bundy and Ridgeway are raised close to highways, where they can absorb even more lead from rush hour traffic.

To cement her argument, Fraser profiles other notorious serial killers who were reared near other smelters outside of Washington state. Richard Ramirez (The Night Stalker) grew up in El Paso, Texas downwind from ASARCO’s massive lead and copper smelter. Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer) was born near Pittsburgh, Kansas, a city “built on smelting” according to Fraser. And she even brings in good ol’ Ed Kemper who spent his formative years near another ASARCO smelter in Helena, Montana where he decapitated the family’s cat with a bayonet.

The floating bridge that killed more people than Ted Bundy.

But Murderland is far more than a catalog of serial killers and their proximity to brownfields. Fraser weaves her polemic with a personal memoir of her childhood on Mercer Island, not far from the killers she profiles. She paints a picture of Washington as a place of violence and harm, both natural and manmade where neighborhoods are built on volcanoes and fault lines, and the reversible lane on the Lake Washington Floating Bridge from Seattle to Mercer Island kills more people in one year (1961) through bad design and official indifference than Ted Bundy did during his seven-state killing spree.

“My mother is a confident driver,” Fraser recalls, “but anytime she drives over across the floating bridge, her hands tighten on the steering wheel when the tires emit a high-pitched whine as they fly over the steel mesh panel on the fixed decline.” Her mother chooses to white knuckle it in the slow lane rather than risk the reversible lane. “This never changes,” Fraser adds.

And Fraser doesn’t spare the Guggenheims who made their vast fortune through their ASARCO smelters but are now known more for their museums than the lands they poisoned, the people and livestock who died from their rains of lead and arsenic, or the monsters they created. In Murderland, the monsters aren’t just hunting for young hitchhikers along Highway 99. They are killing people from city halls and corporate boards without really knowing it or caring.

Although correlation is not causation, the timeline between industrial and smelting boom of World War II and the postwar period when so many mass murderers were born, and the drop in violent crime in the 1990s after they finally get lead out of the motor fuel and the Environmental Protection Agency clamps down on industrial polluters makes Fraser’s argument a persuasive one.

“Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps delivery, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage and neglect,” Fraser writes, as if to hedge, before adding, “Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma? How about a little lead in your tea?”

If there is a drawback to Murderland, it’s that detailing the gruesome litany of the most prolific serial killers of all time can be punishing at times, although it’s safe to argue that the blood-soaked lives of Ted Bundy and his ilk really shouldn’t be a beach read. And that being said, the quality of Fraser’s prose is so strong that I still blazed through its 400 pages in less than a week. At a time when Trump wants to bring back asbestos, Murderland is a much-needed cautionary tale wrapped in a genre that people will actually read.

Images:

Book cover: Penguin Random House

Archival images via Wikipedia