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Murderland

Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

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Murderland

By: Caroline Fraser
Narrated by: Patty Nieman
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'Murderland reads like a true crime thriller' SUNDAY TIMES

'Haunting, elegant and fiercely intelligent' OBSERVER

'Lyrically luminescent' NEW YORK TIMES

A terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond - from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Prairie Fires

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and 80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?

As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem - the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson - Fraser's Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy's Tacoma, stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was only one among many that dotted the area.

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. A propulsive non-fiction thriller, Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.

'Breathlessly propulsive . . . Fraser's prose is lyrical, elegiac' JOYCE CAROL OATES, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

'Extraordinarily well-written and genre-defying . . . a moody masterpiece' NEW YORKER

'A powerful plea' FINANCIAL TIMES

'Compelling, beautifully written . . . at heart, a cry of outrage' WASHINGTON POST

'Wonderfully propulsive and hard to put down' ATLANTIC

'Brooding and often brave' BOSTON GLOBE

'Not to be missed' CHICAGO TRIBUNE

'Sharp, incandescent' SEATTLE TIMES

'A great writer can make art of the most grotesque material, and Fraser does' WALL STREET JOURNAL

©2025 Caroline Fraser (P)2025 Penguin Audio Crime Editors Select Murder True Crime Exciting Scary

Editorial Review

Is lead the ultimate serial killer?
Caroline Fraser’s new book is quite a topic swerve from her Pulitzer Prize-winning Prairie Fires. This one is for the true crime heads, the rabbit-holers familiar with the strange 20th-century spike in serial killers from the Pacific Northwest. Such obsessives, myself included, might know about the lead-crime hypothesis, which links exposure from leaded gasoline and pollution to fluctuations in violent crime. But we’ve never heard it quite like this, in Fraser’s heady blend of reporting, lyricism, and memoir—she grew up on Seattle’s Mercer Island, where a perilous bridge and her volatile father competed with the local maniacs to wreak terror in her young life. Murderland, which Fraser likens to a detective’s “crazy wall,” combines the chilling exploits of Ted Bundy, Jerry Brudos, Richard Ramirez (who grew up in the plume of an El Paso smelter), Dennis Rader (same, but in Kansas’s “lead belt”), and others with the rage-inducing environmental and human destruction of the smelting industry. While it’s just one piece of a complex puzzle, Murderland left me fascinated, saddened, and hungry for more information. —Kat J., Audible Editor

Critic Reviews

A big, ambitious story about the United States and the people it breeds . . . as hauntingly compulsive a nonfiction book as I have read in a long time. It gets into your blood (Dorian Lynskey)
An amalgam of true crime reportage, visionary muckraking in the tradition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and a startlingly candid memoir . . . Though Murderland might be cataloged as ecojournalism, it is also a multi-true-crime narrative related in a breathlessly propulsive manner . . . Fraser's prose is lyrical, elegiac (Joyce Carol Oates)

This book is a mapping, of murderers and their victims, yes, but also of the battle between nature and society, a battle staged out on the edge of America and in the hearts of the people who live there. It started by trying to understand why so many killers come from the Pacific Northwest but by the end it had cracked open the most taboo corners of the American psyche. This story is a menace and a beauty. It left me deeply unsettled-by the idea of monsters, by the myth of free will, and by all the realms of cause and effect that remain unexplored (Wright Thompson, bestselling author of THE BARN: THE SECRET HISTORY OF A MURDER IN MISSISSIPPI)
All stars
Most relevant  
This is a very intense book. It is also intensely important, brilliantly researched and has a message that must be heeded.

Steel Yourself

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Murderland is an historical overview linking lead (and arsenic and other) pollution with human male aggression. The focus is the northwest region of the US, around Tacoma near Seattle, with its disproportionate preponderance of extremely violent serial rapist/murderers, who grew up in the era of high levels of lead in paint, petrol (or gasoline) and in the Tacoma air and soil thanks to the local lead smelter.

While correlation does not mean causation, combined with the various attackers’ often violent family and social contexts and problems, the cited figures and studies on lead-levels in ‘murder hotspots’ are quite compelling.

The polluting corporations are also discussed. The book points out the tactics routinely used by corporations to deny the environmental and human health problems caused by their activities and/or avoid responsibility for those problems. There are also glimpses into some of the founding family businesses and their ludicrous levels of wealth accumulation.

Murderland reminds us that our health and that of our families and communities is dependent on the health of our shared environment. While disturbing in the level of violent, largely misogynistic madness it describes, Murderland is a worthy read and I will be contemplating it for a long while.

Well researched, well written and deeply disturbing

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