American Berserk

In recent years,​ individuals in the grip of murderous impulses have tended to express themselves in a single, frenzied act – school shooting, church massacre, vehicular ramming – that inevitably culminates in their own arrest or death. But for a period beginning in the 1960s and ending around the turn of this century, the preferred form of the homicidally inclined was the drawn-out danse macabre of serial murder. This was especially true in America’s Pacific Northwest, where an astonishingly large number of serial killers, from Ted Bundy to Israel Keyes, from the Green River Killer to the Shoe Fetish Slayer, from the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane to the Beast of British Columbia, grew up or operated. Most of them were notably vicious in their methods, even by the high standards of the fraternity.

Why there? Why then? Caroline Fraser, who grew up both there (on Mercer Island, just outside Seattle) and then, and has been probing at her country’s soft spots ever since (including in her Pulitzer-winning book about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Prairie Fires), is well placed to address these questions. She came of age around the time when Bundy was regularly driving his victims down the I-90 highway across Mercer Island, just a few hundred yards from her house, to his killing grounds in Issaquah. Everyone at her high school claimed to know someone who almost went out with him, and he wasn’t the only violent misogynist at large on the island. There was her former classmate John Stickney, a bomb enthusiast who blew himself up while stalking his ex-girlfriend. There was her near neighbour, George Waterfield Russell Jr, aka the Eastside Killer, who was apprenticing as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing and mutilating three young women in 1990. Fraser has a personal stake, in other words, in solving the conundrum.

She has a solution, too: a remarkably simple one on the face of it, namely the spew of lead fumes and other toxic emissions that billowed unchecked across the region during those decades. It may sound reductive, but among the many wonders of this sometimes flawed book is how richly its single-mindedness illuminates its subject, and how forcefully it makes the case that the subject merits serious consideration. Though I’m partial to crime stories, I’ve never found serial killers especially interesting or even entirely believable. They do exist, I realise, with all their florid quirks and signatures, but they’ve become such a staple of schlocky TV that I can’t quite separate them in my mind from the purely imaginary monsters dreamed up to fill the demand for embodied evil. I’m squeamish too, and I found parts of Murderland difficult to read. But the book’s impressively varied perspectives, which shift between geology, history, politics, literature and neurology, give these poisoned, poisonous figures an unexpected breadth of implication.

It starts out as psychogeography (pun unavoidable), invoking a hostile landscape of active volcanoes and treacherous crustal misalignments, and advancing the idea of some connection between the underlying seismic forces and the behaviour of its more unhinged inhabitants. ‘Think of what the place has been through,’ Fraser urges the reader in her slightly sonorous style. ‘Burning, then freezing. Consider its proclivities: abusive and abused.’ We learn about the OWL: the Olympic-Wallowa Lineament, a line of topographic anomalies that slants south-east through Seattle into southern Idaho, taking in Mercer Island and Issaquah along the way. ‘See where it goes. It carves through America’s killing fields, sites favoured by murder’s most devout practitioners. It falls along the future route of Interstate 90, expressway to hell.’

From the tectonic, Fraser turns to the human activities that have helped to unlock the landscape’s latent malignity. Lead-mining by the Bunker Hill Company (‘Uncle Bunker’ to its employees) began in Idaho in the late 1880s. During the 1920s the product was marketed by General Motors as a fuel additive in the form of tetraethyl lead (TEL), to prevent knocking in engines (grain alcohol would have done the job just as well, but there was no profit in it), and began filling the lungs of the entire nation. Nastier still, at least locally, was the smelting industry, another malodorous flower of the late Gilded Age, when the Guggenheims joined Bunker Hill to turn the city of Tacoma, Washington into a centre for lead and copper smelting, processes that give off cadmium, arsenic, lead oxide and sulphuric acid in colossal quantities. The resulting stink came to be known as ‘the aroma of Tacoma’.

During the Second World War (a ‘war of metals’ in Fraser’s words), government money flowed in and production was massively ramped up. The Axis powers were out-smelted, but at a cost: out of the effluent-saturated Northwest of the 1940s and 1950s, Fraser contends, arose ‘the greatest generation of serial killers’. From the age of four, Bundy was breathing particulates from the Ruston smokestack across the bay from his home on Puget Sound. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, spent his early years playing in the slag piles of an Idaho copper mine before moving west into the Tacoma smelter plume. Gerald Friend, perpetrator of ferocious assaults on young girls and boys, and a suspect in two murders, lived in the plume from the age of twelve (when he began fantasising about sexual torture). Warren Leslie Forrest, convicted of two brutal murders and suspected of at least five others, grew up a few miles east of the Alcoa smelter in Vancouver, Washington. Randall Woodfield, the I-5 Killer, lived as a child in Salem, Oregon, close to an industrial site that pumped out lead, sulphur dioxide, arsenic, barium and cyanide.

The ill effects of ingested lead and other heavy metals had been known since the 1920s, when employees at TEL-refining plants began hallucinating butterflies and going into convulsions of violent insanity (at least ten died). ‘Smelter nose’, a finger-sized hole in the septum, was an occupational hazard at plants. Horses near the Bunker Hill stack dropped dead; children were hospitalised with kidney damage, forced to undergo excruciating chelation therapy. By the 1970s scientists were beginning to link lead emissions with surging delinquency and crime rates.

The industry’s response was to deny everything or, at best, occasionally raise the height of its smokestacks. Company quacks put out statements asserting that high levels of lead in human bodies were not only harmless but ‘natural’. Thomas Midgley Jr, a General Motors engineer with the diabolic distinction of having invented both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons, washed his hands in a can of TEL at a press conference, claiming he was ‘not taking any chance whatever’. He knew this to be a lie, having already succumbed to a bout of lead poisoning. (Years later, paralysed with what was said to be polio, he strangled himself in the ropes of a contraption designed to hoist him out of bed.) Regulations, when they finally arrived, were sidestepped or turned to the industry’s advantage: when the Guggenheim family’s smelter in Tacoma, Asarco, was ordered to stop dumping its six hundred daily tons of waste into the bay, executives instead began selling it for driveways and construction fill, where its metals leached into the groundwater. Even in the face of guaranteed lawsuits, ruthless calculations were made. Weighing up whether to close the Kellogg, Idaho plant while its filter was being repaired, a Bunker Hill vice president decided the extra liability for running it filterless would be worth it: ‘200 children’, he noted, at ‘$5 to 10,000 [per] kid’ was a small price compared to the money to be made from uninterrupted smelting.

This flagrant, shameless spreading of poison for profit is a source of indignation throughout Fraser’s book. There are acidic portrayals of Guggenheim heirs – Peggy, in her Venetian palazzo with her private gondoliers; Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in his ascots and cashmere jackets (‘one of several Guggenheims who’ve managed to slide off the slag pile’) – which seem intended to do for the family’s cultural legacy what Nan Goldin did for the Sacklers’. More tendentiously, Fraser posits a direct moral equivalence between her two sets of villains, quoting a Tacoma resident to drive home the point: ‘As far as I’m concerned, Asarco is a corporate serial killer.’

But Murderland is not just a retrospective j’accuse. Its ambitions are more far-reaching, if also more problematic. It has the authentic turbulence of a work struggling to find a form adequate to its incendiary materials, trying out different approaches at different moments: memoir, mystery, gleeful doomscroll, self-conscious epic of the American berserk (‘Of arms and the murderer I sing’). The shifts in tone that accompany these experiments are the book’s least successful feature. Sarcastic asides (‘How about a little arsenic, Scarecrow?’), solemn injunctions (‘Behold a lethal geography’) and cackling denunciation (‘This is what Uncle Bunker has wrought. What does he deserve? Something bad. Something like murder’) become intrusive. There’s also a good deal of DeLilloesque lyricising of the grim and gruesome, which would be fine in a novel but feels all wrong here, even if this is the story of a decades-long airborne toxic event. What (to give a tiny example) is gained by adding the phrase ‘their hair rippling in the streamflow’ to a statement about Gary Ridgway dumping his victims’ bodies in rivers? Much of the autobiographical material seems too obviously pressed into service to supply the hoary crime-writing trope of reciprocity between investigator and perpetrator, as when Fraser resurrects her childhood fantasies of murdering her violent-tempered father: ‘If I stab him right between the eyes, then he will be dead, and we can bury him in the vegetable garden.’

But these annoying flourishes become less noticeable as the book settles into what feels like its natural form, a more or less straightforward chronology in which the deeds of its killers are intertwined with those of its industrial malefactors. Neither element is news in itself, exactly, but together they create something mysteriously compelling. Mysterious, because the connection between them is created by little more than juxtaposition. This can be blunt to the point of crude, as on the day in 1975 when Bundy captures Julie Cunningham, a ski instructor on her way to meet friends:

He hits her again with the crowbar, rapes her, and strangles her with a cord, then drags her body under a bush.

Also on 15 March, news breaks that Asarco is asking the EPA for permission to fill with slag another fourteen acres of Commencement Bay.

Even when the braiding is more subtle, there’s little in the way of empirical evidence to support the implied connection. Correlation is not causation, and although Fraser does get to the science, it comes late in the book and is relatively perfunctory. We learn that lead causes volume loss in the frontal cortex, that the effects are much more pronounced in men than in women, that children exposed to it are prone to ‘cruel, unreliable, impulsive behaviour’ and will often ‘become dangerous’. That’s about it. What, then, gives Murderland its curious authority?

The answer​ , I think, reveals itself in Fraser’s handling of another running motif, this one having to do with a series of floating bridges that were constructed across the stormy waterways of Puget Sound during the period. Built on the cheap, with lethally dangerous features (such as reversible lanes) in addition to fundamental engineering flaws, these monuments to human folly made their own contributions to the carnage of that dark time, causing staggering numbers of traffic fatalities. Unlike the smelting plants, they clearly had no causal relationship to the violence of Fraser’s human subjects. Both may have been products of an attitude to nature founded on hubris and greed, but the link between them is purely one of analogy. The bridges, in other words, are a way of thinking about the killers. That they are also, like the smelters, a source of outrage in their own right, takes us to what seems to me the most interesting thing about Fraser’s book: its unusually fluid way with subject and metaphor.

To wade through the combined atrocities of Bundy, Ridgway and the rest is to encounter things that seem to defy explanation of any kind. These men weren’t just unusually prolific killers and rapists. If they were, their acts would fit comfortably into patterns of behaviour that existed long before the smelters arose (a few pages of Bernard Bailyn’s history of the early European settlers, The Barbarous Years, should be enough to convince anyone that an unspoiled Eden can host every conceivable kind of brutality just as lavishly as a wasteland can). What distinguishes them is precisely the inconceivable nature of their acts. Paraphilias such as the hoarding of body parts for trophies (eyeballs, whole heads), the torture of children, the repeated burying and digging up of victims for sexual and other purposes all abound, their deep strangeness matched only by the delirious energy with which they are pursued.

Fraser’s present-tense cascade of details captures this all too viscerally. Here (if you can stomach it) is Jack Owen Spillman III, the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane, who, after killing Rita Huffman and her daughter Mandy, ‘strips and eviscerates both women. He rapes Mandy, jamming the baseball bat into her vaginal cavity; he places genital skin across her face. He cuts off Rita’s breasts, distributing them near her daughter. He spends hours at the scene, drinking the victims’ blood, having sex with the bodies and posing them provocatively.’ Necrophilia, as Fraser observes, ‘requires overriding the hard-wired instinct against coming into contact with odours and substances associated with death, decay and decomposition. Yet some serial killers, almost universally male, develop that taste, and an astonishing number of them have spent time in the Pacific Northwest.’

Such are the extreme phenomena that Fraser sets out to understand. Her intuition, that there may be something beyond psychology involved, some extra-human element, with the region’s plundered hoard of heavy metals being the likeliest candidate, may not be verifiable, but it’s persuasive as far as it goes. (It’s also supported by the fact that after environmental regulations were finally enforced and leaded gas phased out, crime in general plunged and the so-called ‘golden age of serial killers’ came to an abrupt end.)

Provable or not, Fraser’s thesis supplies her with a powerful framework for approaching her subjects. Statisticians may have little use for ‘correlation’, but literature thrives on it, especially in the form of the ‘objective correlative’, and Fraser adapts the device ingeniously to her non-fictional purposes. Her volcanoes, slag piles, belching smelters, buckling bridges, ruthless executives and ravening killers are all, in a sense, objective correlatives for one another; all a means of articulating the pent forces – social, economic, natural – each contains.

Certain words and motifs resurface in unexpected ways across the book; images replicate, implications transpose themselves. The catastrophic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was preceded, according to one study, by a form of ‘self-excitation’ resulting in a fatal ‘aeroelastic flutter’ – phrases that discharge unexpected energies as we learn of the killers’ violently twisted erotic fantasies (Gary Ridgway, for instance, would dream simultaneously of having sex with his mother and of cutting her throat). In absolving Asarco of responsibility for a massive sulphur trioxide leak, the local environmental officer called it ‘just something they could not control’ – another statement given sinister meaning by its echo elsewhere, this time in the words of Dennis Rader, who styled himself BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) and wrote, in his expressively primitive style: ‘It hard to control myself.’ In 1983 police examining a body near the Seattle-Tacoma airport thought they had found a clue when they discovered tiny pink particles embedded in the victim’s scalp, but these turned out to be garnets from the eruption of the Mount St Helens volcano three years earlier. Rader, recalling his slaughter of the Otero family in 1974, described himself as ‘a volcano’.

There are also tight, recursive mirrorings in the behaviour of the killers themselves. Among their shared characteristics was a perverse gravitation towards the field of law and order. Rader attended Wichita State University, where he majored in administration of justice. He later worked for a security company, installing alarms for clients looking to protect themselves from his own crimes, which were currently terrorising the neighbourhood. Bundy took courses in abnormal psychology at the University of Washington and made serious efforts to become a lawyer. When he wasn’t out raping and killing, he could be found at the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission, researching assaults against women, or at the Department of Emergency Services, which co-ordinated teams to look for missing persons, including his victims. Some principle of primal confusion seems to drive these men. The basic integers of reality come apart around them, reconnecting in grotesque parodies of order and symmetry. On a killing spree in Utah, Bundy abducted (and later killed) a 17-year-old girl from her high school in the middle of the performance of a school play about a serial killer. Mutual awareness and outright mimicry further dissolve the boundaries between these killers. Jack Owen Spillman began reading about Bundy when he moved to Tacoma as a boy, and later adopted him as a role model. With so many of them in business at the same time, it became hard for investigators to be sure which butcher was responsible for which newly discovered corpse, and in some instances the attribution is still being debated.

The resemblances add further weight to Fraser’s argument that her subjects comprise a distinct criminological phenomenon, and she widens her geographic scope accordingly, turning to killers from lead-rich zones well outside the Pacific Northwest. The Chicagoan John Wayne Gacy, who killed more than thirty boys and young men, joins the list on the basis of his address near O’Hare International Airport, ‘swept by the purifying fumes of leaded jet fuel’. Likewise Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who grew up in El Paso, downwind of not only a massive lead and copper smelter but also the Trinity nuclear test site, before terrorising the West Coast with his bestial attacks (it was Ramirez who cut out a pair of eyes for a memento and kept them in a jewellery box). From further afield, Fraser reels in Britain’s Moors Murderers, along with Peter Sutcliffe and other denizens of the industrial North. And from another era altogether, Jack the Ripper, ‘breathing the air in London Town in the winter of 1888, when millions are burning bituminous coal with a high volatile content’ joins the ranks.

This risks diluting Fraser’s argument past the point of useful specificity. Jeffrey Dahmer makes an appearance for no apparent reason other than having been young during the age of leaded gas. When we learn that by 1977 more than half the children in the US were deemed to have ‘very high blood lead levels’, the obvious question, following Fraser’s logic, would seem to be not ‘Why were there so many serial killers?’ but ‘By what miracle were there so few?’ Conversely one might also wonder, if industrial contaminants are to blame for the derangement of these figures, how a pre-industrial ghoul such as Gilles de Rais got along so well without them.

Fraser does acknowledge the importance of factors besides heavy metals in the making of serial killers, including the extreme childhood abuse most of her subjects experienced. Her point is that mineral particulates, so inimical to organic life, have been overlooked in previous studies, and may play a critical role in the otherwise incomprehensible savagery of these men. Murderland doesn’t pretend to be an inquiry into the origins of evil in general, but it does offer a theory of a particular kind of evil, more purely carnal than others, and for that reason perhaps more amenable to physical explanation. In that respect it made me think of the set of Greek myths and dramas that stem from Heracles’ slaying of the Hydra at the entrance to the underworld, and his fateful use of the monster’s venom on his arrows. This is the deadly corrosive that kills the centaur Nessus as he’s assaulting Heracles’ bride, only to consume Heracles himself, agonisingly, as he puts on the shirt soaked in Nessus’ contaminated blood. Indestructible in itself, the poison lingers in Heracles’ funeral ashes, which in turn (in one tradition) cause the suppurating wound in Philoctetes’ foot, indirectly bringing about the destruction of Troy.

The implied idea is that there is indeed some elemental substance that enters human history from the non-human realm, bringing with it cycles of infernal violence. Fraser isn’t the first person to entertain the notion. Wernher von Braun, who supplies the epigraph to her chapter on the metallurgic underpinnings of the Second World War, seems to be getting at something similar in the line she quotes: ‘Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation’ (Thomas Pynchon used the same line as the epigraph to the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow). She also quotes Dr Jekyll, who thinks of Mr Hyde as ‘something not only hellish but inorganic’.

Then there’s the testimony of the killers themselves, many of whom seem to have experienced their compulsions as something originating outside of themselves. Before shooting up a McDonald’s in 1984, James Huberty told his boss at Union Metal, where he worked as a welder, that the cadmium fumes were ‘making me crazy’. ‘We do know that it’s environmental,’ Bundy informed an interviewer. ‘It’s specific to an environment.’ Less suave, but perhaps more eloquent in his own way, was Dennis Rader: ‘Where this monster enter my brain I will never know,’ he wrote. ‘But, it here to stay.’