‘Murderland’ by Caroline Fraser

Published by Fleet,
10 June 2025.
ISBN: 978-0-349-12754-5 (HB)

This chilling non-fiction book begins by describing the geographic features of the Pacific Northwest of America, a land which is filled with arsenic, lead and zinc, all valuable elements, and in the case of arsenic and lead, dangerously toxic heavy metals. At the start of the twentieth century, mining, smelting and refining the natural elements present deep in the ground helped to found the fortunes of two of the wealthiest and most influential American families, the Guggenheims and the Rothschilds. However, ruthless exploitation of these elements also pollutes the land, the water supplies, and the air. The chimneys of the smelting factories send vast quantities of poisonous sulphur gases into the area, which are then blown far and wide. 

The author reports that, in the first half of the twentieth century, large numbers of people are showing symptoms of ill-health that could be caused by environmental poisoning, especially those who live in the area and work in the factories; and many children are being born with physical and cognitive disabilities. The amount of lead found in the blood of children born and brought up locally is significantly in excess of normal or safe levels. As environmental poisoning grows, so does violent crime, which leads to Tacoma being known as the kidnapping capital of the west. 

In 1927-1928, Dalshiell Hammett wrote four short stories situated in a town that he calls Poisonville, which are believed to be based on Butte in Montana. (Hammett edited these stories together to create the novel Red Harvest (1929). In Murderland, the author comments that Hammett’s unflattering description of Poisonville could equally apply to Tacoma, an ugly town ‘spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters’ stack.’ 

Throughout the book, the author outlines the youthful back-stories of several damaged and dangerous men, from their childhood upwards; but she also tells the story of her own childhood, her fantasy life: the music of her youth, outings with her mother and siblings, and her unfulfilled dreams of killing her vicious, Christian Scientist father, whose brutality embittered and endangered the lives of the author and her siblings. 

Years pass and the smelting operations have now been taken over by ASARCO (the American Smelting and Refining Company), a transnational mining company, but this is a change without a difference. The smelting operations continue and, according to the author, those that profit from it also continue to show reckless disregard for the health and well-being of the workers and local inhabitants. When doubts are raised about the health side-effects of their business practices, they place all their efforts into massaging their reputation and callously calculate that it would be more cost-effective to continue their exceedingly profitable business, even if they have to pay compensation, if and when legal pressure makes it necessary. There is no apparent concern that this will continue to damage people’s health and destroy their lives. However, the author puts forward the disturbing theory that the hidden danger and cost of the long-term, wide-spread, environmental poisoning is far greater than anyone has envisaged. With a convincing amount of corroborative evidence, she claims that the poison in earth, water and air, bred a cluster of damaged young men, who developed into violent offenders, including a terrifying number of serial killers. 

The description of serial killers affected by the polluted land include: Ted Bundy, one of the most prolific killers in American history; Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer); Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker); Randall Woodfield (the 1-5 Killer); Kenneth Bianchi (the Hillside Strangler, who raped and murdered at least twelve girls, often in conjunction with his adoptive cousin, Angelo Buono); Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer), and there are even links with the killer and cult leader Charles Manson. As well as these infamous killers, the book lists many more, and describes their heinous crimes. There are also descriptions of the murderers’ victims and the circumstances in which they died. The author has to tread the fine line between reporting these terrible acts without over-dramatising or exaggerating them, a challenge that she navigates with skill and sensitivity. 

Murderland is a fascinating study of life in the last century in Northwest America, and the environmental poisoning, encouraged by corporate greed, that resulted in so many damaged young men becoming serial killers, and so many young women and children being murdered or suffering life-changing injuries. It is not an easy read, but if it was it would not fulfil its purpose. However, it is compelling and thought-provoking, and well worth reading.
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Reviewer:  Carol Westron

Caroline Fraser is the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder", which also won a National Book Critics Circle award for biography, a Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune, and BIO's Plutarch Award. Her first book, God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church," is now available in a 20th-Anniversary Edition with a new afterword. God's Perfect Child was selected as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, and Outside magazine, among others. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Carol Westron is a Golden Age expert who has written many articles on the subject and given papers at several conferences. She is the author of several series: contemporary detective stories and police procedurals, comedy crime and Victorian Murder Mysteries. Her most recent publications are Paddling in the Dead Sea and Delivering Lazarus, books 2 and 3 of the Galmouth Mysteries, the series which began with The Fragility of Poppies.

www.carolwestron.com