I’ve not read a book by Caroline Fraser before I started reading Murderland, a book that clearly treads lines between different types of serial killers. In saying that, I mean Fraser writes about serial killers that strangle, rape, maim, murder, and discard other human beings, and also serial killers who sit behind desks.

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? Criminologists reach for explanations, each less convincing than the last, suggesting that this so-called epidemic of serial murder might be put down to “group neurosis” or “combat stress” or bad mothers or the crimes committed by American, British, and French soldiers, believed to have raped thousands of women in Germany during the postwar era.

But there may be something else at work, something basic. As for Captain Keith Douglas, in the window of time between the Desert Campaign, which he survives, and the invasion of Normandy, which he does not, he writes a poem called “Simplify Me When I’m Dead.” He is twenty-four years old when he is himself simplified on June 9, 1944, near Bayeux, after his skull encounters mere metal in the form of an insignificant scrap of shrapnel. He sees it coming. “Take the brown hair and blue eye,” he writes, generously, as if he has a choice.

Paragraphs change shape at times, veering between scientific research and poetry.

In August 1965, Frank Herbert, a forty-five-year-old newspaperman and pulp science fiction writer born in Tacoma, publishes Dune. One of the first works to popularize the term ecology, the novel is set in a wasteland covered in sand dunes after a planet’s environment is decimated. As a youth, Herbert spent time exploring the waters of Puget Sound, regularly attempting to escape by sea the industrial despoliation of Commencement Bay, which receives 8.5 million gallons of smelter discharge per day, brimming with 2,500 pounds of toxic metals. At age nine he rowed from the bay up to the San Juan Islands, sixty-seven nautical miles, occasionally grabbing on to the hull of a passing barge when he got tired. Herbert’s vision of desert wastes is drawn from the vast sand dunes on the Oregon coast, but the world he describes is inspired by Tacoma and its smelter. The air of his hometown, Herbert says, is “so thick you can chew it.”

Fraser writes beautifully about how victims exist, be they infants that are poisoned by lead exhausts through massive smokestacks that are strewn across small towns, or women who try to make a living but are likely targets, simply because they have jobs that local law enforcement thinks leads to their not being ‘innocent’; sex workers were often targeted by serial killers, mainly because sex workers are likely not missed for a long time, or serial killers just knew that law enforcement wouldn’t care to investigate their missing person report.

On December 10, 1978, a feature in The New York Times Magazine describes Ted Bundy as an “all-American boy,” a “terrific looking man,” and “Kennedyesque,” while misspelling the names of two of his victims.

There is much to say about this particular serial killer, not only because he was unique in some ways, but perhaps mainly because how he didn’t really care about human lives, something that’s replicated at the very core of how capitalist companies work: profit is valued much higher than human lives in most such companies, where human care is considered a problem, not a virtue.

Water sports are high on Ted’s list of favorite pastimes. Ted, Liz, and Molly have often vacationed at Flaming Gorge, Utah, boating, waterskiing, and swimming. In Seattle, they frequent Green Lake on the weekends, a small lake and surrounding park near the zoo. Ted once saved a toddler there, a three-year-old girl struggling in the water.

For Christmas in 1973, Liz gave him a yellow inflatable raft. On June 29, 1974, a week after his last visit to Georgann’s remains, Ted packs up the raft and drives a woman named Becky, a new acquisition he’s met through friends, over his well-traveled trail across Snoqualmie Pass, past Cle Elum, and down the eastern side of the Cascades. They’ve slept together several times. They’re meeting Larry Voshall, a friend of Ted’s from the Republican Party, and Larry’s date, Susan, at a rafting spot on the Yakima River, just off I-90. The four of them had dinner together the night before. They’re planning to head downriver about ten miles to a diversion dam, a float trip of around five or six hours. Ted knows the area well. The Yakima River flows over the OWL, passing Cle Elum, passing Ellensburg. Let’s put a pin in it. The weather is perfect, hot and clear, but the outing is overshadowed by Ted’s behavior. Larry, who met Ted a year ago, has always thought of him as suave, debonair, well-dressed, and personable. But after they shove off, Ted seems to have put off his manners along with most of his clothes. He boasts about skiing at Vail and Aspen and describes himself as an expert rafter, mocking the others as amateurs. He ties an inner tube to the back of the raft and puts Becky in it, aware that she can’t swim. In a wide part of the river, where there’s plenty of room for safe passage, he steers deliberately beneath a waterfall, allowing Becky to drift under, nearly overwhelming her. He puts his own head under it, almost upsetting the raft. At one point Larry looks over to see that Ted has untied the top of Becky’s halter-style bathing suit, causing it to drop off. Ted clearly enjoys her humiliation.

After they pull the raft out, Ted goes off by himself to collect the other car, disappearing for an hour and a half. During the two-hour drive home and their dinner in North Bend, he doesn’t say a word. It’s as if, Larry says, he’s become a completely different person. He becomes a different person with Liz as well, when he goes rafting with her on July 6, over the Fourth of July holiday, again on the Yakima River. At first they’re in good spirits. They’re alone: Molly is staying with her grandparents for the month. They stash their bikes in bushes downriver, then drive back upstream with the raft. They’ve done this half a dozen times before and, for a time, the two enjoy the hot, silent day, drinking cold beer. They pull over on a small island and have a picnic lunch, then push off again.

An hour later, Liz is sitting peaceably on the edge of the raft, watching the world float by, when suddenly Ted lunges, shoving her overboard. The water is ice-cold, snowmelt from the Cascades. She can barely breathe from the shock of it but grabs a rope on the side of the raft, staring upward into Ted’s eyes. They’re dead and blank, she sees. He’s expressionless. Panting, she heaves herself back in, saying, “Why do you have to ruin everything?” He says nothing. Then he says it’s no big deal: “Can’t you take a joke?”

The next day, July 7, he buys gas in the morning in Seattle and drives to Lake Sammamish, where he’s seen wandering by himself along the shoreline. He buys gas that afternoon on Mercer Island. He buys gas on July 9 and 10. On July 11, he calls in sick to work and buys gas twice.

Ted Bundy is often considered a special serial killer. He was one, just perhaps not in the way that many modern biographies paint him out to be. He was a pedophile. He could be handsome. He often lied in a variety of ways. When caught, he continued to lie to his interrogators, until they instead asked him what he would have done if he had been the killer; then, he sang.

Arlene’s father, Bill Yoss, sues Bunker Hill, and the company sues him back, calling him a “squatter” and implying that his family is poor, shiftless trailer trash. Eventually there will be a settlement throwing some $9 million to the Yoss family and other victims, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer runs an editorial cartoon with two panels, the first showing a demon threatening a child with a hypodermic needle, the second an infernal smoke cloud pouring out of a smokestack. The captions read, IF A PERVERT POISONS A CHILD…THAT’S CALLED CHILD ABUSE. IF A CORPORATION POISONS A CHILD, THAT’S CALLED MAXIMIZING PROFITS.

Fraser magnificently shows how people who lived in the USA were overrun by greedy companies and corporations that courted profit over health.

In the early 1920s the fuel additive tetraethyl lead (TEL) is developed and marketed by General Motors and Standard Oil. It is designed to make automobile and airplane engines run without knocking. GM knows that an ideal antiknock solution already exists in ethyl alcohol, or ethanol. But virtually any hillbilly with a still can make ethanol from fermented fruit or corn.

No profits stand to be made from it. TEL, on the other hand, can be patented. So tetraethyl lead is rebranded as “Ethyl,” which sounds friendly, like a woman’s name. Sales to the public begin on February 1, 1923, but the advertisements don’t mention lead. On October 23, 1924, a Thursday, a man working at a Standard Oil TEL-refining plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, is seeing things that aren’t there. On Friday he begins screaming and running around the plant to escape imaginary pursuers. On Saturday he dies. Four others follow. Thirty-one workers are hospitalized with hallucinations and convulsions. The violent are placed in straitjackets. Their symptoms are the result of acute lead poisoning, or saturnism.

At around the same time, hundreds of men begin hallucinating butterflies at a DuPont plant manufacturing TEL in Deepwater, New Jersey, swiping their hands through the air, trying to push winged insects away from their faces. But it isn’t butterflies that are bothering them. It’s lead. The hallucinations terminate in “violent insanity and death,” according to The New York Times. Eight die. Three hundred fall ill. Some become permanently vacant.

The fuel additive is the work of GM’s mechanical engineer Thomas Midgley Jr., who invents not only leaded gasoline but chlorofluorocarbons, which will come to be regarded as two of the most harmful chemical compounds ever produced during the industrial age. Chlorofluorocarbons will destroy the atmosphere. Leaded gasoline will drive everyone mad, slowly, filling children’s teeth with lead. Sometimes bad things are engineered by engineers.

Lead poisoning at refineries is one thing, but what about the chronic, day-by-day, breath-by-breath exposure caused by leaded gasoline? And smelter smoke? What about the need to breathe? American physicians raise concerns that lead particulates will blanket the nation’s roads and highways, poisoning neighborhoods slowly and “insidiously.” They call it “the greatest single question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public.” Their concerns are swept aside, however, and Frank Howard, a vice president of the Ethyl Corporation, a joint venture between General Motors and Standard Oil, calls leaded gasoline a “gift of God.”

On October 30, 1924, untroubled by the hallucinations, convulsions, and straitjackets, Midgley, himself an Ethyl vice president, holds a press conference in the Chrysler Building in New York, and raises a tin of what he claims to be TEL in front of assembled journalists. He inhales deeply of the fumes and then, like Lady Macbeth, washes his hands in it, saying, “I’m not taking any chance whatever.” He has, in fact, begun wearing gloves religiously in his lab work. He knows that lead is absorbed through the skin. This has already happened to him: the year before, he was forced to take a long vacation in Miami to “cure” himself of lead poisoning. In 1940, Midgley becomes paralyzed by what is said to be polio and contrives a Rube Goldberg device of pulleys and ropes to lift himself out of bed. In 1944 he strangles himself with his ropes, accidentally or on purpose. The American Chemical Society bestows upon him the Priestley Medal, its highest award, because his achievements are lasting.

There are other serial killers. Dennis Rader, family father and home-alarm installer, murdered different kinds of people. Richard Ramirez, who murdered and raped people of any age. John Wayne Gacy, who hid corpses underneath his house.

Gulf Resources chairman Robert Allen boasts that profits at Bunker Hill are sky-high, topping $25.9 million in 1974, after losses of $9 million the previous year. It’s the best year in Gulf’s history, but Allen sends a memo to Bunker Hill warning against spending too much time on environmental issues. Financial planning, he says, is more important.

Serial killers dirty their hands in different ways.

One of the best things in the book, I find, is how Fraser makes rhythm work. She actually manages to turn this book not into a sob story, but a historical document that shows us how waters could have been navigated as events unfolded as well as what we can do today, through the deaths of many, many people.

There is much to read and consider in this book. When I was 15-30 years old, I consumed a lot of so-called true crime in relation to serial killers. This book is soberly written. Fraser cares about how she’s portraying victims. She has obviously researched many different sources in depth for this book.

This is one of my favourite books of the year, so far. I look forward to reading much more by Fraser.