Did lead poisoning help create a generation of serial killers?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, America's Pacific Northwest in the 1960s and 70s produced an astonishing number of serial killers. Was it something in the air they breathed?

0:23Caroline Fraser:The Pacific Northwest is known for airplanes, lumber, tech, coffee and serial killers. This is Caroline Fraser, a Pulitzer Prize winning author. She grew up in the city of Seattle in the 1970s when a new kind of threat was gripping the US. We don't know his name. We don't have a picture. There are very few clues. He is one of a new breed of murderer, a serial killer, a stranger who kills strangers. His victims almost always women, chosen by chance, murdered without motive, their bodies discarded, some never to be found. I think that for most people, one of the first of these that everybody knew about was a guy named Ted.

1:10When Ted Bundy went on trial in 1979, the American public met a unique killer. Articulate, good-looking, even charming, Bundy was everything a murderer is not supposed to be. There were a whole lot more of them that were operating in the area. There was the Wanted Killer, the Boxcar Killer, the Lust Killer, the Phantom Sniper, the I-5 Killer, the Coin Shop Killer, the Index Killer, the Happy Face Killer, and the Green River Killer. In Seattle, another grim discovery today that could be connected to the string of Green River murders which have shaken that West Coast city. So far, 16 murders have been blamed on the Green River killer.

1:55Most of the victims have been young prostitutes.

2:00As Caroline got older and reflected on the time and place that she grew up in, she thought a lot about why, why the Pacific Northwest had produced so many of these men. One city near Seattle called Tacoma had produced enough serial killers that you could plot their trails on a map. This included Ted Bundy. It included Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer. And I then found out that Charles Manson even spent about five years incarcerated on McNeil Island, which is right off of the coast of Tacoma. And so using the addresses of where these people were created a kind of line on the map. And at the centre of that line, where these killers had grown or spent time, Caroline saw something unexpected, something she thinks others have overlooked.

2:56Caroline Fraser:There was a smelter that was emitting tonnes of lead and arsenic particulates right in the city for decades. and then discovering that there was indeed a much more complex map, which had been produced by Washington State, you can see how much lead was in Ted Bundy's front yard and his backyard. And it was a lot. From The Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. Today in Focus, did lead poisoning help to create a generation of serial killers?

3:38Caroline Fraser, welcome to Today in Focus. You're the author of a new book called Murderland, which explores an interesting theory about the origins of some of America's most infamous serial killers. It's about those killers, but it's also about the time and the place that made them, the place that you grew up in. So tell me about it. I grew up in Seattle in a place called Mercer Island, a fairly well-known and well-to-do suburb of Seattle in the middle of Lake Washington in the 70s.

4:11Caroline Fraser:The Northwest is very beautiful, and it's a very distinct-looking area because of the mountains, the volcanoes. There's a volcano, Mount Rainier, which is completely visible from Seattle and Tacoma when it's clear. And it's also kind of a dark place in some regards. I mean, Seattle's famous for rain, but the overcast, the cloud cover, is also a big part of life there. Seattle and Tacoma are urban, they're vibrant, but within about five minutes drive, especially when I was a kid, you can be out in the middle of the wilderness and in a completely isolated area. The highway I-90 that goes from Boston all the way to Seattle, if you drive to the east on I-90, very quickly you're in the middle of the Cascade Range, which is just thousands of acres of contiguous forest.

5:15Caroline Fraser:And there's really nobody out there, you know. And the serial killers that I talk about really took advantage of that fact.

5:27You talk in the book about noticing that a lot of the men in your life as a child, your father, the fathers of classmates, even your male classmates, had a kind of what you describe as a mystifyingly angry or erratic or even dangerous streak to them.

5:46Caroline Fraser:The 1970s was a very violent era. It had the highest crime rates in the U.S. of any point in our history. And I think what I noticed as a kid was that men tended to be quick to anger and would take out their anger on their wives or their kids. It's not like domestic violence has disappeared. We still live with that every day. But I think in that era, particularly, we didn't have a lot of recognition of it as a problem. We didn't have the language to describe it. I didn't know what was normal or not normal as a kid. And there's a passage where I describe a neighbor who lived down the street who one day out of the clear blue sky blew up his house.

6:44And his wife and four kids were there. And miraculously, they survived. He did not because he went into a bedroom and shot himself. And that, to me, I think, became a kind of touchstone or something that indicated how angry and really unpredictable men could be. When did you first become aware of the idea of serial killers?

7:20when I was 13 in 1974. And that was the summer when women had begun disappearing from their beds in the middle of the night. There were disappearances in Seattle and other towns along I-90, a town called Ellensburg. and one weekend in July of 1974, a very hot July weekend, two women disappeared from a beach at Lake Sammamish, which was only a few miles from where I lived. As with all searches of this kind, the police and the searchers have to contend with the grim idea that there might have been foul play, but there really are no clues, no theories as to the disappearance of the two girls.

8:08Caroline Fraser:And nobody knew where they were. Nobody knew what had happened to them for months. And so there was this constant speculation of, you know, where are they? What happened to them? Who took them? And I think it was that weekend that everybody, the public, the newspapers, the police, finally began to put all these pieces together and realize this is possibly one person who's doing all of this. It's worth saying that the man who killed those two women, Janice Ann Ott and Denise Nassland, that was Ted Bundy, who would later admit to killing 30 women. and police suspect probably even more. It was, yes.

8:56Caroline Fraser:And one of the stranger things that I discovered when doing the research for the book was how many other serial killers were operating in that area at that same time. In 1974, there were at least six serial killers who were active in the Seattle area or the I-5 corridor at that time. And people weren't talking about what it was like to be a woman in a society where these crimes were taking place, and nobody was acknowledging the effect of that on women in society. Yeah, I mean, these are some of the figures that I found quite astonishing from your book, because this spate of serial killers emerging wasn't just happening in the Pacific Northwest.

9:52It was part of what's sometimes called, not very tastefully, the golden age of serial killers in America. What do people mean by that?

10:00Caroline Fraser:Well, both the rate of violent crime went up sharply in the 1970s and 80s, and so did the number of serial killers. I mean, the serial killers have always been around. I mean, Jack the Ripper, you know, I mean, we have examples from other eras, but the number started to rise from somewhere in the hundreds and went up sharply to reach about 700 something in the 1980s. And then there was a very sharp drop off in both violent crime and in the number of serial killers in the mid-90s. Can I just dwell on this rise? The idea that there would be in some years up to 700 serial killers operating in America is quite incredible.

10:52What were the prevailing theories at the time for why this era would have produced a number like that?

10:58Caroline Fraser:You know, there really weren't at the time any theories that that really took that into account. And that's one thing that is striking to me, that this was happening and people were just kind of not coping with it. I mean, there was a lot of hand-wringing and talk in newspaper editorials about permissiveness and the youth these days and television and, you know, all kinds of sort of social theories about how we had gone wrong. The highway system was one thing that the FBI was looking at, and it looked to some extent like a lot of these crimes might be committed by people who were using the highways or by truck drivers or things like that.

11:55So that was one theory. These are traveling killers. They're very mobile and our transportation systems are very open and fast, they can get from one jurisdiction to another very quickly and pretty soon be out of sight by the time we find the body and have any following leads to take care of. And they were looking at the family, you know, the domestic situation. There are common denominators, which you find with each and every one of these people. They come from generally broken homes. They're the product of some type of abuse. And by the time we begin seeing his first kill, he's somewhere in his early 20s.

12:35He has a bad track record. He's been a burglar. He's been maybe involved in rape or rape attempts. And he's been extremely hostile and violent to authority type of figures. And so that was something that police were really looking at as part of the profiling of these guys. but there were all kinds of theories.

13:07So, Caroline, one of the interesting things about this widespread violence that you're telling us about is that it rises in the 1960s and 70s and then, as you said, by the 90s, it drops off in this incredibly dramatic way and people have tried to explain this in different ways But one of those ways, it's really intriguing, is that the early 90s is roughly when lead starts to be banned from use in petrol, in paint, children's toys, plumbing, all these things that it used to be in. So that became your starting point for this other theory that you explore.

13:42Caroline Fraser:So yeah, social scientists and epidemiologists started looking at the rise of lead in our environment, which came about largely through leaded gas, which was on sale in the U.S. until really until the early 90s. And industry, you know, smelters, those were all over the country. I think we've, you know, sort of forgotten what smelters are because we don't see them anymore. They're not in our communities anymore, although they are in other parts of the world and in South America and China and so forth. But what they're doing is they're essentially melting ores or rocks that have been chosen because they're high in the kinds of metals that are valued.

14:36The miracles keep coming, but the metals and minerals that make it all possible still must come from the earth. Cadmium, selenium, gold, tellurium, lead.

14:50Caroline Fraser:So they bring these ores to the smelter. They heat them until they essentially melt. And they use all kinds of chemical processes to separate out the metals, the copper, the silver, the gold, etc., the valuable metals. Meanwhile, all kinds of waste material are going up smokestacks that are part of the smelter process. And so all the lead particulates and arsenic, this kind of plume of pollution, just dropped out of the air onto communities, islands, the water, and had really extraordinary consequences.

15:41So lead was everywhere. And people who believe in this, what's known as the lead crime hypothesis, reckon that it played a big role in this spike in violent crime. But how? How could exposure to lead lead somebody to commit crimes?

15:58Caroline Fraser:Lead is a poison and it affects all parts of the body. But one thing that medical doctors have known since the 1920s is that if kids are exposed to lead, particularly when they're very young and their brains are still developing, that it can then cause violence and aggression. and it appears to be that the effects in the frontal cortex, the parts of the brain that help you control your impulses, that those parts of the brain are affected more in men than in women. And ultimately, some 15, 20 years later when the child grows up, it can definitely show the results in a rise in juvenile delinquency and in violent crime.

16:59And so lead has been linked to violent crime very strongly. There are a number of studies that have done this over many decades. And then when you plotted on a map, these killers who had grown or spent time in Tacoma, people like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, you found that there was a very big source of lead pollution in the town. Tell me about that. There was a smelter that was operated by Asarco, which was the American smelting and refining company.

17:33Caroline Fraser:And it was owned by the Guggenheim family. And it was putting enormous amounts of lead into the environment for almost 100 years, polluting about 1 ,000 square miles, not just the water, but the land as well. People who lived near it, they remember tasting metal in their mouths. And it has taken years and years since the smelter closed in 1986 to try to clean up the results of that. And so it's possible that these killers may have been exposed to extraordinary amounts of lead poisoning, even by the standards of the time. Yeah, I mean, this became sort of a fascinating thing to me to look at where these guys grew up and to see, well, could they have been lead poisoned?

18:29Caroline Fraser:Could they have had exposure to lead? Could this possibly be something that might go to explaining why there was a rise in violent crime in Tacoma at that time? Because of the maps that have been put out by the Washington State Department of Ecology that identified where this kind of plume of pollution existed, you can see where Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer who killed dozens and dozens of women over many years. He lived in a place where there was significant exposure, not just from the smokestack, but he lived quite close to SeaTac Airport. Jets at the time were flying on fuel mixes that used a lot of lead.

19:21Caroline Fraser:He also worked with lead because he was a painter. He painted the cabs of trucks, and that paint contained lead. So you can definitely see that some of these guys did have exposure. Whether that means that it influenced them to commit the crimes that they did, we can't really know the answer to that. I mean, it's such a fascinating theory that the fact that these men were breathing and inhaling and ingesting so much lead at such high quantities may have played a role in the terrible killers they would go on to become. But one thing I wondered reading your book was you said that there were these kinds of smelters all over the country.

20:11And I wondered, do you see these kinds of clusters elsewhere as well? I think you probably can find other examples of this in

20:21Caroline Fraser:places like Philadelphia, for example, which was once called the City of Smelters because it had more than any other city in the country. And there are several pretty notable serial killers associated with Philadelphia. One of the examples I use outside of the Northwest is El Paso, Texas, which was notorious for its Asarco smelter, again, very close to the town, about five miles from where a kid named Richard Ramirez grew up. The Night Stalker. Yes, and he becomes in later years known as the Night Stalker and known for committing a whole series of truly grotesque murders in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

21:17At first, Los Angeles police thought that the murder of a young woman last March was an isolated act of violence. But since then, they've come to believe it was connected to a wide ranging series of assaults by a killer who's become known as the Night Stalker. a killer who apparently struck again during the weekend.

21:34Caroline Fraser:And also, when you look at where El Paso is, it's right across the border from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, which becomes famous for a series of horrific femicides in the 80s and 90s.

22:00So this lead crime hypothesis is not without its critics. When it comes to explaining why violent crime dropped off so dramatically in the 1990s, people point to things like improved forensics, CCTV, better mental health interventions, especially for troubled young people. And I'm wondering what you make of these other ways of explaining this phenomenon. Well, the police are very eager to take credit for this drop-off in crime because the 90s, of course, coincides with the rise of mass incarceration in the U.S., driven by drug crime primarily.

22:43Caroline Fraser:And so there are a number of police associations that will say a lot of this has to do with the fact that many of the people who were committing these crimes were incarcerated. And so then, given this swirl of other factors influencing violent crime, how do you understand the role that lead played in shaping these serial killers? Well, I think it's just one factor. I mean, when you look at somebody like Bundy, he comes from a troubled past. He was born in a foundling home in Vermont. His mother sort of abandoned him for a couple of months. He never knows who his father is. That's a very typical story for somebody who becomes a serial killer.

23:29Caroline Fraser:And so I think there are all kinds of things that go into it. Abuse clearly plays a role. Head trauma can play a role. There are genetics. There's a gene that's been associated with higher rates of violence. So if you have multiple factors like that, that may contribute to the violence of your behavior. Yeah, I mean, you write in the book, 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 of that trauma? Yeah, I think it doesn't help. That's what I'd say. Whether it caused Ted Bundy to do what he did, we're never going to know.

24:13Caroline Fraser:But is it worth having a conversation about what lead can do? Absolutely. And after having written this book, when you look back at these serial killers, how do you understand their own responsibility for what they did? When you factor in the idea that they may have been shaped by the very air that they grew up breathing. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fascinating exercise to think about the whole issue of free will. We are so wedded to that perception, to that idea that we make every choice. clearly things may be more complicated than that. And I think, you know, we're very complicated creatures neurologically, biologically.