The Brooklyn Rail

In her latest effort, Caroline Fraser explores why, during the 1970s through the 1990s, the Pacific Northwest produced more serial killers than any other place in the United States. Many people have tried to answer this question over the years, and Fraser makes a good attempt. Over 480 pages, she presents a three-pronged narrative: lead poisoning creates terrible violence, the Mercer Island floating bridge was a bad idea (“In 1961, the bridge kills more people than Ted Bundy”), and our willful refusal to acknowledge that the region is built surrounded by active volcanos and on shifting foundations is somehow tied in with this violence. Whatever the verity of this last point, it is a lovely metaphor—as Fraser writes, “The earth here looks safe, but it isn’t. It has been hoodwinking people for thousands of years, for all of its conceivable life. The ground is unstable, volcanic, prone to sudden, startling fits of temper, to epic floods and rivers of fire, earthquakes and tsunamis, the theater of conspicuous collapse.” Referring to the physical makeup of the area as “lethal geography,” Fraser also highlights the ongoing industrial abuse of the environment: “Bad things can happen by accident. But sometimes they happen on purpose, and sometimes they are engineered. By engineers.”

Fraser’s central theory seems to be that due to high levels of lead—from leaded gas, the now-dead massive Tacoma smelter, and the recently reopened Idaho smelter—severe damage was done to the environment and the people. Fraser cites studies focused on linking mental illness—including a predilection to violence—to letting industry push a deadly cocktail of arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals into the air, water, ground, and every living thing. While Fraser does an excellent job of tracing the history of Guggenheim-owned smelting across the region and the effects of unchecked use of leaded gas for decades—all framed within her own history in the region—I’m not convinced (to oversimply her thesis) that lead posioning can explain the extreme sexual violence of Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, and others in that long list.

Fraser and I have somewhat similar trajectories (although I’m younger). We both grew up in Washington State and lived on Mercer Island, but my family moved to Eastern Washington (land of the Hanford Project toxic outflow and DDT-sprayed crops) when I was very small, and then back across the mountains to Olympia. The horrors she writes about—arsenic/lead and “the aroma of Tacoma,” Ted Bundy, Gary “Green River Killer” Ridgway, and also the deep, dark forests—are all part of my history too. But there are many divergences.

Fraser opens by defining the “crazy wall” as “a real-life artifact of the mid-twentieth-century detective bureau. Cops push pins into wall maps, trying to find the pattern, to analyze, to snatch a cloud and pin it down.” Over two sections and thirteen chapters, Fraser works to build her own crazy wall of the region’s combined histories of pollution and violent crime—what she calls “a book of judgment. A guide to mayhem. … A timeline, with bodies.” The maps, the research, and the personal framing are all there, but I am also from this place, and my critique of this challenging work is multivalent.

Here is one example. Fraser writes, “The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. Weyerhaeuser, Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, and serial killers.” But there is so much more: music (Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, “grunge,” “riot grrrl,” even Bing Crosby), art (Emily Carr, Dale Chihuly), writing (Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Raymond Carver, Tom Robbins, Ken Kesey), even mountain climbing (Jim and Lou Whittaker). Fraser also skips any mention of the specific sounds coming out of the area at the same time these killers were on the loose. As I was reading, I listened to music from those decades, from the Sonics and Hendrix to The Gits (RIP Mia), Mudhoney, 7 Year Bitch, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and of course, Green River. Lots of loud guitars, lots of anger. And lots of people who weren’t murderers.

Fraser describes her map of the region as “a route wreathed in bodies,” but it can also be said that the entire Oregon Trail is a route built on bodies. Despite their long histories and continuing powerful presence in the region, Fraser mentions native people only in passing, and then only a few: the Duwamish, the Colville Tribes—even though there are at least forty tribes (that’s only the federally recognized). Fraser makes no mention of the bloody genocide that paved the way for the rise of industry, and ultimately the towering city that is Seattle. And that’s a mistake, because as powerful as her geographic metaphor of the are may be, this is land that’s soaked in a history of bloody, generational violence.

As detailed and enormous a work this is, apart from a few pointed asides, Fraser almost wilfully refuses to take on the true monster at the heart of her history of the region: American misogyny. Women and girls are raped and tortured and murdered, not because men and boys developed mental illness from lead poisoning, but because our culture allows this violence to happen and has done so for generations. The entire country is built on a history of violence against Black and Indigenous women. The type of violence enacted by Bundy and Ridgway and their ilk in the 1960s through the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest has more to do with the continued failures of law enforcement, a highly transient population, vast swathes of uninhabited forestland, and a “pioneer spirit” that supported machismo and “minding your own business.” It’s true that many people in the Northwest were poisoned by the environment, but out of those millions, only a very few became sadistic serial rapists and murders. Yes, lead is horrific and the endless abuse wrought by industry on every living thing is unforgivable. But so is the fact that more people, including law enforcement, were interested in catching Ted Bundy than Gary Ridgway, and that’s because of who they killed. That Fraser details so many of Bundy’s glamorous, long-haired, “oval-faced,” and white victims, yet rushes through the history of the Green River Killer (Ridgway) is disturbing, but not new. Bundy’s white, photogenic victims make more media-friendly subjects than Ridgway’s victims: runaway, poor, and indigent girls and women. Although Fraser highlights the “Take Back the Night” marches briefly, she fails to go deeper, and it’s disappointing.

Overall, this is a darkly fascinating, albeit problematic dive into the abuses wrought by industry on the Pacific Northwest and a possible connection to the terrifying violence of a small group of men against the region’s women and girls. There are no answers here, but there’s plenty of fuel to push back against the current return of heavy polluters to the region—even if only on the off chance we’re creating another Bundy or Ridgway.