In the years 1970-1980, the northwest of the United States was the scene of an increase in serial murders. Caroline Fraser, journalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize awarded by Columbia University, questions this phenomenon in her work entitled Murderland. Why did such a number of men, often born during or just after the Second World War, targets dozens of women, generally unknown?
His account, relayed by the American magazine The Atlantic, is based on figures as striking as Ted Bundy, the killer of the Green River (Gary Ridgway) or the killer of the I -5 (Randall Woodfield). At the center of the book, a daring hypothesis suggests that exposure to lead and arsenic from industry may have accentuated violent and impulsive behavior.
Caroline Fraser relies in particular on a meta-analysis of 2022 which links lead and increase in crime, recalling that lead, neurotoxic, was gradually suppressed from fuel and paintings between 1973 and 1996.
A strong parallel is also erected between the drop in lead in the environment and the spectacular fall in crime in New York. After a peak at 2,245 homicides in 1990, the city currently had only 112 in 2025, a historically low level, according to New York police.
The toxic hypothesis
For the journalist, it is not a simple coincidence. It highlights a regional link with industrial sites such as Asarco (American Smelting and Refining Company) in Tacoma in the state of Washington, managers of massive rejections of heavy metals. She recalls in particular the warnings, in 1913, of the chemist Frederick Gardner Cottrell: “The problem of the smoke of foundries is entirely distinct from that of the ordinary smoke of cities.” These toxic particles, absorbed and transmitted from mothers to the fetus, would have led to a sanitary disaster.
The book is part of a tripartite approach combining industrial history, serial murders and personal memories. Fraser tells about it how Ted Bundy or Gary Ridgway serial killers grew up in polluted areas, weaving an alternating story between epidemiology and autobiography.
Difficult, however, to believe that only pollution would explain the concentration of serial killers at that time in the northwest of the United States. It is obvious that several factors must be taken into account and the theory of Caroline Fraser arouses some questions: if high levels of lead caused these violent temperaments, why these killers were essentially male? Weren’t other regions of the country so polluted at the time?
The author does not claim to have found an absolute truth. If the concentration of serial killers is explained by many factors, it is the same for the decline in violence in these regions: Discovery of DNA, video surveillance, legalization of abortion, as many tracks to explore that can explain the fall in crime. Only one thing is certain: the era of serial killers – which has seen more than 100 of these murderers act simultaneously in the same year – seems to belong to the past.
