Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers - Hardcover

Fraser, Caroline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593657225 ISBN 13: 9780593657225

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A National Bestseller

“Scorching, seductive . . . A superb and disturbing vivisection of our darkest urges.” —Los Angeles Times

“This is about as highbrow as true crime gets.” —Vulture

“Fraser has outdone herself, and just about everyone else in the true-crime genre, with Murderland.” —Esquire

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Prairie Fires comes a terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond—a gripping investigation of how a new strain of psychopath emerged out of a toxic landscape of deadly industrial violence

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?

As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson—Fraser’s Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy’s Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was hardly unique in the West. As Fraser’s investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers.

A propulsive nonfiction thriller, Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for best biography of the year. She is also the author of God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, and London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in New Mexico.

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Chapter 1

The Floating Bridge

Make a pact with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.
-Romanian proverb

Denn die Todten reiten schnell.
For the dead travel fast.
-Gottfried August Bürger, "Lenore"

Once upon a time, you could smell it, the salt water and the accelerants, the creosote, the diesel, and the benzene. Now people call it "Emerald City," unspeakable gall. Back in the day, no one called it an emerald city.

It's dark. At forty-seven degrees, thirty-six minutes north of the equator, Seattle is the northernmost U.S. city with a population of over half a million, north of Boston and Burlington, north of Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, for that matter, and on the same latitude as Zurich, Switzerland. At the winter solstice in Seattle, there are eight hours and twenty-five minutes of daylight. When you're a kid, you're waiting for the bus in the dark and coming home near dusk.

All bridges lead to Seattle, but Seattle is a bit of spume, iridescent, evanescent, an oily bubble blowing atop the waves. It's a sad place in the 1970s, a place no one wants to be. A literal backwater. Someone puts up a billboard on the way to the airport: Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights. The city lacks historical significance, confidence, political power, and pride of place. Its economy is boom and bust: Boeing and Weyerhaeuser, Weyerhaeuser and Boeing. Their contracts are always being canceled.

Its fortunes reflect the weather, a few fickle weeks of summer bracketed by months of overcast, the clouds clamping down, supplying mist and seeping rain and continuous bone-chilling cold. As a boy, my father learns by heart "The Cremation of Sam McGee," a Robert W. Service poem inspired by the Alaska gold rush, and he recites it ever after by the campfire:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

It's a funny poem about freezing to death.


Behold a lethal geography. A river of rock and ice carves the groove of Puget Sound between the mountains, gouging out Lake Washington and its mirror image, Lake Sammamish. Last gasp of the Ice Age, the Fraser Glaciation presses south down the Fraser Valley sometime between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago, five thousand feet thick where the town of Bellingham will be, thirty-five hundred feet at Seattle, two thousand at Tacoma. That’s pressure. When the glaciers withdraw, they leave erratics in their wake. Erratics are boulders the size of buildings, calling cards of the apocalypse.

The ice leaves an erratic near what is currently the University of Washington campus, eighty feet in diameter and nineteen feet high. In times past, it was used by Native people as a landmark; later, mountain climbers began using it to train: Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest, once scaled it. It is called the Wedgwood Erratic, and it lies becalmed between 28th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 72nd Street. Something, or someone, has left it there.

East across the mountains from Seattle, across the Cascades, we find a land of hanging valleys, scablands, and coulees, topographical anomalies so bizarre that geologists struggle to explain them. Unimaginable forces have been at work, violating everything known about natural erosion. What made these terrible scars? No one can say.

In 1927, a high school biology teacher in Seattle named J. Harlen Bretz delivers a paper at the Geological Society in Washington, D.C., theorizing that the weird distortions were carved by catastrophic flooding unleashed by the collapse of vast ice dams. His theory is called "preposterous." He is dismissed as "incompetent."

He is, of course, correct.

Fifteen thousand years ago, there was an event so bizarre it inspired scenes in science fiction novels. To the east, an ice dam formed between the mountains, stretching ten to thirty miles, creating Lake Missoula, a prehistoric body of water two thousand feet deep, covering three thousand square miles and holding five hundred cubic miles of water, exerting pressures of unimaginable force. At an unknown time, on an unspecified day, the ice dam failed and the water let fly.

No one alive has ever seen or heard anything like it. If there were hide-wearing humans in the area, pre-Clovis colonizers following their mammoth bliss, they likely did not survive to tell the tale. The hydraulic pressure of the flood ripped out bedrock, scouring the earth, changing the courses of great rivers, scoring the land, leaving massive rents that are still visible. Eddies of glacial silt washed up against mountainsides, still extant. Ice dams formed and failed again. The cycle was repeated dozens of times, perhaps once every half century over several thousand years. Geologists quibble, but they agree on one thing: All dams leak. All dams fail.

Spreading and contracting, glaciers leave the land black and blue, dominated by rock walls and harsh crags, lowlands covered in cedars and firs and primitive ferns the color of bruises. Rocked in the wind, the trees move of their own accord, swaying on unseen currents, lowering, watching, waiting.

The Northwest is biding its time, with five active volcanoes marching south down the Washington Cascades: Mount Baker, Glacier Peak, Mount Rainier, Mount Saint Helens, and Mount Adams. Each is an organic smelter, ready to bring forth gas, liquid rock, and ash. Civilization, such as it is, is erected on the back of this dragon, its bridges and tunnels as delicate as eggshell.

Magma, cataclysms. This is the natural path of the OWL, cutting through Seattle, passing north of Rainier, a forecast of disasters past and future. To the planet, it's all a game, Puget Sound just a "big hole" between two mountain ranges, a trough filled with immense crustal toy blocks. There is a 45 percent probability that over the next fifty years the Juan de Fuca plate, lying offshore beneath the Pacific, will cause a "megathrust," a subduction earthquake of higher than 8.0 magnitude. It will do this by trying to force its way under the Cascadia continental plate.

Beneath us lies basement rock, the lowest layer above the earth's mantle, an unstable mélange, basalt and gabbro. Rock can change its spots. Put pressure on it and it goes through a phase change, compacting, tilting, sinking, deforming.

Geologists compare the slow-motion accident that is the Pacific Northwest to a train wreck or a jackknifing tractor trailer. A block of rock we call "Washington" is hitting the wall, crumpling, folding, and faulting. Something temporarily known as "Oregon" is curling around it in clockwise rotation. A megathrust is expected every two hundred and forty years on average. It has been more than three hundred years since the last one. In the year 1700, there was a great calamity, a movement of the earth and everything upon it that caused the cedars and firs to slide upright off the island I come from. Someday, they may rise again.

"Faulting is complex and not yet understood," scientists say.

Yet we know, don't we.

The earthquake to come is expected to bury the streets of downtown Seattle under eighty feet of broken glass and crack the Grand Coulee Dam, one of the largest concrete structures in the world. It will alter the topography of islands.

It will raise a tsunami to inundate the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and Japan. Rock, air, fire, and water: they will not take no for an answer.

The movement of the earth may or may not be related to melting under the continental...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593657225
• ISBN 13: 9780593657225
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 466
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland