You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history,

and the authors that have written about them.

Gacy, Bundy, Dommer, the Nightstalker, BTK.

Every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history.

True murder.

With your host, journalist and author, Dan Zupansky.

Good evening.

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 Nightstalker, 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 Mundy's Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and

arsenic smelters in the world, but 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.

Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology,

...