The Serial Killer Era of the 70s/80s: Lore, Patterns, and Plausible Explanations

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Science, Natural Sciences

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2025

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pulitzer-winner Caroline Fraser maps the lives and crimes of Ted Bundy and his infamous peers—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, and even Charles Manson—and explores an intriguing hypothesis: might environmental factors have played a role in the rise of serial killers in the 1970s and '80s?

Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize. 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. Her new book is Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
0:16.4	All right, everybody, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show.
0:19.7	My guest today is Caroline Frazier, the author of Prairie Fires, Prairie Fires,
0:25.4	The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which we'll discuss a little bit later in the show.
0:31.3	But she won the Pulitzer Prize for that, as well as the National Book Critic Circle Award, which is huge,
0:36.6	and the Heartland Prize and the Plutarch Award for the best biography of the year.
0:41.7	She's also the author of God's Perfect Child. Look, I have the first edition from 1999 about living and dying in the Christian Science Church.
0:51.5	You know, Carolyn, when I saw, you know, I saw your name come up with the new book,
0:55.5	which I'll introduce properly in just a moment, I thought, I know this woman.
0:58.8	I'm pretty sure I read that book.
1:00.4	And then I'm looking at the back blurbs.
1:02.6	And it's like, Michael Shermer, with the brilliant clarity of a talented writer in the
1:07.7	thoughtful depth of a serious scholar Carolyn Frazier is documented precisely
1:11.3	how Mary Baker Eddy credited that created the cult of Christian science and turned it in the
1:16.9	religion it is today. A must read for anyone interested in the powerful role of religion
1:21.2	in American society, God's Perfect Child is a first-rate work by an insider with a distance
1:26.0	and maturity for proper context and
1:27.9	perspective. And if you're a Christian scientist, this book could literally save your life. All right. We'll come back to that a little bit later. I want to give you a proper introduction here. The new book is Murderland, Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. Wow, what a book. I mean, I have to tell you, I read the, I read the book, I listened to the audio.
1:47.5	It's really, it's a gripping story. You're such a good writer. Well, thank you. How did you become such a good writer? And thank you for that blur, by the way. You're welcome. So what's your, yeah, you just kind of give us a little bit of background since you do that in the book, because you grew up in this area that you're writing about.
2:04.4	Yeah, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in a suburb of Seattle, which I talk a bit about in the book.
2:13.7	And, you know, during the 1970s, which was the rise of the serial killer phenomenon
2:21.8	when everybody sort of first became aware of it. And that, of course, was my entree to the subject,
	...

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