Where Do Serial Killers Come From? Caroline Fraser on America’s Murderland

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week I’m joined by Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of beloved author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fraser’s latest book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust In The Time Of Serial Killers, is a notable departure from the world of sunbonnets and covered wagons. This time, she explores the proliferation of serial killers—figures like the Green River Killer Gary Ridgeway, I-5 killer Randall Woodfield, and, of course, Ted Bundy—who haunted the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s to 1990s.

Why were there so many serial killers during this time and in this region? Fraser points to the “lead-crime hypothesis,” which suggests that a spike in violent crime during this era can be traced back to widespread childhood lead exposure from gasoline, paint, and industrial sources. In the book, Fraser expands on this theory, connecting the ecological and societal dots between environmental toxins and waves of violent crime. She also draws on her own experience growing up in the Seattle area, giving personal context to a much larger story.

GUEST BIO

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, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I think sometimes people, because of the way that movies and Hollywood have sort of weirdly sanitized what they do,
0:11.0	we don't quite recognize that these, the vast majority of these killings are about sexual compulsion and torture and control.
0:26.4	Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast.
0:28.5	I'm your host, Megan Down.
0:30.3	My guest is author Caroline Frazier.
0:33.0	In 2018, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Prairie Fires,
0:37.1	a biography about Laura Ingalls Wilder,
0:39.9	author of The Little House on the Prairie Children's Book series. She is out with a new book about a very
0:46.3	different topic. It's called Murderland, Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.
0:52.8	It explores the question of why so many serial killers,
0:56.9	from the Green River killer to the so-called I-5 killer, to of course Ted Bundy, not only appeared
1:04.2	during the same period of the 20th century, from the 1970s through the 1990s, but seemed to be concentrated in the Pacific Northwest.
1:13.9	There's a longstanding theory called the lead crime hypothesis, which posits that violent crime
1:19.6	and violent antisocial behavior in general peaked in the 1980s alongside the coming
1:26.1	of age of a generation exposed to lead poisoning during
1:29.5	infancy by leaded gasoline, paint, and other industrial emissions. Caroline takes that theory
1:36.3	and draws a map of three decades of murder, making connections that law enforcement at the time
1:42.5	was often totally unable to make,
1:45.1	and weaving in her own childhood experiences growing up in the Seattle area.
1:49.7	It's a long way from Little House on the Prairie, yet Murderland is infused by many of the same
1:55.4	ecological concerns that animated prairie fires. This is a great conversation with an extraordinary author,
2:02.7	and I'm delighted to bring it to you.
	...

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