“The lake is not only worryingly deep, at two hundred feet, but essentially has no fixed bottom, no floor except for a soggy miasma of silt that cannot support concrete pylons. The engineers are untroubled by local legends told by the Duwamish Tribe about the lake’s habit of swallowing islands. They know better.”

The opening chapter references two bridges in the Seattle area as evidence of the connection between geology, industry, and violence. In this passage, Fraser suggests that the engineers who built the Mercer Island Floating Bridge believed they could out-engineer problems with the landscape and disregard centuries of local wisdom. Ultimately, the bridge collapsed, though another was built to replace it.

“Instead, the town on Commencement Bay, considered one of the five best natural harbors in the world, chooses industry at every turn […] battening on the smoke and stench of wood pulp and paper mills, lumberyards, oil refineries, chemical plants, rendering plants, sewage tanks and smelters. Soon their waste and effluent and slag heaps are strewn beside the bay and across the Tacoma tidal flats like offal dropped from a raptor’s nest.”

This passage juxtaposes the boom of industry in the early 20th century with the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. The long string of industrial centers in the first sentence (mills, refineries, plants) contrasts with the natural imagery (bay, tidal flats, raptors) in the second sentence. This juxtaposition reflects Fraser’s belief that the industrialization of the Pacific Northwest in the 20th century was an unnatural process.

“An official at the Tacoma plant laments to a colleague about how homes continue to be built on what the company calls the ‘waste land’ of Skyline and the West End. If only we had bought the land, the official says, virtually wringing his hands, we might have avoided this backlash. Regretfully, he muses that it may not be possible to continue pumping arsenic into the air ‘for a great many more years.’”

Although Murderland details the crimes of several infamous serial killers, major industrial corporations like the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) are also central villains in the narrative. This passage introduces The Effects of Corporate Greed as a theme, suggesting that ASARCO officials knew they were pumping dangerous chemicals into the environment even as they denied responsibility. In addition, Fraser suggests that these companies knew that public backlash was coming.

“It’s […] a hissing propane gas container from a camp stove deliberately cocked on and placed next to the home’s furnace by Jenny’s father, Dr. Stephen L. Tope Jr., a thirty-four-year-old anesthesiologist and former lieutenant commander and medical officer in the Navy who has recently lost his job at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle. He has served multiple tours as a flight surgeon in Vietnam.”

In this passage, Fraser identifies two alternate sources for the increase in violence in the US in the 1970s: economic stress and the Vietnam War. She suggests that Stephen Trope’s losing his job so soon after serving in Vietnam led to his attempt to kill his family. Although she now understands this violence within the context of US history, as a child, she believed that it was natural behavior for fathers to act violently toward their families.

“We have built this boat, every member of our family, during years of weekends spent driving to an old barn full of fiberglass fumes outside Kent, a rural Eastside suburb where we stagger around in an epoxy fog, filling screw holes with wooden plugs.”

Throughout the book, Fraser suggests that public exposure to toxic chemicals led to increased violence throughout the 1970s. In this passage, which introduces The Dangers of Environmental Toxins as a theme, she notes that she was personally exposed to toxic chemicals when her father forced the family to work long hours in a workshop without protection from fiberglass and epoxy toxins. Fraser later suggests that she was not immune to the violent impulses that resulted from exposure to these toxins.

“All these products are worth more than individual lives. They are the essence of permanence, the stuff of bullion, wedding rings, coins, glassmaking, the gold leaf on church domes, the gilt on picture frames, and the gold of dental fillings. The Statue of Liberty is robed in copper. The luster is more precious than life.”

In this passage, Fraser explicitly argues that corporations like ASARCO intentionally continued their industrial activities despite knowing that they were poisoning nearby communities, thematically highlighting The Effects of Corporate Greed. The references to material items like gilded picture frames and church domes reflect her belief that capitalism rewards greed. However, the references to glass and the Statue of Liberty’s oxidized copper coating suggest that such ignorance is not sustainable.

“Dr. Phillip Landrigan, a pediatrician and epidemiologist, extends testing to a more affluent white area to stymie the corporation’s inevitable temptation to blame poor victims for living in dirty housing. The testing finds that 62 percent of everyone living within a mile of the smelter have elevated lead levels.”

Even when faced with hard evidence that their activities were harming nearby communities, corporations like ASARCO sought to redirect blame to personal choices like living situations. In this passage, Fraser acknowledges the subtle political work of scientists like Dr. Phillip Landrigan, who designed studies that anticipated and worked to disprove these corporate attempts to avoid blame. ASARCO never fully accepted responsibility for the harm its practices caused.

“On February 13, 197, The Seattle Times publishes a story with a hair raising headline: AFTER SHE PUT OUT THE LIGHT, WHAT EVIL CREPT IN? […] Evil crept into the daylight basement, to be sure, but it was all around her, all her life, in one form or another. It was no big fucking deal until it was.”

Throughout the book, Fraser suggests that a larger culture of violence in the US influenced the localized, sensationalized violence of serial killers in the 1970s. The reference here to evil “all around” a target of violence reflects the book’s interest in environmental causes of such violence, thematically invoking The Dangers of Environmental Toxins as a contributor to human violence. Fraser argues that the 1970s were an overwhelmingly dark time in US culture, especially in the Pacific Northwest.

“He may be picturing two issues of his favorite magazines—Inside Detective from September 1973 and True Detective from the following month—describing in detail the sex murders in Florida committed by one Gerard John Schaefer […] A TAIL OF BUTCHERED GIRLS, promises the cover of Inside Detective, a girl in a green halter top hanging by her wrists, screaming as a man advances. ‘Brutal sex acts with captives,’ it vows.”

In this passage, Fraser suggests that true crime magazines like Inside Detective and True Detective inspired the very serial killers they covered. The use of the words “promises” and “vows” suggests that the magazines’ covers aim to tantalize rather than horrify readers. This brief analysis of the true crime magazines Bundy read suggests that his cultural environment was one of the elements that influenced him (in addition to the chemicals in his surroundings).

“Smelter officials, however, are less concerned with what’s going up the chimney than with what may or may not be hidden in workers’ lunch boxes. Workers are certainly taking home arsenic and lead in their lungs and on their skin. But what their bosses want to know is this: Are they stealing silver and gold in their lunch pails?”

The industrial smelting company ASARCO is a villain throughout the book. Here, Fraser shows that officials redirected attention away from the release of toxic chemicals by noting that they suspected workers of stealing valuable metals. The corporation’s willingness to accuse its workers of theft rather than attend to their health highlights the malice of its executives, again thematically emphasizing The Effects of Corporate Greed.

“‘Something went wrong…some chemical imbalance or some genetic switch gone wrong…a predisposition, you might call it a condition…a weakness or predisposition, which, absent certain stresses and certain environmental conditions, would never have resulted in this behavior but did…We do know that it’s environmental, it’s specific to an environment.’”

Fraser directly quotes serial killers throughout the book, as in this passage, which quotes Ted Bundy’s assertion that the impulse was external and triggered by unknown environmental forces. Although he was attempting to exonerate himself, Fraser affirms his arguments by suggesting that toxic chemicals in the atmosphere influenced him and other serial killers, thematically highlighting The Dangers of Environmental Toxins.

“If he winds the mechanism too tight, it will break. He’s wound too tight, and the weekly chore is a battle between his will and the physical world, which according to his religion isn’t supposed to exist.”

Fraser’s father is a secondary villain in Murderland, as Fraser repeatedly notes how he was a threatening presence throughout her childhood. Here, she suggests that his abusive behavior was related to his beliefs as a Christian Scientist. When Fraser and her siblings could not control their bodies and circumstances in the way he expected them to, he grew violent.

“Every time the Tacoma smelter comes under fire, ASARCO, like a sulking child, threatens to take its toys and go away. The smelter’s 1974 payroll in Tacoma is $16 million. The company pays more than $1 million per year in state and local taxes. Of its property taxes in 1974, more than $300,000 or nearly a third, goes to city schools.”

This passage thematically exemplifies The Effects of Corporate Greed, which Fraser criticizes throughout the book. Rather than reform its dangerous practices, ASARCO threatened to abandon Tacoma entirely, leaving the city without a major source of income. The image of the company as a sulking child reflects Fraser’s disdain for ASARCO.

According to the state average, as the union points out, one excess death a year from lung cancer caused by cigarette smoking or pollution at the smelter would be the norm; ASARCO has racked up ten in the past two years. ‘These men were killed by management just as surely as if a ladle of hot copper had been dropped on their heads,’ they write.”

Murderland notes that ASARCO faced not only external pressure from environmental groups and health organizations but also internal pressure from worker unions at the smelter. While local municipalities were slow to attribute blame directly to ASARCO, union newsletters explicitly attributed workers’ deaths to the plant’s activities. Fraser attempts to honor their efforts by extensively quoting the newsletter.

“He’s rented a room in the Olympic Hotel with a bunch of friends and conference organizers, including a nineteen-year-old woman who ends up spending the weekend with Harlan Ellison. It’s not lost on me that male celebrities, whether they’re Elvis or Ellison or Ted Bundy, prefer girls on the younger side.”

Throughout the book, Fraser emphasizes the youth of women and girls that Bundy and other killers targeted. In this passage, Fraser describes how US author Harlan Ellison, then in his mid-forties, spent a weekend with a teenage girl during a Star Trek convention. The comparison suggests that all sorts of men preyed on women and girls in the 1970s.

“If you’re an animal on the run and your frontal cortex is picking up weaknesses in the continental crust, signing sensations of fault zones and hot spots, movements in the lithosphere that ping the lead in your brain and speak to you through the nonunion of your coronal suture, these messages may well urge you to go to the Florida State University campus and kill women.”

This passage reflects Fraser’s central argument in Murderland: that Bundy and other infamous Pacific Northwest serial killers were influenced not only by the presence of toxic chemicals but also by the landscape, thematically emphasizing The Violent Nature of the Planet and Weather Phenomena. The reference to Bundy as an animal contradicts Bundy’s view of himself as a hyper-intellectual who outsmarted the police.

“On December 10, 1978, a feature in The New York Times Magazine describes Ted Bundy as an ‘all-American boy,’ a ‘terrific looking man,’ and ‘Kennedyesque,’ while misspelling the names of two of his victims.”

This passage notes how, after Ted Bundy’s first arrest, one of the US media’s most prestigious magazines fixated on his good looks rather than his violent behavior, without appropriately acknowledging the women he hurt and killed. This attitude reflects the culture of misogyny that Fraser notes was present throughout the 1970s.

“Murder Incorporated is in its death throes. No one knows it yet, but by 1980 the Tacoma smelter has six years left. Still, as with any archfiend chained on a burning lake, wrapped in dark designs and contemplating damnation, the fiery furnace remains parlous.”

The opening sentences of Chapter 11 exemplify Fraser’s stylistic yet explicit writing style. The use of the obscure word “parlous” (dangerously cunning) and the reference to Satan on a fiery lake, taken from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, reflect Fraser’s PhD in English literature. Despite this flowery language, Fraser’s explicit reference to ASARCO as a murderous devil shows the fiery nature of her argumentation.

“He’s staring down at the Green River, at what he thinks is an accumulation of foam. The longer he looks, however, the more he starts to suspect it’s something more solid. At first he thinks it’s a deer carcass, but then he realizes it’s a woman.”

Most of the violence Fraser describes in Murderland was enacted against women and girls. This scene, in which a man confuses a woman’s dead body for running water and then an animal, reflects society’s tendency to objectify women, even in death.

“Gary Ridgway has left microscopic spheres of DuPont Imron paint on his earliest victims, and he works at the only company in Seattle that’s using that paint. It contains lead. The Green River Task Force has the evidence but never takes notice. More women will die as a result.”

In the final chapters, Fraser suggests that the incompetence and inaction of local municipalities enabled the activities of serial killers like Gary Ridgway and industrial corporations like ASARCO. This passage suggests that investigators ignored or failed to see crucial evidence linking Gary Ridgway to the murders he committed, allowing him to commit more crimes. The brief reference to lead implies a link to the pattern of toxin-related crime.

“After fantasizing about hanging her in various positions in a barn, [Rader] stashes her body in a rural road culvert, placing a porcelain mask over her face ‘for a more female look’.

In 1991, the CDC decides that a childhood blood lead level of ten micrograms per deciliter is cause for concern.”

The abrupt switch between topics in this passage exemplifies Fraser’s narrative style, in which she juxtaposes topics to highlight similarities or contrasts. Although the shocking violence of the first statement seems to contrast with the clinical nature of the second, the juxtaposition suggests that the CDC’s decision is as shocking as Dennis Rader’s post-murder activities. Following these sentences is a hard section break, forcing readers to draw a connection between them.

“The Department of Ecology will eventually develop its own […] maps of lead and arsenic contamination as part of a program called ‘Dirt Alert.’ The largest covers the massive fallout from the ASARCO Tacoma Smelter, but there are four plumes in all. […] Every one of those plumes, including the most remote and least populated site on the Columbia, has hosted the activities of one more serial rapists or murderers.”

Fraser’s intervention into conversations about Ted Bundy stems from her discovery that Bundy was raised and spent many of his active years near smelting sites in Washington State. This passage suggests that Bundy was not unique and that sexual violence and fatal attacks closely corresponded with smelting activity. That this research comes from state departments is especially damning, given the state’s failure to protect its citizens.

“In search of DNA, officials subpoena Kerri Rader’s medical files at Kansas State University, where, as a student, she had Pap smears and a biopsy on a cervical polyp. Her tissue sample reveals a 10/10 familial match to semen in Nancy Fox’s home and to the material under Vicki Wegerle’s fingernails, providing enough evidence to arrest her father.”

This passage reflects the larger patterns of misogyny in US culture from the 1970s to the present. Although Kerri Rader’s DNA helped the police arrest her father, Dennis Rader, for the murder and sexual assault of many women, the circumstances of DNA collection were ethically questionable. Fraser suggests that the police’s use of Kerri’s medical information without her consent is a violation similar to her father’s violation of women’s bodies.