Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

This chapter argues that human nature cannot overpower the Pacific Northwest’s dangerous landscapes. Despite its nickname, the Emerald City, Seattle can be a depressing place: In mid-winter, the city has only eight hours of sunlight per day, and true summer lasts just a few weeks. Fraser characterizes Washington State’s geography as “lethal.” It includes several active volcanoes within the Cascade Mountain range. Violent events, such as the collapse of a prehistoric ice dam (which released 500 cubic miles of water), shaped the landscape. Geologists predict additional catastrophic events in the future, most likely a violent earthquake leading to tsunamis and landslides down the Pacific coast.

As evidence that attempts to manage this landscape often fail, Fraser cites two bridges. In 1940, the Washington Department of Transportation authorized the construction of bridges to help expand the city. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a massive suspension bridge funded by the Public Works Administration, enabled access to the Bremerton Navy Yard as the country prepared for war. Despite knowing that fierce winds gather in the Puget Sound, engineers did not allow time for wind testing. On November 7, 1940, just months after it was opened, the bridge collapsed in a windstorm.

Opening on the same day as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Mercer Island Floating Bridge stretched across Lake Washington from Seattle to Mercer Island, allowing access to the eastern suburb of Bellevue. From its inception, the bridge was known for violent crashes that sent cars and drivers into the deep, silty lake. Despite these dangers, the bridge became an essential part of Seattle traffic because it cut nearly an hour off the commute from Seattle to the east side.

In 1946, 22-year-old Louise Cowell had a sexual encounter with an unknown man, leading to a pregnancy. Cowell tried to end the pregnancy but was unsuccessful and gave birth to the baby, a boy she called Teddy, in a home for unwed mothers. The Cowell family’s home in the heart of Philadelphia was surrounded by industry, including a smelter, which melted rocks to make metal. Fraser suggests that the toxic by-products of smelters had a damaging effect on the mental health of Cowell’s father.

In 1950, Louise and Teddy, now using the last name Nelson, moved to Tacoma, Washington, a city whose once-beautiful harbor was dominated by industrial plants and intense pollution. The Guggenheim and Rockefeller families (which both sought to dominate the production of ores and minerals in the US) funded much of the city’s industry. This fierce industrial competition led to unsafe working environments for factory laborers and environmental dangers for the surrounding communities.

In the 1930s, demand grew for inorganic arsenic, a by-product of copper smelting used as an insecticide. The highly toxic powder was spread over crops across the Pacific Northwest and into the Great Plains. In 1939, Jerry Brudos was born in a region of South Dakota known for its use of agricultural arsenic. Fraser suggests that his early illnesses were related to the presence of arsenic in groundwater and wells.

Meanwhile, in Tacoma, hundreds of tons of lead and arsenic were being pumped out of smelters and into the air. In 1951, Louise Nelson married Johnnie Bundy, and her son began using the name Ted Bundy. Throughout his childhood, Bundy never lived more than five miles from a smelter. He began to act erratically and cruelly as a young child, behavior that Fraser explicitly ties to the prevalence of lead in his community, including not only the smelters but also leaded gasoline. In 1961, 14-year-old Bundy sexually assaulted and murdered eight-year-old Ann Burr. Fraser suggests that lead in the Tacoma region similarly affected the serial killers Charles Manson, who was imprisoned on nearby McNeil Island, and Gary Ridgway, whose family lived near the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

In the late 1950s, Washington’s old Highway 10 became part of the new Interstate 90, bringing traffic from across the country into Seattle. As the population boomed, transportation officials determined that expansion of the Mercer Island Floating Bridge was necessary due to increased traffic. The result was a reversible lane, which changed direction at different times of day according to traffic patterns. From its inception, the reversible lane was disastrous, causing numerous fatal crashes due to bridge movement, as confused drivers swerved to avoid each other, often unsuccessfully.

Meanwhile, Tacoma residents began to question the safety of nearby smelters. The American Smelting and Refining Company, known as ASARCO, flatly denied any connection between its industrial by-products and health concerns. The work of scientists like Robert A. Kehoe allowed ASARCO to continue its industrial practices, despite significant evidence of the dangers. The passing of the Clean Air Act in 1963 inspired Tacoma-based activists to begin to push against the expansion of ASARCO smelters. Meanwhile, the Mercer Island Floating Bridge continued to claim lives. Fraser recalls her normally confident mother driving white-knuckled across the bridge.

Nearly two thousand miles away, in El Paso, Texas, the Ramirez family also experienced the effects of dangerous industrial chemicals. Mercedes Ramirez was exposed to chemicals at her factory job, and her five children all had mysterious illnesses or learning disabilities. The family thought nuclear testing in nearby New Mexico was to blame. However, Fraser suggests that the real culprits were Mercedes’s job and the family’s proximity to an ASARCO-funded industrial smelter in Ciudad Juárez, just five miles away. At age 10, the youngest son, Richard, was diagnosed with epilepsy and began displaying erratic, occasionally violent behavior.

Fraser argues that the late 1960s were a period of notable violence. In June 1966, flight attendants Lisa Wick and Lonnie Trumbull were brutally beaten in their basement apartment in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. Lonnie was killed, and Lisa was in a coma for weeks. The police did not connect the attack to a series of rapes in the neighborhood later attributed to Ted Bundy. The next month, Richard Speck raped and killed eight student nurses in Chicago. In August, Charles Whitman killed 17 people on the University of Texas campus after killing his wife and mother. Live TV broadcast acts of violence directly into homes, such as the assassination of a North Vietnamese officer by South Vietnamese forces. Fraser’s grandmother began sleeping with a police whistle under her pillow.

Violence also occurred closer to home. Fraser and her family struggled to live with the violent temper of Fraser’s father, who beat them physically and intentionally endangered their lives. In 1966, David Warner, the older brother of Fraser’s best friend Susie, quit his job to enlist in the Marine Corps. He served bravely in Vietnam following his deployment in 1967, saving dozens of lives, but was tragically killed in action in 1968. The following year, Dr. Stephen L. Tope Jr., the father of Susie’s classmate Jenny, killed himself after a failed attempt to kill his family by blowing up their home. Months later, Fraser’s choir teacher, Mrs. Peacock, overdosed on barbiturates.

Around the age of 10, Fraser began fantasizing about killing her father, whose abuse had escalated. She developed a detailed plan to kill him on his boat, which he forced the family to build by hand, exposing them to numerous toxic chemicals. Fraser notes that despite her plan’s viability, she could never bring herself to carry it out, though the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest offered many places to hide a body.