48 pages • 1-hour read
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
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Part 2, Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, illness or death, sexual violence, child abuse, child sexual abuse, child death, and death by suicide.
Part 2: “Great Domesday”
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “The Green River”
In July 1981, armed with new tools to measure toxic chemicals, scientists from the University of Washington showed that acid rain caused by industrial activity was causing significant harm to nearby lakes and forests. Despite the severity of the impact, the smelters were given six years to reduce their emissions. In January 1982, a dozen people were hospitalized when the Ruston smokestack near Tacoma spewed hundreds of pounds of toxic dust, including arsenic, into the air. Again, ASARCO denied responsibility. In July that same year, members of a nearby yacht club noticed an acid-based substance eating away the paint on their boats and cars. ASARCO offered the affected members free car-wash coupons.
The following year, William Ruckelshaus became head of the EPA after the former head, Anne Gorsuch, was forced to resign for her collusion with industry insiders. Rather than directly confronting the problem of the Ruston smelter, Ruckelshaus left the matter to the community, pitting ASARCO’s resources against those of smaller environmental organizations. Ultimately, the city of Tacoma opted to do nothing, and the plant was allowed to continue production. Despite this, the smelter closed in 1986, ending 600 jobs in Tacoma. In the summer of 1990, Fraser’s former Mercer Island classmate George W. Russell Jr. murdered three women, leaving their bodies in sexually degrading positions. Fraser attributed his violence to his childhood near the Tacoma smelters.
Between October 1980 and February 1981, Randy Woodfield, a former quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, sexually assaulted 60 women and murdered an estimated 44 women in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. He was arrested in March and convicted later that year. Around the same time, Gary Ridgway, who worked in a factory applying leaded paint to train cars in Renton, Washington, began killing women. In July and August 1982, the bodies of five women whom Ridgway had killed were discovered in the Green River east of Seattle, setting off a media frenzy. Between July and December 1982, Ridgway killed 15 women. Fraser notes that the only thing they had in common was their gender.
After a thwarted attempt to escape from prison in 1984, Bundy attempted to work with law enforcement by offering to help locate the murderer of the women found near the Green River, whom Bundy called the Riverman. Bundy correctly predicted that the killer would repeatedly return to the site, suggesting that the police stake out the sites where they were found. Despite multiple appeals, Bundy was executed on January 24, 1989. In his final days, he confessed to many murders but offered conflicting information about when his murders began and how many people he killed.
In March 1984, nearly 400 women marched on the county courthouse in Seattle to protest the police mishandling of women’s murder cases. The following month, Richard Ramirez moved from El Paso, Texas, to California, where he began a horrific murder spree, first in San Francisco and then, more extensively, in Los Angeles. He killed 15 people and injured dozens more before the police identified and arrested him in August 1985.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “The Towering Inferno”
The brewing violence of the 1980s came to a head in the 1990s. In September 1990, George W. Russell Jr. was arrested after an anonymous tip connected him with the murders of Andrea Levine and Mary Anne Pohlreich. In January of the following year, he was charged with Pohlreich’s murder. In 1995, another Mercer Island High School graduate, Martin Pang, set fire to his family’s frozen food warehouse and hid racing fuel inside. The resulting explosion killed four firefighters.
In January 1993, the Ruston ASARCO smokestack was demolished. By the following year, research in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that the mean blood level of lead in US citizens had dropped 78% since 1976. The authors of this study explicitly attributed the change to the banning of leaded gasoline and the closure of large-scale industrial smelters.
Fraser points to the city of Juárez, Mexico, as an example of the inverse: While smelters closed across the border in El Paso, industry in Juárez (which lacked environmental regulations) expanded in the 1980s. A thick, toxic smog settled over the city, and Fraser attributes the killing of 370 women between 1993 and 2003 to violence caused by these toxic fumes. Likewise, Fraser notes that the infamous crimes of Jack the Ripper were committed in London during a time when toxic chemicals, including arsenic and lead, frequently choked the city.
Despite the closure of the Tacoma smelter, the environmental damage it created continued to claim lives. In 1995, Jack Owen Spillman III, who lived six miles from the Ruston smelter during the peak production years (1976-1982), killed 48-year-old Rita Huffman and her 15-year-old daughter, Mandy, in their home. After his arrest, Spillman admitted to murdering nine-year-old Penny Davis. Like Bundy, Spillman returned to Davis’s corpse many times. In 2003, Tacoma’s mayor, who grew up in the shadow of the smelter, murdered his wife and then himself in front of their small children.
In Colville, Washington, 40 miles south of the Cominco smelter, Israel Keyes was raised in a survivalist, apocalyptic Christian household, subsisting on fish and deer scavenged nearby. From 1994 to 1997, the Cominco smelter released more toxic chemicals than all other US industrial companies combined. In the summer of 1997, at the age of 21, Keyes kidnapped and raped a young girl on the Deschutes River. When the girl calmly asked him to let her go, Keyes complied, and the crime went unreported.
In 1997, Robert Lee Yates Jr. reported for duty with the National Guard at Fort Lewis, southwest of Tacoma. Yates was raised in Oak Harbor, Washington, near a naval air station that leached lead into the soil and groundwater. After a string of murders from 1988 to 1995, Yates killed 10 women in Spokane in 1996 and two more in Tacoma in 1997 and 1998. He was arrested in 2000 after his daughters reported him for domestic violence.
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary: “The Fog Warning”
When Roger Straus Jr. (the founder of US publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and the son of ASARCO chairman Roger Straus Sr.) died in 2004, his obituary made no mention of his family’s connection to the toxic smelters that had been poisoning US citizens for years. Like his great-aunt Peggy Guggenheim, whose art collection formed the base of the world-famous Guggenheim museum, Straus’s cultural contributions helped obscure the source of his family’s fortune: mining and smelting.
Between 2001 and 2007, Israel Keyes killed at least four people in Washington State, depositing two bodies in Lake Crescent (an unnaturally deep lake that the local Klallam and Quileute tribes believe was created and cursed when a nearby mountain god threw an avalanche of stones at warring tribes below). Because of its cold depths, bodies that resurfaced from it were frozen in nearly perfect condition. Those whom Keyes killed have never emerged. In 2011, Keyes drove to Ted Bundy’s birthplace (Burlington, Vermont), where he stalked and killed Bill and Lorraine Currier in their home. The next year, he killed Samantha Koenig in Anchorage, Alaska, leaving her body on his property while taking a cruise with his daughter. Upon returning to the property two weeks later, he took a photo of the body with a newspaper and left it on a public bulletin board, demanding ransom for her return. He was arrested in March 2012 after using Koenig’s stolen ATM cards, and he died by suicide while waiting for trial that December.
In April 2005, Joseph Duncan was released on bail after being arrested for molesting young boys in North Dakota. He fled to Idaho and began stalking nine-year-old Dylan Groene and his eight-year-old sister, Shasta. On May 15, 2005, Duncan entered the Groene home, kidnapped Dylan and Shasta, and killed their mother, Brenda, their 13-year-old brother, Slade, and Brenda’s boyfriend, Mark McKenzie. He tortured Dylan and Shasta for nearly two months before killing Dylan. Shortly after, patrons in a restaurant recognized Shasta and called the police, leading to Duncan’s arrest.
ASARCO filed for bankruptcy in 2005, claiming that the company could no longer meet the financial burden of managing its 20 mandated Superfund sites. The EPA had deemed these sites, such as the location of the former Bunker Hill smelter, environmental disaster zones and had attributed blame to ASARCO, forcing the corporation to pay for the restoration. In a landmark settlement, ASARCO agreed to pay $1.79 billion to 19 states, the bulk going to Idaho and Washington. Despite this settlement, ASARCO ultimately failed to clear the waste from the Ruston smelter site, so local authorities buried it in an unmarked location. In 2018, EPA director Scott Pruitt signed a pact to reopen the Bunker Hill smelter.
The book ends with an incantation cursing the forces that caused environmental ruin and failed to protect women since the 1970s. Fraser urges readers to meet violence with violence and do whatever is necessary to restore peace with the earth and in society.
Part 2, Chapters 11-13 Analysis
In the final chapters of Murderland, Fraser’s discussion of the end of the smelter industry in the Pacific Northwest reflects her thematic interest in The Long-Term Effects of Corporate Greed. Despite evidence that lead exposure via gasoline was harming US citizens, oil companies like Exxon lobbied hard against federal lead regulations, knowing that the cost of compliance would cut their profits. Fraser argues that this lobbying was so powerful that President Reagan began publicly “steering attention away from leaded fuel by wringing his hands about inner-city [women on] welfare, the ones who bear ‘out-of-wedlock’ children in subpar housing where the windowsills are covered in chalky, disintegrating lead paint” (318). The image of Reagan wringing his hands suggests that Fraser does not believe he was genuinely concerned about the health of inner-city children but rather sought to distract the public from the importance of regulating lead in gasoline. The fact that this message reached the top tiers of the US government reflects the power of industrial lobbyists. Fraser indicates that this change in discourse was a direct attempt to avoid expensive reforms, another symptom of corporate greed. Changing the conversation from lead gas, which affected millions of US citizens, to lead paint, which had largely been phased out in homes by this point, allowed lobbyists to redirect blame to an imaginary foe: “bad mothers in Black neighborhoods—not ASARCO, not Exxon, and not refineries” (318). The irony, Fraser notes, is that, by the mid-1980s, “every child in America, rich or poor, [had] been exposed to lead from gasoline” (318). Her invocation of children’s health here demonstrates the hypocrisy of the lobbyists’ argument and reinforces her belief that these companies prioritized profit over children’s lives.
In addition, Fraser contextualizes the violence of serial killers within larger patterns of violence in the US, in particular domestic violence. The police were able to identify Robert Lee Yates Jr. as the killer of 10 women only after his daughters, “tired of being slapped around, report[ed] him for domestic violence” (367). This type of domestic violence is not limited to serial killers. Before the mayor of Tacoma killed his family and himself, he had a record of violence against his wife, having “pointed his gun at her, choked her, and threatened her, telling her he [could] snap her neck” (369). Fraser notes that this violence did not prevent his being elected mayor: “[H]e [had] been credibly accused of rape, a charge known at the time of his appointment.” (369) Fraser herself experienced domestic violence at the hands of both her father and a boyfriend who tried to “strangle [her] on a ferry in Greece” (320). These examples suggest that an undercurrent of domestic violence throughout the 1970s contextualizes the more sensational violence of serial killers.
Fraser suggests that police mismanagement of cases abetted the murder sprees of serial killers like Gary Ridgway and Ted Bundy. Her research shows that the Green River Task Force had physical evidence linking Ridgway to the bodies found in the Green River, but could not make the necessary connections. Even though Ridgway had left “microscopic spheres of DuPont Imron paint on his earliest victims” (321) and worked at the “only company in Seattle that [was] using that paint” (321), the police failed to question Ridgway or any other factory workers. Fraser is blunt in her assessment of the consequences of this failure: “[M]ore women will die as a result” (321).
The case of Ted Bundy suggests that mismanagement of cases can continue even after a serial killer is apprehended. In Bundy’s final days, when he began confessing to a multitude of crimes, investigators around the country visited Bundy, “imploring him for details, names, places, where missing bodies can be found” (337) to close cases in which he was a suspect. Fraser attributes Bundy’s inconsistencies in these confessions to the fact that most of these detectives “haven’t thought to bring the most basic vehicle of enlightenment: maps” (337). Here, Fraser implies that had the police been more prepared for the interviews, they might have closed long-open cases and brought families a sense of closure and comfort.
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