Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

On January 1, 1976, the Mercer Island Reporter published an article questioning the safety of the Mercer Island Floating Bridge and urging major repairs. The unstable bridge added to the tense mood on the island, which was experiencing a small crime wave that Fraser attributes to George Waterfield Russell, Jr. Abandoned by his biological mother, Russell lived with his stepfather and his new wife until they, too, kicked him out at age 18.

Fraser (now a high school student) began to fantasize about escaping her abusive father’s home. Her father’s enforcement of Christian Science on the family made Fraser an outcast among her classmates. After an encounter with author Harlan Ellison at the 1977 Star Trek Convention, Fraser decided that a career as a writer might help her escape her home. When she became sick later that spring, her mother disobeyed her father’s strict Christian Science beliefs and gave her medicine.

In late January 1976, FBI investigators found hairs they believed to match samples from Caryn Campbell and Melissa Smith. Bundy waived his right to a trial by jury, and Stewart Hanson Jr. oversaw his February trial. Hanson found Bundy guilty of kidnapping and ordered a presentence investigation to determine Bundy’s mental capacity before sentencing. The investigators questioned Bundy’s family, his ex-girlfriend Liz Kloepfer, and his former colleagues. In addition, they found an abnormality on his skull that often indicates lead overexposure. After hours of interviews with Bundy, Dr. Evan Lewis reported that he was highly intelligent, attempted to exert rigid control over his emotions, and held a deeply misogynistic worldview. Dr. Al Carlisle’s interviews showed that Bundy was haunted by his illegitimate background and had the capacity for extreme anger and violence.

As a result of these findings, Bundy was sentenced to one to 15 years in prison. In October of 1976, he was formally charged with the murder of Caryn Campbell and extradited to Colorado to face trial. He briefly escaped custody in Colorado but was soon recaptured. On December 30, 1976, while waiting to be retransferred to another facility, he escaped custody.

When 62-year-old Loy McDonald was fatally electrocuted while working at an ASARCO plant outside of Tacoma in March 1976, his union explicitly attributed his death to the company, calling it murder for profit. In the months following McDonald’s death, the union assembled a list of workers who had died as a result of chemical exposure. The resulting pressure led ASARCO’s resident doctor, Dr. Sherman Pinto, to retract earlier studies denying a link between work in the smelters and lung cancer.

In the early months of 1978, Mercer Island experienced a significant juvenile crime wave. Although Fraser did not herself commit crimes, she began breaking her father’s rules more regularly. She became obsessed with Star Trek and dystopian fiction. When her maternal grandmother died, Fraser urged her mother to leave her marriage and live in the newly inherited house. As she prepared for college, Fraser grew increasingly anxious about leaving her mother alone with her father.

After escaping from the Garfield County jail, Ted Bundy fled to Chicago and then Ann Arbor, Michigan. On January 4, 1978, Bundy stole a car and drove to Atlanta, where he caught a bus to Tallahassee, Florida. Fraser notes that if the OWL were extended across the country, the eastern terminal would be near Tallahassee. Nine days after arriving in Florida, on January 15, Bundy snuck into the Chi Omega sorority house on the Florida State University campus and brutally attacked five women, killing two of them. Later that night, he attacked a sixth woman, who had major injuries but survived.

A month after the attacks at the university, Bundy drove hours east towards Jacksonville, where he attempted to kidnap the daughter of a police chief. When that failed, he drove to nearby Lake City, where he kidnapped and killed 12-year-old Kim Leach, abandoning her body off a dirt road.

On February 10, the day Bundy was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted List, a Wichita television station received a letter from Dennis Rader, who called himself the BTK killer. Frustrated that his cryptic letters to the Wichita Eagle had gone unnoticed, in this letter, Rader explicitly took credit for the murders of the Otero family, Nancy Fox, Shirley Vian, and another unnamed person. Rader’s letter suggested that the impulse to kill was out of his control, and he claimed that the same impulse existed in other men across the country, including Bundy, whom he named directly.

Five days later, Bundy was arrested in Pensacola, Florida, while driving a stolen car. Although he initially led prosecutors to believe that he would accept a plea deal in exchange for dropping the death penalty, Bundy publicly defied his lawyers in court, insisting on a trial. Bundy acted as his own lawyer and behaved erratically throughout the trial. On July 24, 1979, he was convicted of the murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy in Tallahassee and sentenced to death. In January of the following year, he stood trial for the murder of Kimberly Leach and was again convicted and sentenced to death.

In May 1980, shortly before the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens, Fraser’s former classmate Jason Perrine crashed his car into the gymnasium of their alma mater. Like Fraser’s father, he was a Christian Scientist who believed that the material world was an illusion.