Throughout Murderland, Fraser demonstrates the dangers of environmental toxins to people and the natural world, focusing primarily on the example of Ted Bundy. However, she is clear that this was a nationwide problem in the 1970s and 80s, when “the unwitting populace [breathed] [lead], [ate] it, drinks it, and [became] it” (47). Fraser argues that exposure to leaded gasoline and other sources of lead and mercury during these years drove “everyone mad, slowly, filling children’s teeth with lead” (52). These passages reflect Fraser’s belief that environmental toxins affected all US citizens. To support this argument, she uses the example of Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez, both of whom were exposed to toxic chemicals before their most violent sprees.

Charles Manson was incarcerated at the McNeil Island Corrections Center in the Puget Sound near Seattle from 1961 to 1966 after being arrested for human trafficking. Fraser notes that Manson was on McNeil Island “longer than [he] lived in any place in his life” (53) and writes that during his five-year incarceration on the island, “virtually everything Manson [ate] and [drank came] out of the earth, where particulates from the Ruston plume [had] been drifting down to the ground since 1890” (53). Fraser explicitly attributes Manson’s later violence to exposure to toxic chemicals while incarcerated on McNeil Island: “[L]ater studies on lead in soil [ranged] from a low of 19 parts per million (ppm) to a high of 190. Helter smelter” (53). In this passage, the phrase “helter smelter” is a play on the phrase helter skelter, which one of Manson’s followers wrote on a wall in blood during the Tate-LaBianca massacre in 1969. Fraser’s invocation of the phrase here suggests that the Manson cult’s violence may have begun with Manson’s exposure to toxic chemicals while incarcerated in the Pacific Northwest.

Fraser makes similar arguments about the serial killer Richard Ramirez, who was exposed to toxic chemicals in utero and as a child. While pregnant, Ramirez’s mother, Mercedes, worked with toxic chemicals in an El Paso, Texas factory with “no ventilation: no fans or suction or windows or masks” (65). As a result of this exposure, the pregnant Mercedes “often [became] dizzy” (65) and was ultimately forced to leave her job. As a child, Ramirez was raised “within the plume” (66) of a major ASARCO smelter in El Paso. In the parks and streets where Ramirez and his siblings played, “surface lead levels [were] somewhere between two hundred and six hundred ppm” (66). Like his mother, Ramirez had a negative reaction to this toxic exposure: “[He suffered] from petit mal seizures. He [was] diagnosed with epilepsy […] Sometimes he [saw] monsters” (66). The inclusion of this final detail foreshadows Ramirez’s violent murder spree, explicitly connecting it to his childhood exposure to toxic chemicals.