Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

Although the primary villain in Murderland is Ted Bundy, Fraser also suggests that industrial corporations like ASARCO and the Bunker Hill Mining Corporation enacted significant violence. Unlike Bundy’s murders, these companies enacted violence not out of a taste for it but out of corporate greed. Fraser’s depiction of the environmental toxins battle highlights moments when this greed directly affected children. In 1974, scientists collected blood samples from children living near the Bunker Hill smelter outside of Kellogg, Idaho. In the town of Deadwood Gulch, 15-month-old Arlene Yoss was found “to contain a higher concentration of lead than any other living human” (174). When Yoss’s father sued Bunker Hill to cover the costs of his daughter’s medical care, the company countersued, “calling him a ‘squatter,’ and implying that his family [was] poor, shiftless, trailer trash” (174) and brought the poisoning on themselves. The fact that the affected person was so young makes the Bunker Hill executives’ pursuit of profit over health even more difficult to comprehend.

Ultimately, the Bunker Hill executives decided that they could pay an “inflated $12,000 per child” (120) and still make a profit. Assigning a dollar value to the life of a child suggests that the executives’ greed was foundational to their worldview.