Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

by Caroline Fraser

The OWL stretches from Cape Flattery, the far northwest tip of Washington State, and skims across fathomless Lake Crescent, Elliott Bay, Seattle, the north shore of Mercer Island. Lake Sammamish.

Issaquah. Remember these names, for we will see them again.

From Issaquah it cuts through Stampede Pass and down the Wallula Gap on the Columbia River, through the Horse Heaven Hills and the south fork of the Walla ...

“Civilization exists by geologic consent,” the historian says, “subject to change without notice.”[12] Great will be the fall.

I cannot make sense of them. He is as dead and alive as he ever was, all at the same time. On a rainy day, a stranger in a strange land, he is killed instantly on the porch of a house on the south side of the Perfume River by gunshot wounds to the head and body.[11] Yet here he is on the island, at home in his parents’ sunny bedroom in Washington State, safe and sound.

But not everyone holds back. Not everyone fails.

Everything changes and nothing does.

Nor do they consider the fact that 1974 has just become—with the seizure on February 4 in Berkeley, California, of nineteen-year-old Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army—the most infamous year for kidnapping women in American history.

The Seattle Times publishes a story with a hair-raising headline. No one who sees it will ever forget it: After She Put Out the Light, What Evil Crept In?[32]

before the bulge is removed.

you might call it a condition…a weakness or predisposition, which, absent certain stresses and certain environmental conditions, would never have resulted in this behavior but did…. We do know that it’s environmental, it’s specific to an environment.[44] It is specific to an environment, the imbalance in the chemicals. He just doesn’t know how. He will never know.

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. —Wernher von Braun Of arms and the murderer

Richard Speck and Fred West are born in 1941; Ted Kaczynski, John Wayne Gacy, James Homer Elledge, and the rare female lust murderer Carol Bundy (no relation to Ted) in 1942; Gary Heidnik and Rodney Alcala in 1943; Dennis Rader, Joseph DeAngelo, Randy Kraft, Leonard Lake, and Arthur Shawcross in 1945; William Earl Cosden Jr., Ted Bundy, Gerard John Schaefer, Richard Cottingham, John Linley Frazier, and Peter Sutcliffe in 1946; Herbert Mullin in 1947; Ed Kemper in 1948; Gary Ridgway,

Robert Pickton, and Warren Leslie Forrest in 1949.

Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps delivery, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect.[20] Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that...

But in addition to the limited human remains, the ESAR team finds and removes from the mountain an enormous quantity of women’s clothing, shoes, and pornographic materials, enough to make a pile six feet high and twenty feet wide. The Explorers are told that these items have no relevance to the search. Nevertheless, Scott lies in his tent at night, wondering about the state of humanity.

Lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth. —Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

the Earth, and local rabble-rousers such as GASP (Group Against Smog Pollution) and IRATE (Island Residents Against Toxic Emissions). The most irate live on Vashon Island, directly

What interests me most about Harlan Ellison is his ruminations on how he, a small Jewish boy growing up as a pariah in Painesville, Ohio, became a writer, earning pennies a word from pulp magazines and then graduating to the big time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. He lays it all out in the essays he writes for the Los Angeles Free Press, collected in The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. I adopt this as my new career path. This is how I’m going to get out.

“There is something the matter with me. It wasn’t you. It was me. I just couldn’t contain it. I’ve fought it for a long, long time.”[19]

The CDC doesn’t know it, but functional derangements caused by lead are being seen all over the country, wherever men are repeatedly beating, raping, strangling, stabbing, and smothering women and children, as if compelled by some force as implacable as gravity.

Gacy lives at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park, three miles due east of O’Hare International Airport, swept by the purifying fumes of leaded jet fuel, a gift of the prevailing winds.[27]

By the late 1970s, “the golden age of serial murderers,” as a crime historian will call it, is well underway.[29] In earlier decades, these perpetrators could be measured in the double digits, but the numbers climb sharply after World War II, along with the lead in gas tanks and bloodstreams. There are 55 serial killers in 1940, 72 in 1950, 217 in 1960. By 1970 there are 605. By 1980, 768.[30] Body counts of individual killers are rising.

On December 23, 1979, Peggy Guggenheim dies of a stroke in Italy at the age of eighty-one. She’s lived much of her adult life in a palazzo in Venice, a patron of the arts, sleeping under a silver headboard fashioned by Alexander Calder, attended by Lhasa apsos and feted by celebrities who flock to her cocktail parties. She’s said to have slept with a thousand men.

There is a significant rise in the number of victims killed by strangers in the 1980s and another such rise in the 1990s.

There are, in fact, superpredators, but they’re not Black kids in Harlem or Hilltop. They’re largely white males. Murderers, yes, but also serial rapists, torturers, mutilators, and necrophiles. Quite a few of them hail from Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and British Columbia, where they leave strings of bodies alongside highways or discarded in woods and rivers.

We pay attention to the wrong things. We make a mystery of Jack the Ripper. It’s not a mystery. It’s history.

Above the sofa in my father’s house hangs a copy of a painting by Winslow Homer called The Fog Warning. The house is gone, the painting is gone, and my father is gone. But they’re still there, in my mind.

Dylan, a nine-year-old boy with strawberry-blond hair, and his sister, Shasta, eight.

They live with the two young children and Brenda’s older son, Slade, thirteen.

Men are more violent than women by a country mile. Maybe we should do something about that.

Throughout the 1990s, nationwide there are 669 serial killers. In the 2000s: 371. From 2010 to 2020: 117.[60]

Those were the days, my friends, and they may or may not ever end.