Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

by Caroline Fraser

Not only that but Patterson calculates that the blood lead level of preindustrial humans would have been 0.016 micrograms per deciliter, far lower than that of anyone living in the industrial age. Americans, he concludes, are suffering from “enough partial brain dysfunction, that their lives are being adversely affected by loss of mental acuity and irrationality.”[7]

It’s May 24, 1963, and a Kirkland movie projectionist who has threatened to quit his job because he hates driving in the reversible lane is killed in a head-on crash in the reversible lane.[28]

The sky is the color of lead because it’s full of lead.

It’s a pity they have to clean up the water, he adds, since the zinc in the lake is actually helping to “disinfect” the raw sewage.

He doesn’t consider the fact that the concentration of a heavy metal associated with heightened aggression has risen 300 percent in Greenland ice cores since leaded gasoline became ubiquitous.[83]

The EPA begins the phaseout of leaded gasoline in April 1976. Its industry opponents lose lawsuits, one after another, filed against the proposed federal regulations, which have already been watered down at the request of corporate titans and Nixon’s White House. Lawrence Blanchard Jr., vice-chair of the Ethyl Corporation, which remains one of three chief American suppliers of tetraethyl, the additive that crippled and perhaps killed its inventor, is apoplectic, comparing the regulations to “the worst example of fanaticism since the New England witch hunts in the 17th Century.”[20]

Okay, let’s take out the map. Run a ruler or a straightedge or a piece of yarn along the OWL. Run it clear down through the country on the diagonal, slicing the United States in two, southeast through the Tetons and the cornfields of Kansas and the black soil of Arkansas. It’ll come out somewhere in the Southeast. Say, Tallahassee. If you’re an animal on the run and your frontal cortex is picking up weaknesses in the continental crust, singing sensations of fault zones and hot spots, movements in the lithosphere that ping the lead in your brain and speak to you through the nonunion of your coronal suture, these messages may well urge you to go to the Florida State University campus and kill women.

Industrial paint formulations are exempt from lead regulations,

The book, whose inherent racism is debated and debunked, is published at a moment of overweening concern about crime. It feeds into a growing concern over “superpredators,” a term coined by conservative writer John Dilulio in a 1995 essay in the neoconservative The Weekly Standard and adopted by Hillary Clinton. The article expatiates on “violent drug kingpins” and “urban street criminals” growing up in what is described as moral poverty, “fatherless, Godless, and jobless.”[29] Dilulio bases his analysis of “scientific kiddie-crime literature” on a study of ten thousand boys born in 1945 and living in Philadelphia, a year when a third of males between ten and eighteen had at least one arrest.[30] The author appears to be unaware that in 1945 Philadelphia was the smelter capital of the country or that neighborhoods such as East Baltimore are being called “Zombieland” because one in five children there have lead poisoning.[31]

a new study of several hundred boys in the Pittsburgh public school system, establishing a strong association between students with high lead levels in their bones and juvenile delinquency. Examining reports from parents and teachers, the study finds that children with higher lead levels are more aggressive, prone to anxiety, depression, social problems, and difficulty paying attention.

Lead levels in American children and adults are seen to be declining rapidly, beginning in 1992. At the same time, the crime rate falls, the largest plunge in recorded history. Epidemiologists superimpose graphs of lead and crime over each other, the lines rising and falling in tandem so closely that a theory is born: the lead–crime hypothesis.[2]

He solicits money from well-heeled friends, including $50,000 from a scion of the Fleischmann yeast family, which has also underwritten The New Yorker.

They find that lead exposure in childhood is linked to brain volume loss when their subjects reach adulthood, and that the effects are particularly notable in men.

Federal agencies and states renegotiate with the company, and the largest environmental bankruptcy in American history yields a landmark settlement: $1.79 billion.[37] The money will go to nineteen states, but the largest pot, $435 million, is collected by Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Basin to clean up Uncle Bunker’s mess, where 1,500 square miles of land and water have been carpeted with up to thirty tons of lead per square mile.[38]

Little is known about the heritability of lead poisoning, but experts confirm that “lead can indeed cross the placenta.”[39]

Every day, around four hundred pounds of heavy metals leach out of Bunker Hill’s tailings into the South Fork Coeur d’Alene River. Every year, another four hundred tons of lead and seven hundred tons of zinc flow into the lake.

Around this time, a professional long-distance swimmer named Christopher Swain, who’s fallen in love with the scenic glory of the Columbia, decides to swim the length of it, 1,243 miles, from the headwaters in Canada to the Pacific Ocean.

Since the water temperature is often in the forties, Swain has to wear a dry suit, and he swallows so many foul mouthfuls that he begins rinsing with hydrogen peroxide every twenty minutes. Interviewed by an NPR reporter, he says, “Today I can taste…mud, metal, sewage, fuel.” He swims through pesticides, nuclear waste, human feces, mercury, arsenic, zinc, lead, and salmon. When the water is clear enough, he sees scrolling beneath him an extraordinary wasteland of cars, tires, chunks of concrete, metal, and, in areas where dams have buried towns, submerged sidewalks and streets.

The CDC again revises its strictures on blood lead levels, advising that no child have more than five micrograms per deciliter.[59] It’s lowered again in 2021, to three and a half. There is no safe level. Throughout the 1990s, nationwide there are 669 serial killers. In the 2000s: 371. From 2010 to 2020: 117.[60]

As for Tacoma, the city’s still not pretty, but there’s little of the age-old aroma. Millions upon millions of dollars have been spent to scrub its bloody hands clean. The Washington State Department of Ecology has set its ideal cleanup level for arsenic in soil at 20 ppm, for lead at 250 ppm.[61] Before ASARCO gave up, it sampled 2,800 properties and cleaned 1,600, but only those with arsenic measuring over 230 ppm.[62] The EPA and Ecology have done the rest, remediating more than seven hundred residential yards, parks, and school properties for arsenic over 100 ppm and for lead over 250 ppm. That’s all they have money for.

In April 2023, a Trident Seafoods factory fishing vessel, old and poorly maintained, catches fire and burns for six days, combusting 55,000 gallons of diesel, nearly ten tons of Freon coolant, and a hullful of frozen pollack from the Bering Sea. The Freon alone amounts to a massive release of climate-changing gases, the equivalent of burning 1.7 million gallons of gasoline.[63]