Murderland Quotes

“Recipes for making a serial killer may vary”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“Civilization exists by geologic consent,” the historian says, “subject to change without notice.”[12] Great will be the fall.”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“Worldwide”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“There are”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“During the last years of the twentieth century, the Colville tribes learn that since the 1980s the Cominco smelter has been daily dumping into the river up to 40 pounds of arsenic, 136 pounds of cadmium, and 440 pounds of lead. Every year between 1990 and 2000, the corporation has reported repeated “accidental” but nonetheless massive releases into the Columbia of arsenic, mercury, sulfuric acid, lead, zinc, and cadmium. From 1994 to 1997, the smelter’s spills of lead, cadmium, and arsenic amount to more than all U.S. companies reporting discharges combined.”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“London is Tacoma before Tacoma is even a gleam in a Guggenheim’s eye. We pay attention to the wrong things. We make a mystery of Jack the Ripper. It’s not a mystery. It’s history.”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“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.”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“In June 1961, Charlie Manson, a pimp, a thief, a violator of the Mann Act (transporting prostitutes across state lines), and a disciple of Dale Carnegie, is transferred to the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island, across from South Tacoma in the nether reaches of Puget Sound. Born to a fifteen-year-old girl, he spent his first years in a mining town in West Virginia, a product of broken homes, reform schools, and institutions. He never knew his father. Now twenty-six, he spends his days at McNeil sitting in a five-tier cellblock listening to the radio and studying Scientology and learning to play the guitar and writing songs and breathing the air from the Ruston smokestack.[92] McNeil Island is proudly self-sustaining. Prisoners drink water from a well, grow crops, and tend a dairy herd, producing most of the food they eat. During his five years on the island, virtually everything Manson eats and drinks comes out of the earth, where particulates from the Ruston plume have been drifting down to the ground since 1890. He’ll live on McNeil Island longer than he’s lived in any place in his life. Later studies on McNeil find lead in soil ranging from a low of 19 parts per million (ppm) to a high of 190.[93] Helter smelter.”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“In 1940, Midgley becomes paralyzed by what is said to be polio and contrives a Rube Goldberg device of pulleys and ropes to lift himself out of bed. In 1944 he strangles himself with his ropes, accidentally or on purpose.[89] The American Chemical Society bestows upon him the Priestley Medal, its highest award, because his achievements are lasting.”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“The fuel additive is the work of GM’s mechanical engineer Thomas Midgley Jr., who invents not only leaded gasoline but chlorofluorocarbons, which will come to be regarded as two of the most harmful chemical compounds ever produced during the industrial age. Chlorofluorocarbons will destroy the atmosphere. Leaded gasoline will drive everyone mad, slowly, filling children’s teeth with lead. Sometimes bad things are engineered by engineers.”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“Year after year, lead is flying out of the smokestack. What is lead? It is a poison, second in toxicity only to arsenic. It is a chemical element bearing the atomic number 82 and the symbol Pb, from the Latin plumbum. In its solid phase, it is a shiny gunmetal gray, excruciatingly heavy. It burns with a white flame. It’s resistant to corrosion. It never disappears. It enters the world in many ways, including but not limited to “oil-processing activities, agrochemicals, paint, smelting, mining, refining, informal recycling of lead, cosmetics, peeling window and door frames, jewelry, toys, ceramics, pottery, plumbing materials and alloys, water from old pipes, vinyl mini-blinds, stained glass, lead-glazed dishes, firearms with lead bullets, batteries, radiators for cars and trucks, and some colors of ink.”[61] Lead is a vampire. Invite it in and it will drink your blood and live forever.”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“Civilization exists by geologic consent,” the historian says, “subject to change without notice.”[”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“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.[”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

“Sometimes bad things are engineered by engineers.”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers