Angry Planet - Traveling America’s ‘Murderland’

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comThe Pacific Northwest is known for its startling natural beauty, precocious rainfall, and propensity to birth serial killers. Why? Caroline Fraser has a theory and it’s a good one.This week on Angry Planet, Fraser takes us on a journey through the American past and into the dark heart of the PNW. Her new book Murderland weaves together memoir, true crime, history, and science into a compelling narrative that’s as beautiful and deadly as the forests around Tacoma.Lead in the time of serial killersCrazywall as mapAmerica’s ultra-leaded 1970sThe killer hubristic roadways of the Pacific NorthwestThe unique draw of Ted BundyThe beauty and horror of the PNW’s woodsLead poisoned psychos become pop culture geniusesAnne Rule and the different eras of true crime writingThe Olympic–Wallowa lineamentThe current state of the true crime genreMurdlerand: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial KillersTacoma Smelter Plume projectHouses of ButterfliesA look back at the I-90 floating bridges before light-rail work beginsThe Domesday BookSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. Did you know that Angry Planet is entirely listener-supported? It's true. If you like what you hear, go to Angry PlanetPod.com and sign up for $9 a month.

Get early commercial free access to all the mainline episodes. We've got one up right now. That's all about what happened in Venezuela. So please go over to angry planetpod.com and sign up. And without further ado, here is the show. Hello, and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. I am so delighted to be sitting here with the author of a book that I finished a couple weeks ago

that I was not planning on talking about on the show. I had read it for my own pleasure, kind of just picked it up at random, and thought it was so striking. and we had not kind of done an episode like this in a while that I had to get the author on. The book is Murderland. The author is Caroline Fraser. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on. Can you kind of introduce yourself? And I hesitate to do the hacky intro, but give us the, what is the elevator pitch for Murderland? Sure, yeah. Now I'm happy to be here. I'm the author of Murderland, Crime, and,

bloodlust in the time of serial killers. And a lot of people have asked me about the subtitle, which does, I think, give you kind of an entree into the book because it is about the rise of violent crime during the 70s and 80s. And the rise of a particular kind of crime, which were murders, committed by serial killers, which in the 70s weren't as common a phenomenon, and people didn't really know about them the way we do now.

I mean, there's been tons of movies and books and media about them, and so everybody knows what a serial killer is. But in the 1970s, it wasn't that well known. And the crimes that I'm talking about are, you know, I start in the Pacific Northwest with some pretty notorious crimes committed by Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway. And these are crimes that are sexual in nature, hence the bloodlust. That used to be a term that was used sometimes in the media for rape murders or so-called lust murders. And it's a story about this time because I think sometimes people don't realize that there really was an era of the serial killer that during the 70s and 80s, the number of these guys, and they are primarily men, went up quite sharply, as did the number of violent crimes. And so I was taking kind of a, you know, a path into the past, you know, into my own past because I grew up in the Northwest, in the 1970s.

And trying to recreate that time and talk a little bit about what might have caused this phenomenon. Yeah, it's so interesting because you're weaving the true crime element. and memoir, but also both like local history and geologic history and science, kind of all together. I'd never, I'd not quite ever read anything like this, which is, which is why it was so fascinating to me. Why was it important for you to capture this memoir element? Yeah, I mean, when I start the book, I talk about. this thing called the crazy wall, which I think as people are very aware of what serial killers are, they're also very aware of this crazy wall phenomenon, which you see in TV series and movies,

which is a kind of visual aid almost to the mystery that's about to unfold, because you see some kind of wall or, you know, chalkboard or something like that that's got a bunch of pictures of the, you know, victims and the suspects and the, you know, the pushpins, the red string. Yeah. Yeah. And it looks really nutty, you know. And sometimes it is kind of a reflection of the craziness of the detective or whatever

who is trying to investigate the crime. And that's kind of the structure of the book in a way is using, you know, proceeding at a kind of timeline as the mystery unfolds and using all kinds of ways back into the past, including my memories of certain incidents that happened when I was growing up on Mercer Island, which is a suburb of Seattle, crimes that I remember, which were not necessarily serial killers, although there was a serial killer who was growing up down the street from me, unbeknownst to anybody. But also, you know, looking at what was happening at the time, what was happening, for example, in the city of Tacoma, which is just south of Seattle only about 30 miles away.

And that's where Ted Bundy grew up. That's where Gary Ridgeway, the Green River killer. grew up and even Charles Manson was there for a while. And when I learned that, I was so kind of taken with that, you know, I mean, obviously it's probably a coincidence of some kind, and yet I thought it was a real way back into the past of this place, which is itself so kind of dark and and disturbing because, you know, it was, Tacoma was a city that was heavily industrialized, and notoriously was the home of this smelter, the Asarco smelter owned by the Guggenheim family. Asarco is American smelting and refining company.

And this, I found out, was a company that had been spilted, spewing lead and arsenic into the air that eventually covered a thousand square miles of Puget Sound. And this was shocking and disturbing to me, as it certainly was to a lot of the people who live there. And I began looking at, you know, could there be any possible connection between that and the fact that these very, very, prolific murderers grew up in the same place. The connection is pretty compelling, I think, that you come up with here. So our producer, Kevin Nodell, is from Tacoma. And has often told me about the aroma from Tacoma.

And Tacoma is kind of like darkness. But he is not like, but it's interesting. And he's talked about like the serial killer thing in the Pacific Northwest. And you know, of course, I, of course, I've heard a dozen different theories about, like, why it happened there. I think one of my favorites ones is the, there's a specific fungus that can infect the brain. Oh, I haven't heard about the fungus. Yeah, that's like, that causes some sort of encephalopathy that does it.

But like the kind of the thing that you chart and the lead, the arsenic, the smelters, and the industrialization that happens after World War II makes a pretty. neat line with the rise of violent crime. And also you're able, like, for most of these serial killers that you talk about in the book, you can find a spelter that's close by. Like even Richard Ramirez down in El Paso grew up next to one. Is it Ridgeway that has the memory of, like, playing in it as a child, like near one? Ridgway's brother wrote about remembering playing in a pile of copper tailings when they were kids, you know, like when Gary was five years old. And then little Gary has some problems growing up.

You know, he's not very, you know, he's not learning good, as he said. he clearly had some issues with his development. And this you see is a pattern with a lot of these guys that they seem to have, you know, something kind of goes off the rails with them and actually pretty young. And this was something that the FBI was actually looking at. You know, they had in their profiling program, really could see a pattern with, you know, abuse in the home, sexual abuse, physical abuse,

that these guys started fantasizing very young about violence in some way. You know, I mean, Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, used to, you know, climb trees and fantasize about murdering his teacher, you know, when he was like in the sixth grade or something. So it's a pattern that starts young, and this has then been linked to, by me, but also by some other people, to lead exposure in part, because lead, if you're exposed to it as a kid, definitely does seem to lead to, you know, juvenile delinquency later, to problems in brain development. in neurological development. Parts of the brain just don't grow. They don't expand and become what they're supposed to in the frontal cortex.

And those are the parts of the brain that control behavior, you know. And so people who have been exposed to too much lead might have issues with being able to control themselves. And so that to me just kind of leapt out like, oh, that's so interesting, given what we now know about where these guys grew up in Tacoma or Richard Ramirez in El Paso. You know, maybe it was a whole bunch of things. And yet the whatever led they were exposed to and we actually know exactly how much, for example, Ted Bundy was exposed to. it might not have helped. You know, it might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. You know, maybe they had a bunch of other problems to begin with.

But then this might have pushed them over the edge. Can you talk about, I think one of the things that we take for granted today, and, you know, maybe we'll learn some harsh lessons again in the near future. but one of the things we take for granted again today is how clean the country is, how we are not swimming in lead. Can you kind of walk me through like how pervasive lead was in the 70s, in the 60s, in the 50s? Oh, yeah. I mean, anybody who's as old as I am, you know, anybody born between the, you know, 40s and 1980s.

and 1980 was exposed to lead, unfortunately, because of the sale of leaded gas. You know, leaded gas was the default fuel at that time. And this itself was a crime, really a crime against generations of kids and of people because the companies that were producing leaded gas, standard oil, DuPont, etc., knew very well that it was dangerous. And medical professionals had told them, you know, in the 1920s, they told them, don't do this. You know, don't develop this as a product because it's really, you know, hazardous to expose people to this much lead. And they didn't care.

They just went ahead and did it anyway. And at the same time that they were selling it, they were pouring all this money into paying for medical professionals to testify that this really wasn't a problem, that it was fine to have, you know, high levels of lead in the body, that it was natural, that it wasn't going to hurt anybody, which, you know, complete lies. So that was happening at the same time that these smelters, many of which were built in the 1880s or 1890s, were also contributing a large amount of lead and arsenic and other bad stuff to the air all over the American West and also in many cities across the country. I mean, if you lived in a big city, you know, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc., you were probably living not that far from a smelter. One of the things that was unique about Tacoma was that they were smelting, which means, you know, burning. I mean, basically a smelter is just taking in rocks from a mine and burning it to refoing. to refine metals, to pull all the different metals out, whether it's, you know, copper, lead, silver, gold. But it's a very dirty process.

And in Tacoma, the rocks they were smelting were particularly dirty in the sense that they were very heavily larded with arsenic. And so there was a lot of arsenic in Tacoma, a lot of lead particulates. and the pollution became so bad that it was really, you know, by the 1960s communities were really kind of up in arms about what this was doing to people. If you were around at that time, you probably remember things like, you know, the Cuyahoga River catching fire, which led in part to the Clean Air Act. So yes, you're absolutely right that. it was a different era up until the creation of the EPA and the Clean Air Act.

And once we had those things, then all of the stuff that these companies were doing, the leaded gas, the smokestacks, the smelters, was on its way out because you just couldn't legally sell that stuff anymore. And so leaded gas, they start to withdraw in about 1973, but it takes quite a long time for that withdrawal to take effect and isn't really fully completed until the 80s and 90s. And likewise, most of the smelters started closing down. But it was a little too late for somebody like Ted Bundy. And one of the things that really struck me is that,

the effects of a lot of this stuff were pretty immediate in the communities where the smelters were and in the families where people worked at the smelters. It seemed like if you worked in the arsenic factory, that was a slow death sentence. And you were going to go mad, right? The butterfly room? Is that where that, that was the arsenic, right? The house of butterflies is what they called it, and that was from leaded gas. That was what they called TEL, which was the product that made the gas leaded.

And that stuff was so hazardous that when they started producing it in factories in the 20s and 30s, they actually poisoned a bunch of people. Some people died. You know, people began hallucinating and running around, you know, in fits and then fell down and died. And then there were some guys who were hallucinating butterflies. Like they kept making these gestures where they were trying to push butterflies away from their faces. And not all of them died, but they were really affected mentally, I think, for the rest of their lives. and some of them continued working at the factory and basically just sort of sat apart from everybody else silently.

I mean, there's a very creepy image of what happened to these guys. And I think they eventually ironed out these problems in the production of leaded gas, but they didn't do anything to, you know, ameliorate the effects that this was going to have on people, for example, who lived right next to freeways. Freeways is in freeways and roadways is another interesting like running through line in the book. Can you kind of walk me through while you felt it was important to include these almost like these hubristic roadways that were constructed in the Pacific Northwest?

Well, that isn't, you know, the metaphor for what they are, particularly the floating bridge, which I talk a lot about. The floating bridge connected Seattle to the island that I lived on, Mercer Island, and also to the east side, you know, a huge population center of Seattle that would become the home for Microsoft eventually. And the bridge, famous for being floating, for starters, was built in 1940. And it was never built big enough for the amount of traffic that was eventually going to be using it. And so it had all these engineering problems.

It was too small. It was too narrow. There was no place on the bridge to pull over, for example. If your car broke down or there was an accident, nobody could move. You know, it was just there was no breakdown lane. There was this thing on the bridge called the bulge, which was a curved out section that contained the machinery for opening a gap in the bridge so that boat could. traffic could go through and that bulge because you had to navigate, you know, if you were driving, you had to, you know, at highway speed, make a fairly sharp kind of right curve and then regain the

straight roadway. And in the middle of that bulge, there was an open well of water. So the whole thing was kind of like if some, you know, Dr. Frankenstein, type engineer had decided to build the most deadly thing that he could think of. This was what it was. And there was also a reversible lane on the bridge, which I think was not that uncommon. You know, I think Golden Gate Bridge had maybe still does a reversible lane. But all these things on top of each other created a really deadly, experience for drivers

and there were all kinds of accidents, many of which involved people just kind of leaving, their cars just shot right off the bridge and they were later, you know, fished out of 80 feet of water. Yeah, I'm looking at the picture of it now.

That is such a sharp turn around that bulge. That is wild. Yeah, so eventually I think the reader becomes aware that this, the bridge is itself a metaphor for the Hebrus of engineers at the time who just weren't thinking about people. They were thinking about design. They were thinking about other things besides safety. And this, of course, is totally the story with the smokestack and the smelter. I mean, it was an era

when people were kind of in love with technological progress. But they weren't looking at the cost. And I guess the big cost that you kind of connect everything. Like it's human life, right? It is human life being sacrificed on the pyre of industry. And especially the lives of young women. Yeah, I mean, in a word. Yes.

And of course, the 1970s was a very different time in, you know, when women were, not that we've made a whole lot of progress in many, many ways, but when you go back to the 1970s and look at the kinds of things that women were expected to do and the things it was okay to say to them and, you know, how they were treated in the workplace, I mean, it is a very madman-like, you know, situation. It's almost hard for us, I think, to imagine what that was like. So, yeah, I mean, it was a very different time. It was a time when people went hitchhiking all over the place on freeways.

And so there were all these sort of dangers that I think that women faced that they almost weren't aware of. You know, I mean, I think women had been entering, you know, the workforce and guns. going to college in greater and greater numbers. But they had still been socialized, you know, as they were in the 50s, to be helpful, to sacrifice themselves. And this, you see somebody like Ted Bundy taking advantage of, you know, that, I mean, it's not an accident that a lot of the ways that he was able to pull women in was by asking for help. You know, he would pretend that he had a broken arm or a broken leg. He would drop a package

of books or something. And he would say, can you help me? And of course, you know, being helpful young women, these college girls often would help him. So you write about a bunch of different killers in the book. But Bundy is definitely the central figure as far as the killers go. Why him? What is it about him? Yeah, I mean, there are several reasons. One is that we know more about his activities and his travels than we do about a lot of the others.

We also have him speaking about his experience, often in a kind of weird way. I mean, he would only speak about himself kind of in the third person and hypothetical situation until just the very last days of his life when he actually confessed. But he's interesting because he sort of encompasses a personality type that is also somebody that you see among serial killers. Some of them are like Gary Ridgeway, who does seem mentally challenged in a lot of ways. He doesn't seem like he ever developed kind of a fully adult sensibility, and yet was cunningly clever. I mean, he escaped detection for many years. But Ted Bundy was kind of the opposite of somebody like Ridgeway. He was very good looking.

He went to college. He was smart. he convinced everybody that he was a normal, the person, a successful person even, which is also something that you can see sometimes with the lead exposure, because some kids have very obvious symptoms of poisoning. Others are less, you know, it's much less obvious what's happened to them. And so he's a really interesting figure. He also is somebody who doesn't have some of the famous signs of the serial killer.

He doesn't seem to have been physically or sexually abused, for example. And so he remains, I think, endlessly fascinating. to people because people just wonder why. You know, why did he do what he did? But I think he's also somebody who's been romanticized and glamorized by Hollywood, by TV shows, by movies. And so I wanted to kind of pull him out of that context and treat him in a more, I don't know, clinical way and show how aberrant he really was. Also, I think, something that you see with lead damage.

I mean, it's really quite astonishing to me how many necrophiliacs, for example, were in the Northwest at this time as serial killers, and he was one of them. Yeah, it's a very strange and specific feature, the necrophilia. Right. Yeah, I mean, these guys, a lot of them, and even some of the serial rapists in Tacoma that I talk about, developed this weird thing of, you know, they want to take their victims out in the woods. And some of this was cunning. You know, it was very clever, for example, of Bundy to realize that, you know,

if he took these women kind of way out in the woods and murdered, them there, that nature would take its course and hide what he had done, you know, that the bodies would be there for so long that there wouldn't be very much evidence left of what had happened. And he helped that along by moving body parts from place to place. So that was in one sense that was deliberate, but I also think it was, something that he found sexually gratifying. And you see this with the other guys too. Ridgeway does it. Ridgeway was so specific, as you say, that he had one wall of his bedroom, had a giant, you know, silk screened image of, you know, trees and the forest, because he liked

to pretend that he was outside, even when he wasn't, you know, raping and murdering outside, which also did a lot. So it's almost this kind of adivistic, you know, return to some kind of caveman quality or so, you know, some, they're not just predators, but they're almost a very primitive kind of predator. Yeah, that's one of the things I think is really interesting because we have this notion in pop culture.

I think in some part, driven by Bundy, who is atypical in a lot of ways, as you say, of the serial killer as mastermind, right? Hannibal Lecter being like the textbook example of that, I would think. These very intelligent figures that have things plotted out and they're always one step ahead of the police. When in reality, it really seems like a lot of these guys are, you know, developmentally like coming up short, not always the brightest. They are maybe clever, but as you say, it is a very like primitive

adivistic kind of thing. It's almost like, I would say that especially like in the 70s, they avoid detection for so long because the United States is not equipped to have all of the police departments talk to each other

is one part of it. And like we just hadn't experienced anything like this before. So can you, what do you think, what do you make of this why did we turn in pop culture serial killers into geniuses, do you think? Yeah, it's an interesting question because I think Hollywood can't help itself, you know, in my experience, which is limited, but I think they can't help but want to focus on that,

you know, when they cast somebody, they want to cast somebody who's handsome, They want to tell a story about somebody who's smart. You know, they don't, it's not attractive as a prospect in Hollywood to show the reality of these crimes. And so I think that's partly why Bundy became such a common figure in these, as an inspiration for these characters or as the star of a lot of these shows because it's irrescently. in a Hollywood frame to have that character who's good-looking, who's sexy, who's Zach Ephron or whatever, you know, and they don't want to make a movie about somebody who looks like Gary Ridgway or, you know, have and help us the horrible Jack Owen Spillman third, who was the

rapist in Wenatchi, who raped and murdered and ate parts of his victims. There's a certain way to glamorize

murder, I think, in Hollywood. But you can't show anything like the deviance and the horrific violence. that was practiced, you know, in these murders. And so they fall back on the kind of tropes that they know. So I think that's one thing that happened.

But yeah, I mean, you know, the whole Thomas Harris, the Silence of the Lands and all of that. Great movie. You know, I'm not criticizing the movie or his books or anything. thing. I understand why he did what he did. And there is, you know, a certain horror in there. But one of the things he's just not showing with somebody like Hannibal Lecter is that these crimes are sexual crimes. They involve sexual gratification of somebody getting off on, you know, raping, torturing, and murdering somebody. What do you think of Anne Rule?

Anne Rule is fascinating. I mean, I think she's really important in the history of true crime because she spans both the earlier era of the magazines, True Detective magazine. I actually bought a bunch of copies of those old magazines from the 70s that she wrote for under a pseudonym. She was a single mother who was trying to make a living. And she knew cops. She had tried to be a cop herself but couldn't pass certain vision tests and so forth. So she ended up kind of writing about crime instead, although she still had real ties to the police community. So she's so interesting because, of course, she knew Ted Bundy.

She worked alongside him in the rape crisis center in Seattle before anybody knew what he was doing. And she got a contract to write a book about this guy who was murdering women in the Northwest before anybody knew his real identity. And so she, I think, is somebody who knew all the original kind of male-oriented tropes of the genre of crime reporting. But she also brought in a lot of attention to the victims. I think she was really one of the first person, you know, one of the first journalists in writing both, you know, the stranger beside me, her famous book about Bundy to really report about who these women were. She did this in book after book, even though I think it was difficult in some instances,

as it was in writing about Ridgeway, for example, because a lot of those young women were sex workers. There just wasn't a lot of information about a lot of them. That was really hard to track down their families in some instances, but she really gave it the old college try. And I think she really helped transform true crime in a way. So you can, you know, say what you will about her. I do think she was a really pivotal figure in the history of the genre. I was thinking about this conversation earlier today.

It's funny you said the, earlier kind of those pulp era male audience-oriented like true crime magazines. So there's a, there's a Ned Gein show coming out. And there's a trailer fort dropped today. And in the trailer, they have the police officers going through, you know, the nightmare house. And one thing, one of the shots is the cops holding up four or five of his true crime magazines and like taking a picture of it as evidence. and another interesting aspect of your book is the way that Bundy becomes a figure of a figure to be emulated by some of these other killers. Oh, yeah.

Can you talk about like how some, the way like true crime, if it's maybe not handled correctly, kind of feeds into the fantasies of these people and like why Bundy becomes a person that, other people aspire to be, not only just, you know, to watch, but like, that's the person they're trying to become. Yeah. It is a, it is a very strange aspect of the history of true crime. And definitely, I mean, when you, you know, Jack Owen Spilleman III talked about, you know, how he aspired to be Ted Bundy is really. Keyes, I think also

wanted to be Ted Bundy and in some ways maybe even exceed his example. I mean, I hesitate to sort of blame true crime for that because

you know, it's very common in our society for us to kind of fixate on certain things like, you know, comic books used to be, thought to be a terrible influence and radio was a terrible thing and TV, you know, I mean, just over and over

every new form of technology, every new video games, of course. So I'm not so sure that it is just whether we should blame the true crime magazines or look at the true crime magazines as a reflection of male desire because, of course, they were kind of a, not just softcore porn, but soft core porn that reflected violence in a way that was sexualized.

And they're so interesting as a product, because, you know, people have pointed this out that the covers of the true crime magazines were incredibly salacious. Color, you know, they became color at a certain point. Often they showed women, you know, being strangled or, you know, some guy standing over them with a knife or, you know, tied up, you know, this whole bondage thing. And so the covers were sort of a separate part of the message. But then when you went and looked at the inside of the articles, and this is true. of the articles that Anne Rule wrote, they're pretty sober. You know, they're not as salacious as the imagery. And in fact, in some instances, there's sort of really important reporting about crimes,

murders that were not being covered by very well by newspapers. And this is true of some of her reporting. You know, it's actually quite valuable as a source of information. about things that happened because the, you know, Seattle Times or whatever just wasn't up to the job or didn't, wasn't interested in covering these things. So yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, it's a chicken and egg type thing. What was the real problem? Was it the problem that men were having fantasies about, you know, raping women? Or was it the, you know, the magazines that were encouraging those fantasies. I mean, I think it's probably both to some extent. And also the overwhelming majority of people who read that material did not go on to do something

awful, right? Right. Right. As, you know, I mean, as many people have pointed out, not everybody who lived in Tacoma went on to be a serial killer, which of course is very true. But I think, you know, that doesn't take away from the fact that, you know, obviously serial killing is an extreme. It's a very extreme form of sexualized violence. But if you look at the history of violent crime in Tacoma, it's not good. It's not a good history. And their levels of violent crime, especially throughout this period when the smelter was in operation, are bad. And there probably lots of factors involved in that. A lot of times people point to the presence of what used to be called Fort Lewis and is now called Joint Base Lewis McCord,

big Army and Air Force base that has itself terribly polluted, as many Army-based are around the country. But that that introduced, you know, whole areas of social unrest and, and itinerant men who, you know, have no place in the community and commit crimes and so forth, probably all true. But I think you have to look at the whole picture, the whole history, not just one thing. Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that's fascinating about the book is to me how holistic and wide in scope it is. Even if you'll zoom in on like a weekend in your life. But then you will also like just blow it out and talk about all of these interesting,

these interesting geological phenomenon that I had never heard of because I'm not a geologist and I don't live in the Pacific Northwest. But my conception of the Pacific Northwest for a long time has always been like Twin Peaks, very beautiful and mysterious. But also kind of, I guess, like Twin Peaks, under the surface, literally under the surface of many of the mountain ranges and other places, there's like, it's just full of poison gas and strange things. Can you talk about the owl and like what is underneath some of these mountains kind of just waiting? to cascading out. Yeah, it's a fascinating corner of the world that like San

Francisco, it has real hazards and Los Angeles has serious earthquake faults, many of which were not known about until much more recently. I think people have known about the

geological fault lines in Los Angeles and San Francisco for a century or more because of the big earthquake in San Francisco in, you know, what was it, 1906 or something, and a number of events in that region. But in Seattle, a lot of this was not learned about until during my lifetime. And also, you know, one of the things that I found so kind of funny, doing the research about this is that the volcanoes, there's this whole series of large mountains volcanoes

that come down the sort of the spine of the cascades, which are quite near Seattle and some of the other major cities there. Everybody in the 1910s and 1920s thought that those were extinct volcanoes, and if you look at old books, they'll call them, you know, extinct. But they are far from extinct, as we saw in 1980 when Mount St. Helens erupted. So, yeah, it's just, it's a fascinating part of the world. And I used that one fault line, which is probably what the owl is. The owl is short for Olympic Walla La La Lawnan, which a mapmaker in the 40s was drawing this, you know, sort of very detailed, beautiful map of the Northwest.

And he noticed that there was this kind of strange trough that extended from the northwest tip of Washington State and cut across sort of diagonally down the state. And he didn't know what it was, but he thought it was probably a geological fault line of some kind that was quite ancient. And indeed, it's been a source of, you know, debate ever since. But I talk about it as, again, a kind of metaphor for the violence of nature itself,

that we live in a world in which things can suddenly happen like an earthquake, that we have no way of predicting, and that will throw civilization into a complete tailspin, you know, and I think this is, you know, big fear now in the Northwest, now that we know how dangerous a lot of these fault lines are that extend right under Seattle. there's one that goes sort of right across Seattle, across the northern tip of Mercer Island, sort of parallel to the Mercer Island Floating Bridge.

And now that we know what these things can do, it's a little bit late because, you know, everybody has built this, you know, city and so many lives are dependent on these transportation corridors. And so there's a real fear that a major, big earthquake, which there was, you know, some time ago, 700 years ago, there was a huge earthquake in that region at a time when not a lot of people lived there, but although the people who lived there kept memories of that for millennia. So I think, you know, it's just, it's an example. It's an image, if you will, of kind of the dangers of what we've done with nature. Do you see then serial killers as a kind of natural disaster? Well, you know, as with the, you know, the owl, the problem is what we did. you know, we decided to create these cities, these bridges, these tunnels, these, you know, elaborate structures on top of an earthquake.

So in the same way, we heedlessly, you know, encouraged the corporate world to build these smelters in population areas without any kind of acknowledgement of what they were going to do to the population, whether it was, you know, creating serial killers or just, you know, creating populations that were prone to asthma and respiratory diseases and heart disease and all these other things that are caused by lead exposure. So I think that, you know, the problem is always what we have done. Problem is not nature. Nature's going to do what it does.

I mean, we now know that. But we have to cope with what we've done. Yeah, the cost. Not something we're very good at. And the cost always comes due in the Doom book, right? Yes. The Dooms Day book. Yeah, I'd never heard of that before.

That's a really fun tidbit. learned from this book. It was very interesting. How long was this kicking around in your head? Oh, parts of it for a very long time. I'd always wondered about certain things that happened in the 60s and 70s on Mercer Island, you know, the guy who lived down the street from us, who blew up his house when I was eight. I mean, that was something that was kind of stuck in my mind for a long time. Like, how do we explain this? And why was the 1970s such a weird, you know, time, such a dangerous time, you know, because there was just so much weird stuff happening, including on the island,

which was a fairly, you know, should have been sheltered in some ways from that because of its, you know, it was well-to-do. It was, in fact, physically sheltered. and yet it was prone during the 70s to a lot of bizarre things happening and accidents and crimes. What do you think of the, I'm going to guess that you don't care about this because you're probably above it, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. What do you think of the state of like the true crime genre right now? I think it's like there's a lot of it out there. There's a lot of like, I would say like pretty bad podcasts that are just kind of reading news reports.

There's a voracious appetite for it at a time when like crime is pretty low. And I would, you know, we were talking about earlier how like a lot of this stuff was designed for men. There's kind of this lad mag thing with these salacious covers. and now it feels like it is a genre that is driven by women and for women. And what do you think of that change? Well, I mean, just for starters, I think you kind of have to separate out the different media because I think true crime on TV is, and in film, perhaps, but largely in TV, whether it's documentaries or scripted series, is different than true crime in books.

books, which is different than true crime and podcasts, which are obviously hugely popular at the moment. And I think some of these, you know, media are more responsible than others. I think in books and journalism, true crime has moved toward a much more responsible model of reporting and and taking up issues that didn't used to be discussed that much, you know, including, you know, the racial breakdown of how these things are covered, you know, Native American, you know, crimes that affect Native American women. You know, so I think, I mean, maybe I'm just being self-serving, but not, I don't think so, because.

I see a lot of books coming out that really are doing a good job, I think, of covering crime in a more responsible way. Podcasts I'm not as sure about because I just don't follow them as much, so I'm not as confident speaking about them. Although I think they bring, you know, there's a whole range of, from responsible to irresponsible. and TV is particularly interesting because obviously that's a, you know, huge component of what people are consuming. And again, some of those are quite fascinating and doing a good job of sort of finding

a compelling way to talk about these things. Others are pretty trashy. So, yeah, it really runs the gamut and is very different in terms of the media. I think one of the things it may reflect the popularity of this, especially among women, is just, you know, a continuing sense of vulnerability of wanting to feel in control of, you know, your life. there are, for, you know, for reasons that are just, you know, part of our culture, I think women don't feel safe. And part of that has to do, I think, with the fact that domestic violence is fairly common. And so women are experiencing threat or violence maybe in one part of their lives, but they have no way of coping with it or they have no way of

feeling in control. And so consuming these things is a way to may not be a rational way to feel in control, but you feel like maybe you're learning something about how to be safe. So I think it probably reflects our, you know, a lot of the vulnerability we feel just as a society because everything seems to be spinning out of control. There are all these mass shootings. And we're told that crime is a big problem constantly. You know, if you are watching Fox News, you may feel that crime is the worst it's ever been.

It's not at all. In fact, that's a complete lie. You know, I mean, we're now at some of the lowest levels in terms of violent crime that we've seen in many years. but people don't understand that. They're not going back and looking at the FBI, you know, annual journal and looking at the statistics, unfortunately.

So, yeah, I think it's a complicated social issue. One of the favorite stats that we like to break out on the show, and I'm going to screw some of it up, is that during the 1960s, there was like a bombing every day. In America, like a big political. bombing. They got so common that there's a there's a story, I think, from the late 60s in New York City where a bomb went off in a theater. Nobody was hurt.

Cops cleared it out. And the patrons were mad that they couldn't go back in and finish their movie. So it's like, this is just part of life. This is just a thing that happens. In many ways that we're very lucky that we don't live under that kind of thing anymore. So, but that does lead me to, like, I think the moment when I read the book, though, I was like, oh, I've got to talk to you, which is like the last couple pages. Because I really, like, I'm reading this and it's wonderful. And I'm like, how, how is she going to, how is she going to land this?

Like, what is, like, what's the final thing? And this thing that you land on, and I'll only spoil it a little bit is like this kind of poetic, I don't almost come like an incantation or a warning about like our possible future. And one, can you kind of talk me through that, talk us through that a little bit? Yeah, it was a, you know, it was a real issue of how to end this book because it, it obviously kind of, you know, walks you through a number of years of, of, and ends with this, kind of the closure of the smelters and the end of leaded gas and the, you know, the, the, the kind of dropping off of the serial killer phenomenon,

which fell off at the same time as violent crime did. But I just, you know, needed a way to end the book in a way that sort of took you out of that encyclopedic, you know, reporting mind and kind of put you back in the in a different frame of reference and kind of the sorrow of what has happened, you know, over the years in which all this murder and rape was occurring and tried to use some of the kind of, I won't say nostalgia,

really, but, but there is a sort of sense of, you know, if we could go back and make things right, you know, how would that, I mean, obviously it isn't possible to do that, but if we could imagine, I guess it's a sort of, you know, John Lennon kind of moment of like, you know, imagine if we could make this right, what it would take, what it would, what it would, what it would, would feel like. Caroline, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking to us about murderland.

Where can people find the book? Well, everywhere, hopefully, your local bookstores, bookshop.org, you know, I hope it's out there. People have told me great things about the audiobook. So if that's how you like to do. you know, experience the books. I encourage you to seek that out. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me. It's been great talking to you. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, go to Angry PlanetPod.com.

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