I’m not a devotee of the true crime genre. Whether in book, podcast or documentary form, it too often feels voyeuristic, recycling the same narratives of male violence with only minimal interest in structure, context, or consequence. Aestheticised suffering, procedural fetishism, and the soft-focus myth of the lone monster. I rarely finish them. Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers is the exception. What caught my attention, and held it, was not just the elegance of Caroline Fraser’s writing, but her decision to treat serial killing not as aberration, but as a cultural logic. Her subject is less the killers themselves than the world that created and enabled them: its infrastructure, its poisons, its police.
The Pacific Northwest has its own genre of unease. Fog pressing in from the water, basalt cliffs shedding rain, cabins folding into forest. Fraser takes this damp, fracturing terrain. Literal and figurative—and builds a murder wall, pins and string tracing fault lines between killers, cops, industrialists, engineers, and the polite society that made them all possible. “Welcome to the crazy wall,” she writes. “Let’s take a walk around the room. Let’s have a look.” It’s not a conventional true crime book. There’s no whodunnit. We already know. The question isn’t who killed her, but why did no one care.
Fraser’s answer is both immediate and tectonic. In 1961, she notes, “there are three males who live in what you might call the neighborhood, within a circle whose center is Tacoma. Their names are Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway.” The opening chapter draws a near-straight line between them. Manson imprisoned on McNeil Island, Bundy a teenager on Skyline Drive, Ridgway a 12-year-old growing up near the airport. The proximity is more than eerie; it’s a challenge to narrative conventions that want to see killers as outliers, exceptions, loners. “Is it chance?” she asks. “Is there a connection? Well, that’s the question.” Murderland refuses gothic coincidence. This is not The Shining. The book is not trying to spook us with monsters. It insists instead that they are structures. Bundy is the bridge, the furnace, the smelter.
Each chapter is anchored in place: a floating bridge, a smelter, a basement, a lane. Fraser moves through these landmarks as if walking a map of memory and violence, returning not just to the geography of the Pacific Northwest, but to the historical and material conditions that made its cruelty possible. The Olympic–Wallowa Lineament (OWL), a little-known geological fault line, becomes her central metaphor: “We live on top of rubble, not a solid foundation.” And later: “Whatever we build, however busy we become, the OWL is down there, indifferent, implacable. It is the fault line we cannot see, but we know it’s there. It’s the knife at the neck. It’s the clean cut.”
“Whatever we build, however busy we become, the OWL is down there, indifferent, implacable.”
The floating bridge, which opens the book’s first chapter, is a kind of thesis: engineering ingenuity meets fatal oversight. Traffic curves, draws bulge, concrete floats. People plummet. The bridge, which cuts across Lake Washington, was celebrated as a marvel. Until it began swallowing cars. “Forty-five feet wide… there are four-foot-wide sidewalks but no room for error, no pullout, no breakdown lane, no shoulder. Beyond the traffic, there is water. Deep water.” It is a metaphor, but not merely that. The idea Fraser unfolds across the book is that nothing we build. Not bridges, not suburbs, not mythologies, can hold if it is founded on lies. And America, she suggests, is all lies. A country that builds its roads over mass graves, its neighbourhoods beside smelters belching arsenic, its family homes atop fault lines both literal and social.
This social geology is crucial to Fraser’s method. In a chapter on smelters, she braids the postwar industrial expansion of the Pacific Northwest with the birthplaces and atmospheres of the men who became monsters. Ted Bundy is born near the lead refineries of Philadelphia, then raised beside the floating bridge in a neighbourhood infused with industrial toxins and evangelical repression. Jerry Brudos comes from the poisoned earth of South Dakota grasshopper fields, dosed with arsenic bait. She doesn’t offer a simple causal chain, but she invites us to consider environmental violence. The particulate legacy of the Guggenheims and Rockefellers. As an unacknowledged accomplice. “Burned in the hellfire of private enterprise, set free on an unsuspecting world, they will have their revenge.”
Why does America produce so many serial killers? It’s not a matter of biology or individual derangement, Fraser suggests, but a collision of historical forces. The postwar boom created the suburbs, the highways, the disposable income and domestic isolation. Men returned from the Second World War and Korea with violent training and emotional vacancy; their sons grew up in split-level homes with basements, garages, and the steady hum of televised power. Fraser never states it as a thesis, but it pulses through the book: America in the second half of the twentieth century cultivated a perfect storm of mobility, alienation, and masculine impunity. “We had an entire population,” she writes, “trained to overlook violence so long as it was dressed in a tie.”
Yet Murderland’s most damning passages are not about individual pathology but cultural permission. In the chapter on the Green River Killer, Fraser details the “timeline with bodies” and the astonishing inertia of law enforcement. “The police knew,” she writes. “They were told. People told them. Over and over.” The women were poor, young, sex workers—expendable. “We chose not to care.” Ridgway wasn’t hiding. He didn’t need to. The system was designed for him to operate in full view.
“The madness is not in the minds of murderers, but in the society that finds their crimes titillating and their victims forgettable.”
Fraser calls this “the crazy wall”—a reference to the sprawling pinboards detectives use to track suspects and patterns, now common in police procedurals. But her wall is not just red yarn and cigarette stubs. It’s a ledger of complicity. “Spare some string for the smelters and smoke plumes, those insidious killers, shades of Hades.” Her crazy wall is a map of the structures that enabled murder: industrial by-products, civic neglect, a media culture that turned killers into brands. “It’s the inside of anybody’s mind,” she writes. “Play along at home: connect the clues with string or yarn until the whole thing resembles a graph of sheer lunacy, a visual eruption of obsession.” The madness, in other words, is not in the mind of the killer. It is systemic.
The structural logic extends even to the domestic. In “The Daylight Basement,” Fraser moves into the architecture of American family life. The garages, dens, partially finished spaces. Showing how they become sites of terror. The serial killer doesn’t haunt gothic castles. He builds a kill room out of plywood and insulation, a place for “disposal and dismemberment, an industry of parts.” She doesn’t dwell on gore, but on the illusion of safety. “The house has secrets,” she writes. “The basement is where we put things we don’t want to deal with.”
“The basement is where we put things we don’t want to deal with.”
One of the most quietly devastating chapters is “The Dutch Door.” Fraser uses this half-swinging, half-contained portal as a metaphor for the psychic architecture of American masculinity. What is let in, what is shut out. The chapter returns to Bundy’s boyhood, but with none of the pathologising voyeurism so common to the genre. Instead, Fraser considers the built environment: the house, the garage, the block, the road, the bridge. “He walks past the houses with bicycles on their sides in the yard. With pails of huckleberries on the porch.” It’s not a monster lair. It’s the suburbs.
Fraser’s metaphors are rarely neat; they fray, twist, double back. “The Volcano” takes us up into the Cascades, a region poised perpetually on the edge of eruption. She draws on the geological reality of the region’s megathrust fault system—“rocked in the wind, the trees move of their own accord, swaying on unseen currents, lowering, watching, waiting”—but brings it into intimate relation with male volatility. These men don’t just snap. They simmer, accumulate, collapse inward before exploding outward.
The book culminates not with a solution, but with The Fog Warning. It is Fraser’s version of a closing argument, though the tone is elegiac rather than declarative. The title refers to a Winslow Homer painting of a fisherman rowing back to shore, fog descending. Fraser writes, “The longer we look, the more we see how it’s broken. And where it will break again.” Her warning is not only about geology, or about men, but about the fog of forgetting. The ease with which a culture fails to account for what it permits.
Throughout Murderland, Fraser never lapses into sentimentality, nor does she indulge in spectacle. She won’t give you the gruesome inventory of wounds; she gives you arsenic tables and bridge schematics, zoning maps and lead exposure levels. She returns, again and again, to the margins: to the women, girls, and boys who vanished because no one of consequence was looking. She names names. She lists locations. She walks the terrain.
“She won’t give you the gruesome inventory of wounds; she gives you arsenic tables and bridge schematics.”
“The true crime lies in what we’ve done with the place,” she writes. If that’s the argument of the book, its method is to walk us through the scene and let us see the blood on our own hands. Not stylised or metaphorical blood. But real, absorbed, sedimented, industrial, historical. Poison in the dust, and in the stories we tell.
If the American serial killer was the mascot of late 20th-century masculinity. Rageful, entitled, pathologically alone. Then Murderland is the reckoning. It shows us the floating bridge not as triumph, but warning. The smelter not as industry, but grave. The daylight basement not as refuge, but oubliette. And underneath it all: the OWL, the fault line, the crack in the teacup. Fraser’s great achievement is to show us that what we think of as random acts of monstrous men are anything but. They are planned. They are permitted. They are mapped.
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