The Air Gave Ted Bundy MurderUnfinished Books: 𝑴𝒖𝒓𝒅𝒆𝒓𝒍𝒂𝒏𝒅 by Caroline Fraser

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When I picked up this book from the library I was shocked to see it weighed as much as a Gutenberg Bible.

I didn’t know what I was getting into!

Part of what has garnered this book such excellent reviews is it genre-fluid nature. For instance, The New Yorker described it as “an extraordinarily well-written and genre-defying blend of memoir, social and environmental history, and forensic inquest.” I mean, yes, but that also kind of got on my nerves. I’ll get into why in a second, but let’s start with the main thesis.

I suppose most people are now aware of the high-high-high correlation between leaded-gasoline exhaust in the air and violent crime. It basically explains why Scorsese’s early movies look the way they do.

You can make this chart with any nation in the world and you get the exact same overlay. Leaded gasoline leads to violence when all those poisoned kids come of age.

Ends up, and this is the main thesis I was refering to, advanced pollution leads to advanced violence. She focusses mainly on a Tacoma smelter. Downwind of that plant lived not just Ted Bundy but BTK, Green River, Happy Face, Night Stalker, Boxcar, Want-Ad, Lust, Phantom Sniper, that DC sniper, Hillside Stranglers, I-5, Coin Shop, Eastside, Werewold Butcher, and others—many of whom remain unidentified but almost certainly tied to the pollution given their area of activity.

(Did you know there’s another smelter near where the Zodiac got his start?)

Anyway, this argument is extremely persuasive and something to keep in mind next time you’re looking at beautiful art the Guggenheims are using to launder their reputation.

Did you know that when they moved their smelters to Mexico and a new generation of kids were born under those fumes women started disappearing en masse?

This is terrifying and convincing stuff.

But Caroline Fraser isn’t satisfied with this. She also needs to go in depth about how deadly the interstate pontoon bridges have been, the local volcanoes’ bloodlust, etc. It’s often about her growing up in the regions and how much it sucked and how a bunch of serial killers fit in nicely with her experience.

Those things are all interesting themselves, but they don’t always mesh well together, in my opinion. Which is why I ended up skipping many pages here and there. I would be enjoying one aspect of the book then something else would start happening and I would be thrown out.

In the end, I probably read 80% of it? And it’s permanently altered they way I think about certain things. (It’s already impacted my current WIP.)

In short, I highly recommend this book. Even though I found it stylistically faulty and packed too full of side issues, it’s still fascinating and worthy of your attention if you have the least information in any of this stuff.