(The New Yorker) – Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.

During the “golden age” of serial killing, between the nineteen-sixties and the new millennium, many of the murderers were from the area around Seattle’s Puget Sound. The writer Caroline Fraser grew up in the region, in the shadow of massive ore-processing facilities. The smelters from those facilities caused a profusion of heavy metals in the air and water, and toxins such as lead and arsenic were found in staggering concentrations in the blood of local children. Some of those children were merely dulled, or delinquent; a few became tabloid monsters. In a new book, reviewed in this week’s issue by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Fraser traces the “long line of outlandishly wanton necrophiliac killers who’ve lived, at one time or another, within the Tacoma smelter plume,” and argues that their psychopathy had a common cause. (Read More)