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Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

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.

“Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps delivery, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect,” she writes at one point, backing off slightly from her central thesis. She never brings herself to acknowledge that her account happens to flatter liberal preconceptions, and she only really gestures to politics in passing, when she disparages an alternative view that is popular among conservatives: that the rapid decline in the homicide rate since the nineteen-nineties ought to be attributed to President Clinton’s notorious 1994 crime bill and a subsequent investment in more aggressive policing. What’s ultimately bizarre about Fraser’s omission is that “Murderland” presents just as much evidence in favor of routine-activity theory as it marshals in support of the lead-crime hypothesis: Ted Bundy is constantly filling his 1968 VW with gas, prowling dark, unsupervised parking lots in pursuit of innocently unparanoid victims, leaving their corpses in remote ravines, and driving on to some other jurisdiction.

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