Polluted minds: How industrial emissions may have driven a violent crime spree

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Caroline Fraser grew up near Seattle in the 1970s, in the shadow of Ted Bundy - one of the most notorious serial murderers of women in American history.

He wasn't the only one. The Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, and even Charles Manson were all from the same area.

Fraser’s new book Murderland explores how connections can be made between a notoriously polluted area and the infamous killers it spawned.

The well-to-do neighbourhood Fraser grew up in was near industrial Tacoma, she told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

“Tacoma ended up with a lot of very heavy industry centred around Commencement Bay, which was one of the best deep-water ports on the West Coast.

“And all kinds of stuff sprang up around the bay, pulp mills and refineries. And it was also notorious for a smelter, the ASARCO smelter [American Smelting and Refining Company], which was founded by the Guggenheim family.”

This smelter emitted highly toxic fumes, she says.

“They were making metals out of the dirtiest kinds of ores and producing a lot of lead and arsenic particulates.”

The people living there were exposed to high levels of the pollutants coming out of the smelter’s smokestack, she says.

Violent crime was also surging in the region, which in the early 1970s had half a dozen prolific serial killers on the loose, she says.

“The sheer number of these guys in the 1970s, and particularly in the Northwest, really did attract a lot of attention.

“And it's not until later, in the late 1980s and 1990s, that you start to see a fall-off in the rate of violent crime and in the number of serial killers.”

People started to look at why this might be, she says.

By the mid-1980s, the EPA, the US environmental body, was clamping down on lead pollution, she says. Leaded petrol was phased out, and old dirty smelters became unviable under stricter controls.

And so, the amount of lead in the atmosphere dropped significantly in the US by the mid-90s.

“And that's when the rate of violent crime really fell off a cliff. So, there are people who make a connection between these events.”

Other factors were certainly at play to explain this drop-off, she says.

“People are still talking about how much it might have been policing, how much it might have been lead exposure.

“But I think that there's a pretty good argument to be made that there's some percentage of the rise in violent crime that can be attributed to the rise of lead in our atmosphere.”

The murder rate in the Seattle region rose by more than 30 percent in 1974, almost six times the national average.

“I think there is a good case to be made with circumstantial evidence, as they say in the courtroom, that led played some kind of role in this.”

Lead has long been known to damage the brain, she says.

“Study after study shows that the more lead you are exposed to, the higher your rate of all kinds of difficulties, including psychopathology, becomes later in your life,” Fraser says.

One of the serial killers in the region, Gary Ridgway, dubbed the Green River Killer, eventually pleaded guilty to 48 counts of first-degree aggravated murder. He had high exposure to pollution, she says.

“He had lead exposure from a number of different sources. He lived in the plume from the Tacoma smelter. He lived two miles away and grew up just a couple miles from Sea-Tac Airport [Seattle-Tacoma] at a time when planes were flying using jet fuel that was leaded. He also lived next to two very well-travelled highways.”

The other villains in the piece were the polluters themselves, she says.

“By the 1970s, the guys that are running these smelters, they've spent decade upon decade lying to the public.”

These companies insisted, she says, despite cattle dying in fields and crops being ruined, that the emissions from their plants were harmless.

“And the lying is so closely connected to the behaviour of the serial killers who are also just champion liars.”

Lead’s poisonous legacy remains in the US, she says.

“We still have leaded pipes, lead paint, lead in our soil. There are lots of cities in this country and around the world that have pockets of really severe lead pollution left over from that era of the smelters and leaded gas, and we're still discovering those all the time.”