TIL I Was Definitely Lead-Poisoned As A Child

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve had a Special Interest in serial killers since the summer between my younger kid’s freshman and sophomore years of high school. Told that she could take any classes she wanted that summer at the local community college, she chose 1) Introduction to Food Safety, which enabled her to get her ServSafe certification and set her up to take a proper baking class at the college the next fall, and 2) Serial Killers and Their Victims. This latter was in some ways EXTREMELY inadvisable, considering it was WAAAAY more graphic than I stupidly thought it would be and thank goodness, I guess, that it was online so the professor never realized that one of his students was only fourteen years old, but it also encouraged the kid’s academic interest in Criminology, taught her the concept of “ethical true crime storytelling,” and made her probably the most safety-conscious of all her college peers. She told me once during her freshman year that several of her hallmates never locked their dorm room doors.

“I asked them,” she said, “if they had any idea how many serial killers there are currently active in the US, because it’s a lot!”

Whenever someone pisses her off she also speculates about how they fared on the MacDonald Triad as a kid, but that’s a different issue…

@horror_chronicles Replying to @Taylorkay #greenscreen #horror #horrortok #horrorcommunity #psychology #psychologyfacts #macdonaldtriad ♬ Suspense, horror, piano and music box - takaya

Because she was only fourteen during this class (oops!), I often helped her study, so I, too, read the entirety of Serial Killers and Their Victims, spent several months talking too loudly and too often about Jeffrey Dahmer, and, while I’m admittedly less married to my kid’s commitment to “ethical true crime storytelling,” I still seek it out.

Murderland doesn’t perfectly embody ethical true crime storytelling, but I think it comes about as close as you can when the subject of your book really is the criminals and not the victims. Like, yes, there’s a lot of blow-by-blow details of what victims endured, and that always skates the line of what is necessary to tell the story vs. what is simply lascivious, but I never felt like my gaze was inappropriate. And anyway, this was NOTHING compared to the level of graphic detail in Serial Killers and Their Victims! I also felt like there was a proper point to all the detail: making it very clear that these serial killers were as they were because they were also walking Superfund sites.

The universal lead poisoning of our older generations has become a cultural joke at this point, but it is genuinely horrifying how prevalent heavy metal contaminants and chromosome disruptors and just general poisons were. The constant smelter pollution of the Pacific Northwest is one thing, but apparently everyone who was in the vicinity of a car was actively lead poisoned? Like, DUDE, I was born in 1976, and have actual memories of the not one, but TWO Ford Pintos that my family owned! Thankfully nobody ever rear-ended us while I was riding in one, but I was absolutely being lead poisoned well into the 1980s.

When I asked my partner if he thought that he had been lead poisoned as a child, he said, "I spent much of my childhood in Europe." Well, la-dee-dah, Mr. I'm Too Good for Lead Poisoning! You've got to deal with it secondhand now, don't you?!?

Murderland had another personal-ish connection in its discussion of Israel Keyes, a sometimes suspect, at least among armchair investigators, for the disappearance of local college student Lauren Spierer. I'm pretty sure that all the real authorities have long dismissed him, but reading about all of ground that all of these serial killers covered, just driving back and forth and murdering people along the way, honestly makes me not want to rule him out. I mean, Ted Bundy's road trips often involved detours to seemingly random spots just to abduct and murder random people, so it feels possible, however unlikely, that Keyes or another active serial killer could have done the same. That's not my own personal conspiracy theory, though. Like everyone else in town, I've got my own pet conspiracy theories and, overall, just the wish that somehow somebody will figure out what happened to her so her loved ones can have closure.

Elaborating the full context for all the environmental poisoning people, especially the economically disenfranchised, were subject to was a LOT: the history of industrialization, the biographies of prominent corporate families, the geological history of the Pacific Northwest, the shoddy decision-making at every level that led to shoddy construction projects that further disenfranchised the vulnerable. That, combined with the elements of memoir, did cause me to get pretty lost in the weeds sometimes. What I really needed were maps and timelines and graphs; after a while, there was so much information I was trying to hold onto that the author simply jumping back and forth between serial killers confused me. I read a whole crime committed by BTK before I realized I wasn’t reading another Ted Bundy joint!

P.S. View all my reviews.

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!