Caroline Fraser
Fleet, $34.99

“Correlation does not imply causation.” So every student of logic or science is told, and it’s true. It is a far sounder principle than the vacuous, oft-heard assertion that “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”.

Nonetheless, there are circumstances in which correlation certainly does imply causation, and smoke is indeed a telling symptom of a hellish inferno. Whether in the laboratory or the courtroom, it all comes down to weight of evidence.

In Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser’s gripping, relentless, and often distressing Murderland, she makes a compelling case for a causal link between the atrocities committed by countless serial killers across the United States from the 1960s to the first decade of the 21st century, and the unfettered, unregulated release of millions of tons of heavy metals by American industry since the Second World War.

Of the grisly crimes there is no doubt. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of victims were raped, tortured and murdered by deranged psychopaths in a crime wave spanning five decades.

There is no disputing the toxicity of the effluents, exhausts and emissions belching from smokestacks, vehicles and waste pipes since the 19th century either, nor the colossal growth of same since the United States industrial boom during and after the war.

Fraser’s thesis is that many of the children conceived and born since the 1940s were ingesting brain-scrambling pollutants, lead especially, at levels which no generation of children before or since have had to contend And as for which kids fared the worst, well, that depended very much on where you lived. If you were born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, say in the Tacoma/Seattle area of Washington state, in El Paso, Texas, or near Bunker Hill, Idaho, you spent your formative years unwittingly immersed in a biochemical miasma.

Or, in many cases, deformative years. But as Carl Sagan insisted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. On the face of it, linking lead poisoning to anti-social behaviour is not much of a stretch, but laying the blame for the brutal, relentless criminality of Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, the Hillside Strangler and their countless imitators to sooty playgrounds and foul air might seem to be.

Fraser makes her case convincingly, not just with statistics (though she comes armed with plenty of terrifying numbers), but with maps. She is a firm believer in the power of cartography, tracing toxic smelter plumes to place these maniacs-in-the-making at various grounds zero.

Murderland is not for the squeamish. The relentless and detailed descriptions of the crimes would border on the voyeuristic, were it not for their cumulative impact as part of Fraser’s scathing indictment of the real villains. It is Fraser’s fury at corporations knowingly allowing these kids to be poisoned that drives her important, often terrifying book.

She shares the blame for these senseless, sadistic atrocities between the deranged men who shot, stabbed and tortured so many women, and greedy company executives, some of whom she would happily have had follow Bundy to Florida’s electric chair on January 24, 1989.

In one particularly appalling episode, Frank Woodruff, a senior executive at the Bunker Hill smelter in Idaho, was faced in 1973 with a decision on whether to close down for repairs, after a major fire in an emissions filtration building.

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Woodruff, based on what a smelter in El Paso had had to recently pay out for lead poisoning claims, writes a memo, which read in part “El Paso – 200 children – $5,000 to $10,000 per kid.” A back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that paying out at even $12,000 per damaged child, and allowing for 500 claims, the company would be $11 million ahead by keeping the smelter open without filtration.

Inevitably, the children of nearby Deadwood Gulch (yep, that’s where they lived) lost out, and hundreds of tons of lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury poured from the stacks.

Fraser is not an apologist for serial killers and their horrific crimes. But in this thoroughly researched and damning indictment, she makes it clear who she holds equally responsible.

The air in America, and here, is much cleaner now, but as well as the lakes, rivers and forests still laced with poisons there remain countless families shattered by corporate greed. It is a very ugly legacy.