What makes a serial killer

In early 1978, a serial killer named Dennis Rader, who’d later become known as the BTK (“Bind, torture, kill”) Strangler, wrote a letter to his local TV station, taking credit for several recent murders. His crimes were especially gruesome, with Rader breaking into the homes of his victims, mainly women in their early 20s (though he also killed a thirtysomething couple and their two young children), before tying them up, strangling them with belts or smothering them with plastic bags, and masturbating while they died. Rader wanted acclaim for his horrific crimes, which he considered noble rather than stomach-churning, believing himself to possess a quality he called “factor X”. This trait, he told the TV station, was shared by other serial killers, including the many then active in the Pacific north-west, among them Ted Bundy, who would confess to 30 murders, but was suspected of many more.

In her new book, Pulitzer prize winner Caroline Fraser attempts to work out what that “factor X” is, and the background behind this cluster of men who killed mostly young women, in incredibly harrowing ways, in a specific part of America during the mid-70s and 1980s. But this isn’t a straightforward analysis of the psychological profile that drives some men to kill; instead, it explores the deprived surroundings that shaped these murderers. Like much of the US, Fraser was fascinated by these crimes, which dominated the nightly news of her childhood and adolescence. Growing up in Seattle in a Christian Scientist family, with a father so mean he confined his wife to the basement to avoid heating his house, Fraser experienced privations that left her especially alert to the misogyny in 1970s American culture. She pays particular attention to the true-crime magazines that glamorised murder – and which some of these murderers claimed directly influenced them.

Unsurprisingly, given his killing spree was so extensive and his life so dramatic, the person Fraser returns to most frequently is Bundy, who defended himself in court and escaped from custody twice before meeting his end in the electric chair at the age of 42. Attractive and functional enough to have girlfriends, Bundy led a double life and would abduct, strangle and rape a huge number of female students between 1974 and 1978. Alongside accounts of his crimes, Fraser also weaves in the actions of an extraordinary number of other killers active in and around this period. These include Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, named after Washington’s Green River, where he disposed of the first five people he murdered, before going on to kill almost 50 young runaways and sex workers; Randall Woodfield, the I-5 Killer, a rapist and murderer named after the Pacific north-west highway he used as a getaway; and Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker, a satanist who caused terror by breaking into homes and raping and killing the people inside.

It’s grisly stuff, but the true marvel of this book is Fraser’s tone: plain enough not to prettify the terrible details, but with an empathy usually absent from police reports or true-crime books. Through a careful accumulation of horrific (but never prurient) detail, Fraser looks at whether there are commonalities between these men that may not have been explored before. While there are many potential factors that create serial killers – Fraser lists poverty, crude forceps delivery, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage and neglect – she argues there’s one that’s been previously overlooked: the physical environment in which multiple murderers have grown up and then operate. More specifically, Fraser notes the damage caused to air and water by the presence of lead, copper and arsenic smelters in the Pacific north-west, citing studies that suggest that childhood lead exposure is associated with aggression, psychopathy and crime, particularly in men. This could make readers uneasy if it were used as a justification for their crimes, but Fraser suggests it’s part of a bigger picture of unchecked male violence, exploring how the cultural climate of the time was almost as toxic as the natural one.

Haunting, elegant and fiercely intelligent, Murderland works as a moving requiem for the many lives cut short by these killers, but it’s also a clear-eyed sociological account of how this terror affected the entire country, and how we cannot understand these terrible crimes without also fully appreciating the darkness of the era in which they occurred.

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser is published by Fleet (£25). Order a copy from observershop.co.uk to receive a 10% discount. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images