The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. Weyerhaeuser, Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, and serial killers.
Every decade, the headlines. “Why Are There So Many Serial Killers in the Northwest?” There is no answer. There are just numbers. Per capita, Alaska is number one in the country, Washington five, Oregon six.
“America’s killing fields,” it has been called, the home of the stranger, the lone wolf, the neighbor who’s a little too quiet. For some it’s a hobby. For others, a career.
They have their own brands, but they’re all different. The Want‑Ad Killer, the Boxcar Killer, the Lust Killer, the Phantom Sniper, the Hillside Strangler, the Lewiston Valley Killer, the I‑5 Killer, the Coin Shop Killer, the Dismemberment Murders, the Index Killer, the Happy Face Killer, the Eastside Killer, the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane. The Beast of British Columbia. The Green River Killer. Weirdly, many of them are born in the same period, shortly before, during, or after World War II.
Amateur cartographer, I draw lines, making maps tied to timelines, maps of rural roads and kill sites and body dumps. Some of the maps are in my mind. I always consider the location of the scene of the crime. In a chaotic world, maps make sense. There are people who have gurus or crystals or graven images. I have maps. They tell a story. They make connections.
Here’s one of my maps: It’s August of 1961. I’m seven months old. There are three males who live in what you might call the neighborhood, within a circle whose center is Tacoma. Their names are Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway.
What are the odds?
In 1961, Manson is twenty-six, serving a ten-year sentence in the federal prison on McNeil Island for forging a United States Treasury check. McNeil Island lies in Puget Sound, off the city of Tacoma.
Across the Sound, eight miles from Manson, Ted Bundy is fourteen, living at 658 North Skyline Drive, next to the approach to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
Gary Ridgway is twelve, residing north of Tacoma at 4404 South 175th Street, near SeaTac Airport, an address then considered to be in Seattle.
Eight years later, on August 9, 1969, Manson, gathering his followers, will urge them to murder everyone at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon on a night that will become a byword for inconceivable and random violence. The following night, they will kill Rosemary and Leno LaBianca.
Sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s, Gary Ridgway will begin killing women he picks up near the airport, blocks from where he grew up. He strangles prostitutes, runaways, and teenage girls. Dozens of them. At first he dumps their bodies in rivers, their hair rippling in the stream flow. Until 2001, when he’s apprehended, he will be known to the public only as the Green River Killer.
But in the early morning hours of August 31, 1961, the one who gets the ball rolling—the prodigy, the polymath, the boy wonder—is Ted Bundy. That night, rain lashes the windows, and I’m a baby in a basket, teething, seething, rubbing my hair off on a fuzzy yellow blanket. That night, during a thunderstorm, in a neighborhood he knows only too well, Ted Bundy climbs through the living room window of a family named Burr. He used to live right around the corner. He has friends who know the Burrs. He finds Ann Marie, who is eight, wearing a blue-and-white flowered nightie, two religious medals, and a bracelet invoking the protection of Saint Christopher. Pied Piper of Tacoma, he spirits her out the front door. She is never seen again.
Now let’s look at the map. If you take a ruler and lay it down in 1961 and connect the dots between Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway, you can practically draw a straight line.
Is it chance? Is there a connection? Well, that’s the question.
‘Murderland’ by Caroline Fraser
Tacoma is famous for one thing: its smell. If Seattle is considered a remote backwater in the 1950s—and it is—then Tacoma, poor sister to the south, is even more remote, more philistine, beneath contempt. Tacoma is Seattle’s industrial flunky, the also‐ran, the perennial embarrassment. Its setting once bore the rich grandeur of the Northwest, framed by mountains, royal robes of evergreens trailing into the placid harbor of Commencement Bay. Before white men arrived, it was a natural oasis, but Tacoma’s forefathers took that charm and threw it away with both hands.
In 1873, having commissioned a design by Frederick Law Olmsted laying out the town in a series of curvilinear terraces beautified with seven parks, city planners reacted with “a bemused blend of boosterism and dismay.” During a recession, they rejected Olmsted’s vision.
Instead, the town on Commencement Bay, considered one of the five best natural harbors in the world, chooses industry at every turn, buoyed by a brief boom associated with the building out of the Northern Pacific Railway, battening on the smoke and stench of wood pulp and paper‐mills, lumberyards, oil refineries, chemical plants, rendering plants, sewage tanks, and smelters. Soon their waste and effluent and slag heaps 33N are strewn beside the bay and across the Tacoma tidal flats like offal dropped from a raptor’s nest. Fifty‐three industrial plants are invited to squat there, in the center of the city, and the smell of decomposition and putrefaction and acidification, a stew of sulfur, chlorine, lye, and ammonia, suffuses the air. The staggering odor is called, as early as 1901, “the aroma of Tacoma.”
Year after year, lead is flying out of the American Smelting and Refining Company’s Tacoma smokestack, part of the industrial process of turning raw ores into metal. What is lead? It is a poison, second in toxicity only to arsenic. It is a chemical element bearing the atomic number 82 and the symbol Pb, from the Latin plumbum. In its solid phase, it is a shiny gunmetal gray, excruciatingly heavy. It 33N burns with a white flame. It’s resistant to corrosion. It never disappears. It enters the world in many ways, including but not limited to “oil‐processing activities, agrochemicals, paint, smelting, mining, refining, informal recycling of lead, cosmetics, peeling window and door frames, jewelry, toys, ceramics, pottery, plumbing materials and alloys, water from old pipes, vinyl mini‐blinds, stained glass, lead‐glazed dishes, firearms with lead bullets, batteries, radiators for cars and trucks, and some colors of ink.” Lead is a vampire. Invite it in and it will drink your blood and live forever.
It tastes sweet. Chemically, it resembles calcium and is taken up rapidly in the bodies of children as their bones are forming. In ancient Rome, where winemakers boiled their grapes in great vats lined with lead for added sweetness, the diets of Nero and Caligula were rich in lead.62 In Tacoma, decade after decade, it rises out of the smokestack, dust drifting and settling where it may—north, south, east, and west. The unwitting populace breathes it, eats it, drinks it, and becomes it.
When Louise and her son Ted Nelson arrive in Tacoma, they stay with her uncle John Cowell, three years her elder. John and Louise lived and played together as children. John is the social climber of the Cowell family. During World War II, he was seriously injured in a stateside training accident, preventing him from serving overseas. He recovered in time to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music at Yale, marrying an heiress and encountering such musical stars as Leonard Bernstein and Paul Hindemith. In 1948 he accepted a position he felt was beneath him, at the School of Music of the College of Puget Sound, in Tacoma. In his memoir he’ll write:
The Seattle‐Tacoma region was admittedly in the “minor leagues” musically, compared with the New York orbit we were so at home in. But it came to allow me to develop naturally as a composer and performer with freedom from the anxieties of the “big time” New York pressures.
That tinge of self‐satisfaction, pride in a former “New York orbit,” will thoroughly impress young Teddy, and his status as poor relation will be impressed upon him by his cousin, the Cowells’ young son John, six months Ted’s elder. The Cowells live at 1514 North Alder Street in Tacoma, a modest two‐story frame house just across the street from the college campus.
Louise and Ted eventually move to a place in Browns Point, a nub of land on the far side of Commencement Bay, directly across from Ruston and the smelter. He is four, he is five, and the smokestack is filling the air with redolent particulates while he hunts for frogs in the local swamps. “I was somewhat of a champion frog catcher,” he’ll later say. “I was a frog man. Prided myself on my ability to spot that pair of bulging eyes, which would bob just above the surface of a murky pond.”
While Teddy is marinating in Browns Point, Louise finds an office job as a secretary and dips her toe in the dating pool, attending a First Methodist Church social. There she meets another displaced soul struggling to make his way in the city, Johnnie Culpepper Bundy, an orphan from a backwoods North Carolina farm, one of a family of ten. Before Johnnie was a teen, his mother died and his father followed, drowning himself in the Pasquotank River in 1934, at the age of forty‐eight. In the 1940s, Johnnie did what dirt‐poor orphans from North Carolina usually did: he joined the Navy. After the war, he washed up out west, adrift in the turbid waters of Tacoma. Johnnie met Louise in 1951 and fastened upon her like a limpet. They married within months, on May 19, 1951, and Teddy stuck his hand in the wedding cake.
Teddy doesn’t like his new stepfather, who has a dorky Nash Rambler, a clown car, and works as a cook at the Fort Lewis military hospital, south of town. Nonetheless, Johnnie adopts the boy, who, in his larval stage, morphs into Ted Bundy. Teddy notes that Johnnie is passive, with little to say, deferring to Louise. Teddy prefers his uncle John, who drives foreign cars. He wants to be adopted by John Cowell and leave his mother behind; he wants to live with Roy Rogers and have his own pony; he wears a cowboy hat and a sweater appliquéd with bucking broncos, every button buttoned. In 1953, Teddy’s seventh year of life, 630 tons of arsenic and a couple hundred tons of lead pour out of the Ruston stack.66 No one knows it yet, but that’s more airborne arsenic than anywhere else in the country. It’s one of the largest sources of arsenic emissions in the world.
That same year, the Bundys move to the Skyline neighborhood, all of them packed into a tiny cracker box of a house beside State Highway 16, which feeds traffic onto the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The bridge has been rebuilt and painted with lead‐based paint.
Over the coming years, Louise has first one child, then another and another. Displaced by Bundy babies, Teddy joins the Boy Scouts and bicycles all over Tacoma, skimming through back alleys like a common tern, hovering outside windows, picking through garbage. He gets teased because of a mild speech impediment. At scout camp, he can’t get the hang of what the other kids are doing, can’t tie the knots right, can’t shoot the gun straight, and can’t win the races. He gets angry and likes to scare people. His elementary teachers note “boisterous” and “immature” behavior.
He is ten, he is eleven. He has a paper route and a pocketknife and slashes the seats of an expensive convertible. He hits a fellow scout over the head with a stick from behind. He is found undressed in a tent with a scoutmaster. He runs up behind girls and pulls their pants down and likes to build “tiger traps” in the woods with his friends—pits covered with vegetation that hide sharpened sticks poking up from the bottom. He never lives farther than five miles from the smokestack.
Skyline is a new development. The city’s population is burgeoning as tens of thousands of postwar hopefuls are drawn by jobs in the railyards, mills, and smelters. South of the bridge, as old‐growth forest is clear‐cut, Skyline is bulldozed out of the “cut‐over stump land,” as the smelter manager puts it, and carved into minuscule lots.73
The manager tries to convince the city fathers not to turn Skyline into a human warren. The proposed suburban development, he warns, is just four miles south of the Ruston smelter. It lies, he says, “in the heart of our smoke stream” and is “our area of greatest fumigation.” He knows that people will complain about the smell, for starters.
And they do. But it’s not just the smell. For decades, nothing grows reliably, not trees, not the Douglas firs that spring up everywhere else like grass, not shrubs, not roses, not lawns. Gardens fail; crops die; bees die.
Strange spots appear on the laundry, hung to dry on the line. Small farmers sue. Every few years, the smelter “blows out” the smokestack, an expectorant form of industrial housecleaning, causing “arsenic showers.” When the smelter coughs, white ash falls all across town, snow made of lead and arsenic. Cats and dogs walk in it and try to lick it off their paws and collapse and die. It is known that smelter officials will pay a few dollars to replace them. Children have trouble breathing. They develop coughs and rashes and asthma. These are the diseases that can be seen.
The diseases that cannot be seen are different. These diseases constitute a category called the “late effects of lead poisoning on mental development,” caused by infants breathing leaden air or chewing little flakes of lead paint off walls or the slats of their cribs or inhaling invisible particles out of the air or off windowsills or the steps to their homes. The late effects include “cruel, unreliable, impulsive behavior” and “extreme unpredictability” and have been documented since at least the 1920s, when a physician wrote, with alarm, that children were living “in a lead world.” There’s lead in the air, in soil, in paint, in pipes, in water, toys, food, and milk, but there are no federal standards governing lead levels in products, in the environment, or in the blood or bones of children.
The late effects of lead poisoning on children’s moods and behavior stem from “gross evidence of cerebral damage.” These children act out. They are said to be “crazy‐like.” They are irritable, nervous, inattentive, slow to learn. They have short attention spans. Sometimes they scream and bang their heads. Sometimes they set fires. Sometimes they wet the bed. They have dreams “bordering on hallucinations.” One boy, at six, sticks a fork into another boy’s face, steals pencils and pens, and sets his apartment on fire twice.
Lead can be seen in X‐rays—deposited on the margins of children’s long bones or in opaque flakes of paint in their intestines—or in a blue‐tinged “lead line” in their gums. Lead can be measured in human blood in micrograms per deciliter. (A deciliter is a little less than half a cup.) In a child, blood lead levels of 125 micrograms per deciliter can cause acute swelling of the brain (encephalopathy) and death; over 80, kidney failure; over 60, stomach spasms; over 20, anemia and neuropathy. Levels around 10 may be responsible for the loss of nine or ten IQ points. There is no safe level of lead in the body, especially for children.
Industry and its spokesmen are quick to blame poor parenting for kids who eat paint, but it’s not that simple. A major culprit emerges: leaded gas.
Leaded gas fumes drift through the Skyline neighborhood of Tacoma, where the Bundy family is perched right beside Highway 16, the busy roadway yards from their home, but it’s nothing compared with the fumes and particulates from the Ruston smokestack. Much of Tacoma, with a population approaching 150,000, will record high lead levels in neighborhood soils, but the Bundy family lives near a string of astonishingly high measurements of 280, 340, and 620 parts per million. 91 Lead occurs naturally in soil at trace levels of no more than fifteen to forty parts per million.
In June 1961, Charlie Manson, a pimp, a thief, a violator of the Mann Act (transporting prostitutes across state lines), and a disciple of Dale Carnegie, is transferred to the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island, across from South Tacoma in the nether reaches of Puget Sound. Born to a fifteen‐year‐old girl, he has spent his first years in a mining town in West Virginia, product of broken homes, reform schools, and institutions. He never knew his father. Now twenty‐six, he spends his days at McNeil sitting in a five‐tier cellblock listening to the radio and studying Scientology and learning to play the guitar and writing songs and breathing the air from the Ruston smokestack.
McNeil Island is proudly self‐sustaining. Prisoners drink water from a well, grow crops, and tend a dairy herd, producing most of the food they eat. During his five years on the island, virtually everything Manson eats and drinks comes out of the earth, where particulates from the Ruston plume have been drifting down to the ground since 1890. He’ll live on McNeil Island longer than he’s lived in any place in his life. Later studies on McNeil find lead in soil ranging from a low of nineteen parts per million to a high of a 190. Helter smelter.
A few miles north of Tacoma, young Gary Ridgway is also growing up in the plume. Before settling there, his itinerant family has moved all over the Intermountain West, and his older brother fondly recalls playing with Gary “in the slag pile from a copper mine” in Idaho. The Ridgways live two miles east of the Seattle‐Tacoma International Airport (SeaTac). That area, in addition to the Ruston plume, suffers powerful secondary exposures, trapped as it is between two of the most heavily traveled north–south routes in the region, Pacific Highway South (old Highway 99) and Interstate 5. The prevailing wind blows inland from the west, sweeping highway and jet fuel fumes across the neighborhood. Airplanes are flying on leaded gas. There is no lead limit for aircraft, but most mixes contain around three grams of lead per gallon, higher than the 1.10 grams in gasoline sold for cars and trucks.
In 1960, annual lead emissions from the Tacoma smokestack are estimated at 226 tons. In the summer of 1961, Gary is twelve and wets the bed. He is said to be “slow” and is held back a grade. “I wasn’t learning good enough,” he’ll later say. His mother, who has a habit of going about scantily clad and sunbathing nude in the backyard, scrubs his genitals to punish him for bedwetting, and he finds himself beset by hallucinatory fantasies, simultaneously dreaming of having sex with his mother and of slitting her throat with a kitchen knife. His father drives buses but works part time in a mortuary and relishes telling his family about a co‐worker who has sex with corpses.
On August 31, 1961, the number one hit song in America is “Wooden Heart,” a song recorded the previous year by Elvis Presley, adapted from a German folk song. It has a pronounced oompah rhythm, accompanied by accordion. Elvis sings some of it in the original German, some in English, begging his lover to treat him good, because “I’m not made of wood / And I don’t have a wooden heart.” For Pinocchio, for any puppet yearning to be a real boy, it is the perfect anthem.
In the heart of our smoke stream, Teddy is the boy with a wooden heart, a leaden heart, who goes out before dawn, working his paper route on his bicycle, escaping the house where his mother is heavily pregnant with the fourth Bundy baby. He rides and rides and ends up at the Burr house, just around the corner from where he used to live. He has lately been prone to violent daydreams and night visions of an extreme sexual nature, fantasies and nocturnal emissions, strangulation married to ejaculation.
He has seen exciting things in the true crime detective magazines at the drugstore, in the pornography in other peoples’ trash, and perhaps in his grandfather’s potting shed, long ago. But seeing is not believing. He wants to act it out.
He is fourteen. He rides and rides in the dark night of August 31, peering into windows. The Burrs’ living room window is cracked open, to allow the TV antenna to snake outside. He drags a little bench over to the window and stands on it, pushing the sash up, leaving a footprint on the bench and another in a flowerbed beside the basement door, the imprint of a teenager’s tennis shoe.
The Burrs live on North 14th Street, around the corner from where his uncle John once lived. Next door to the Burrs’ Tudor bungalow is old Mrs. Gustafson’s orchard, a maze of apple trees and raspberry bushes, frequented by neighborhood children. That summer, the street is upended by sewer construction: down the block yawn thirty‐foot‐deep trenches full of mud and rainwater.
The Burr family is troubled that night. Eight‐year‐old Ann is sharing a bedroom with three‐year‐old Mary, who has a cast on her arm after falling off a playground slide. Mary keeps waking up because it is warm and humid. A half an inch of rain is falling. For the past few nights, Ann’s parents have thought they heard someone prowling in the yard. In the middle of the night, Mary starts crying: the skin under her cast is itching. Ann takes Mary to their mother, Bev. Bev shushes them and sends them back to bed. Their cocker spaniel Barney barks and barks, but Bev thinks that it’s the wind and the rain.
It’s not the wind and the rain. It’s more than likely Ted Bundy, the paperboy, leaning in the living room window, asking Ann to open the front door, offering a combination of whispered persuasion or temptation or promises or threats that will never be known. Ann idolizes teenage boys and has a crush on one, calling him “lover boy.” She’s pals with a girl named Sandi Holt. Sandi’s older brother Doug is Ted’s best friend.
She leaves the door ajar as she goes, and her mother will find it standing open in the morning. Ted leads her into Mrs. Gustafson’s orchard and, although no one will ever confirm exactly what happens there, he may well rape her and strangle her and throw her body like a rag into a pool of water at the bottom of a construction trench. Later he will deny it but admit that, the summer he was fourteen, “something happened.” It was something “autoerotic,” he will say, something that involved an eight‐year‐old girl.
Oh, and one other thing. She’s still down there.
From MURDERLAND: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser, to be published on June 10th, 2025 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Caroline Fraser.
