Chemical reaction? How this Washington city became the serial-killer capitol of America

In 1996, Jack Spillman (a k a the Werewolf Butcher) confessed to murdering three people, two of them children and one just 9 years old.His brutality was staggering, not just raping his victims but dismembering them, drinking their blood and removing their sexual organs.Bob Keppel — the chief criminal investigator for the attorney general of Washington state, where the murders were committed and Spillman lived — told reporters that “killers like Spillman, mutilators who commit cannibalism, vampirism, and necrophilia, are exceptionally rare, representing less than a tenth of 1 percent of all murderers,” writes Caroline Fraser in her new book, “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers” (Penguin Press), out June 10.What he failed to mention was that many of these “rare breed” serial killers had “spent quality time in Tacoma, a place where paraphilias flourish like fungi,” she writes.The Pacific Northwest is known for five things, writes Fraser: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee and serial killers.

“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,” writes Fraser.Is it just an unlucky coincidence? Or could it, wonders Fraser, have something to do with the region’s high concentration of smelters, factories that release high levels of arsenic, cyanide, lead and other dangerous chemicals into the air?In 2018, Washington state’s Department of Ecology launched an online resource called “Dirt Alert,” a block‑by‑block map of lead and arsenic contamination.Of the four major “plumes” — the largest area of contaminated soil, usually located near smelters, industrial factories used to extract metals from ore — every one of them “has hosted the activities of one or more serial rapists or murderers,” writes Fraser.The author fully acknowledges that pollution is far from the only explanation.

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