PORT ANGELES — Draw a line from Cape Flattery to Lake Crescent and then to Seattle. Continue on to Lake Sammamish and Stampede Pass. Keep going to Cle Elum, Ellensburg and Walla Walla.
You’ve just traced a geologic fault called the Olympic-Wallowa Lineament — what author Caroline Fraser calls a “route wreathed in bodies,” a legacy of Pacific Northwest serial killers.
In her latest book, “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers,” Fraser asks what makes a serial killer and why has this corner of the United States been a breeding ground for them?
Fraser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” is in Port Angeles and Port Townsend this week as Peninsula College’s 2025 Writer-in-Residence.
Fraser will speak at 12:30 p.m. today at Studium Generale in The Little Theater on the Port Angeles campus of Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd. At 1:30 p.m., there will be a screening of the American Masters’ documentary “Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page,” followed by a conversation with Fraser facilitated by Peninsula College professor Helen Lovejoy and instructor Rich Riski.
The “Murderland” project began when Fraser was trapped at her home in Santa Fe during COVID. She had some ideas for biographies in mind, but with archives closed, an essential avenue of research was unavailable.
“I’d always been really curious about the whole Pacific Northwest association with serial killers,” Fraser said. “Had there ever been an explanation for this? And what kind of explanation could there be if there if there was one?”
There was Ted Bundy, who, before his execution in 1989, admitted to the deaths of 30 women — at least seven of them in Washington. And Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who pleaded guilty to murdering 49 women in Washington and Oregon.
There were other, lesser-known but equally disturbing predators: Kenneth Bianchi, Westley Allan Dodd, Charles Rodman Campbell, Joseph Edward Duncan, Warren Leslie Forrest, Billy Gohl, Billy Addison Taylor, Randall Woodfield and Robert Lee Yates.
Fraser weaves her own story of growing up on Mercer Island in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s with the kidnappings and horrific killings of children and young women that dominated the news during those decades.
In trying to explain the prevalence of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest, she points to the Asarco Company copper smelter in Tacoma that pumped toxins like arsenic and lead into the atmosphere over a 1,000-square-mile area for more than 100 years.
Exposure to lead and arsenic has been associated with criminal behavior, violence and anti-social traits. Could bad air have been a contributing factor in producing a cohort of men who exhibited psychopathic tendencies, lack of sense of remorse and hunger for control?
Companies like Asarco were no better than the serial killers, she said, by using deception and deceit to get what they wanted.
“They’re kind of evocative of each other,” Fraser said. “Lying is a big theme in this book. For Asarco and other corporations, that was pretty much their game plan for dealing with the public and the fallout of what they were doing was to lie about it.”
The influence of place, landscape and nature on individuals informs both “Murderland” and “Prairie Fires.”
“The sense of the Northwest is of a place where it’s threatening and it’s a landscape that is so overwhelming in some ways and so dangerous,” Fraser said. (Think David Lynch and “Twin Peaks.”)
For Wilder, it was her early years spent on the prairie and chronicled in eight semi-autobiographical children’s books published between 1932 and 1943 that formed her character as self-reliant and resilient.
“Laura went to Dakota Territory and she loved it, she thought it was the most beautiful place she had ever been,” Fraser said. “But there were people who had mental breakdowns because they couldn’t stand the size and emptiness.
“It says a lot about her how she reacted to it.”
While she has no sympathy for the serial killers she writes about, Fraser has more nuanced feelings toward Wilder.
“I feel a great deal of affection and exasperation,” she said. “As a writer, I’m always trying to explain things to myself, and it’s frustrating when I can’t make things work out. I often wish that could have had a conversation with her.”
‘Murderland’
“Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers,” by Caroline Fraser, Penguin Press, $32, 480 pages (June 10, 2025)
Writer-in-Residence
Caroline Fraser, 2025 Peninsula College Writer-in-Residence, will speak today during Studium Generale at the Peninsula College Main Campus, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd., Port Angeles.
• 12:35 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. — Presentation in the Little Theater with an introduction by Peninsula College professor Kate Reavey. This event also is available via Zoom: Meeting ID: 834 3095 5029
• 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. — Screening of American Masters’ documentary “Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page” in the Little Theater followed by a conversation with Fraser facilitated by Peninsula College professor Helen Lovejoy and instructor Rich Riski.
Both events are free and open to the public.
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached by email at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com.
