Notorious serial killer Ted Bundy grew up in the toxic plume of Tacoma’s copper smelter, not unlike the polluted air of Jack the Ripper’s coal-burning London.
“London is Tacoma before Tacoma is even a gleam in a Guggenheim’s eye,” author Caroline Fraser writes in her new book, “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.”
Fraser, who hails from Mercer Island, investigates the link between repeat violent offenders and their exposure to lead, arsenic and other dirty materials in her true-crime nonfiction focused on Tacoma’s infamous Asarco industrial plant and the prevalence of serial killers from the Pacific Northwest.
In the late 1800s, the plant began processing mainly lead ores from local mines and switched in 1912 to copper, yielding inorganic arsenic, according to the book. The smelter, which bordered Ruston and north Tacoma, emitted lead and arsenic for several decades as the centerpiece of a company town before it was shut down in 1985 and later redeveloped as the residential and retail hub known as Point Ruston…