When the serial killer Ted Bundy was 7 years old, in 1953, he lived under an abhorrent black plume consisting of 630 annual tons of arsenic and a couple hundred more of lead. The plume emanated from the 562-foot-tall stack at ASARCO’s Ruston smelter, once the largest such emissions tower in the world, perched on the flanks of Commencement Bay some four miles northwest of downtown Tacoma. A veritable mint for its owners, the Guggenheim family, the plant was a nightmare for those living in its shadow.

In her new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Pulitzer-winning author Caroline Fraser fashions an odious link between environmental pollution (particularly ASARCO’s heavy metals) and Pacific Northwest serial killers. Bundy, Gary Ridgway, Israel Keyes, Robert Lee Yates—all the Washington bogeymen make appearances. They’re not glamorized. They’re not hailed as criminal geniuses (really, they weren’t). In Murderland, they’re data points. These vile men were responsible for some of the highest body counts in American criminal history. All, according to Fraser, were also chock-full of heavy metals.

“I wanted to put these men in a historical context instead of just looking at them one by one,” says Fraser. “Because that’s what true crime does. It creates a little silo around each one of them. When you open up the question of crime in the Pacific Northwest, it enables you to look at the history and ask what’s unique.”

Fraser grew up on Mercer Island under both the specter of violence from those killers and the tail end of ASARCO’s plume, which reached all the way north to Green Lake and south to Olympia. Traffic deaths were pervasive among her high school classmates, especially on I-90’s reversible lane, and the island’s population included a nascent serial killer named George Russell. Fraser recalls seeing the ASARCO smelter as a child “without knowing what it was.” It terrified her. In Murderland she describes the facility as an “archfiend chained on a burning lake, wrapped in dark designs and contemplating damnation.”

Fraser’s original serial killer research didn’t include environmental contamination. She was investigating an old crime on Vashon Island and noticed real estate listings that mentioned arsenic remediation. “So I Googled it,” she says. “And five minutes later I’m looking at the smelter.”

The lead-violence hypothesis had been advanced by others. The metal has long been known to cause “cruel, unreliable, impulsive behavior.” A 1996 study found that Pittsburgh-area children with higher lead levels in their teeth were “more aggressive, prone to anxiety, depression, social problems, and difficulty paying attention.” Two years prior, The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that, thanks to the removal of lead from gasoline and cans, blood lead levels had dropped 78 percent in the average US population since 1976—a far cry from the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the country underwent one of the most rapid industrialization processes in human history. Much of this progress involved the fabrication of metals. None of it, until 1970, was environmentally regulated.

“Recipes for making a serial killer may vary,” writes Fraser, “including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps deliveries, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect. Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma?”

Fraser explores three gigantic ASARCO stacks—Tacoma, El Paso, and Idaho’s Bunker Hill (off present-day I-90)—and finds ample death in their shadows. This is partially a numbers game. Fraser knows that. She’s not necessarily trying to prove anything. Clearly, the world could use fewer serial killers. Same with industrial polluters. The troubling part is that one of those groups gets locked up when they are caught, while the other traditionally doesn’t.

This locking up bit is another distressing aspect to Murderland; some of these killers ran loose for an awful long time. Bundy is the central focus, both for his Tacoma roots and unfortunate national influence. Fraser describes his monstrosity in unsparing language, like a camera lingering on a shot. It’s powerful enough to have you locking your doors at night—seriously—and goes on for so long that you’ll sigh relief when he’s finally apprehended by Sgt. Robert Hayward of the Utah Highway Patrol. Of course, that’s before Bundy escapes from jail. Not once, but twice!

Fraser gives a few reasons for police ineptitude. Early computers had difficulty crunching data. Interagency cooperation was limited. Bundy pioneered this pattern of mass killing, and his case’s investigator, Robert D. Keppel, was young and inexperienced. Still, by the time Gary Ridgway dumps his umpteenth sex worker in the Green River, many of them sourced from the exact same strip of Route 99 by SeaTac, the frustration reaches a crescendo. How could society let this happen?

(Related: How could society allow ASARCO to poison Tacoma’s children for nearly a century?)

Today’s culture is captivated by at least one of these questions. Fraser calls the modern-day explosion of true crime, especially podcasts, “a fascinating social phenomenon.” She thinks it can be partially explained by women’s fear of violence, the immeasurable gap in how genders experience safety. “I think it exposes something we’re not dealing with as a society,” she says. “We’re dealing with crime in all the wrong ways. There are fears, but we're not dealing with the fears in a rational, experience-based way.”

With a new EPA Administrator proposing widespread rollbacks of environmental regulations, and gun control a distant dream, Murderland is as topical as ever. It’s also one of the most well-researched nonfiction works in recent Washington memory. The ASARCO smelter is gone. So is Ted Bundy. But on a human scale, they aren’t so far in the rearview that we—or the Tacoma–Pierce County Health Department, which still runs soil testing programs related to the plume—can ignore their legacies. “My aim was not to give a bad reputation to Tacoma,” says Fraser, “but to help people remember, or if they don’t remember, to help them learn about history. It’s shocking and kind of horrible to think about people moving to Ruston or North Tacoma and not knowing. I just feel like that’s so important.”