The Crime Lady: MURDERLAND and "The Bundy Problem"
Dear TCL Readers:
Two newsletters this week! This one’s shorter, and for a special reason: I have a new review/essay up at The Atlantic on Caroline Fraser’s Murderland, which has one of the more provocative theses in the true crime space — that the rise of serial killers, particularly in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and 1980s, owes a lot to the incidence of environmental toxins pumped out by smelters (think lead, also arsenic, zinc, copper, etc.) in those areas. Fraser also connects both strands to her own life, growing up on Mercer Island, desperate to flee to a bigger city and away from her menacing father.
As I write in the piece:
Setting up a tripartite structure of murder, industrial history, and memoir is a complicated task. Fraser comes close to pulling it off, as Murderland is wonderfully propulsive and hard to put down. But in casting about for a grand unified theory connecting serial murder to a larger environmental phenomenon, Fraser falls into a trap I’ve taken to calling the “Bundy Problem”: Whenever he’s present in a story, even if the focus turns elsewhere, he dominates it; the abominable details of his myth, such as the sheer number of his victims and the enraging failures of law enforcement, take up all the available air. Bundy is the malware of narrative. By focusing on him, Fraser relegates her thesis about the damage done by pollution to the background. More important, Bundy’s actual victims, the dozens of women and girls whose lives he snuffed out, grow ever dimmer.
I know I’m going to be thinking about Murderland for a long time, even if I don’t think the book entirely lands the plane. The book also pairs very well with Ginger Strand’s Killer on the Road, which correlates the same rise in serial killing with the creation of the Interstate Highway systems. Easy getaways, long distances — those certainly were factors, too.
But perhaps it’s a tall order, looking for a grand unified theory to explain stochastic violence perpetrated by men upon women. We want to make meaning out of the unspeakable, and sometimes it really is garden-variety misogyny writ large.
My deepest thanks to my editor, Emma Sarappo, who took a very unwieldy first draft and figured out the argument I was actually trying to make, and then pushed me to write the best possible piece, and to Will Gordon and Michelle Ciarocca for their excellent fact-checking.
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A little more on “The Bundy Problem”: I didn’t get into it in the essay — which was plenty long — but I had a similar feeling while reading Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women, a novel that had the best of intentions in trying to reverse-engineer the narrative to focus on the women who survived his onslaught (and some who didn’t) but also couldn’t escape the killer’s long shadow. Bundy is never named, and yet, he dominates the book regardless.
It could also be my own personal failing. The one time I wrote about his crimes was in conjunction with a well-done documentary that centered the victims, as well as his longtime girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer (writing as Kendall) and her daughter, Molly. As Trish Wood, the documentarian in question, told me, “We all know Ted Bundy, but no one can name the victims, who have kind of drifted into sepia-toned memory.”
Five and a half years later, except for a handful — namely, Kimberly Leach, his final victim, and Kathy Kleiner Rubin and Carol DaRonch, two survivors of his attacks — the names of those Bundy murdered remain a dark blur in my mind, and in the collective mind of society. It isn’t fair, when so much of true crime media still centers killers like him. But I firmly believe that whenever victims, survivors and their family members have a chance to be heard, we should listen closely, with care, and never let stop.
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One other announcement before I sign off: The Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prizes were announced earlier this week, and the nonfiction winner — which I picked — was Dear Da-Lê by Anh Duong (Douglas & MacIntyre). It’s an extraordinary memoir that I hope will be published outside of Canada. (Congrats as well to the winners in fiction and romance, The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard and Never Been Better by Leanne Toshiko Simpson.)
Here’s my citation: “As Duong writes in luminous, exacting prose, his story serves as a reminder of how war can divide and damage people and communities, not only during wartime but also for generations after. Dear Da-Lê stopped my heart and stole my breath, and we are all better off that Duong put to pen his lifelong reckoning with trauma and the costs of war.”
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A heat wave’s about to roll in. Stay cool, and read a good book.
Until next time, I remain,
The Crime Lady