Fraser’s essay might be read as a preface to her new book, “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers,” an extraordinarily well-written and genre-defying blend of memoir, social and environmental history, and forensic inquest. The book opens with a typically dry observation: “The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. Weyerhaeuser, Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon, Starbucks, and serial killers.” What follows is a granular, if poetic, attempt to solve two related mysteries: What might account for the abrupt rise and equally abrupt fall, between the nineteen-sixties and the turn of the century, of the “golden age” of serial killing? And why were so many of these brutes—almost all of them men—cradled in a crescent of psychopathy around Seattle’s Puget Sound?
Fraser admits that she, too, is a practitioner of what she calls the “crazy wall”: “Amateur cartographer, I draw lines, making maps tied to timelines, maps of rural roads and kill sites and body dumps.” She continues, “In a chaotic world, maps make sense. There are people who have gurus or crystals or graven images. I have maps. They tell a story. They make connections.” She locates herself on the first and most puzzling of these maps: “It’s August of 1961. I’m seven months old. There are three males who live in what you might call the neighborhood, within a circle whose center is Tacoma. Their names are Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway. What are the odds?”
A crazy wall can function as an actual tool. A good detective assumes, as a heuristic, that there are no coincidences. She uses pushpins and red yarn to reveal hidden patterns, and these patterns ensnare the perpetrator. A crazy wall is just as likely to function as a metaphor. A bad detective also assumes there are no coincidences, not as a heuristic but as a matter of conspiratorial or aesthetic principle. She uses pushpins and red yarn to create hidden patterns, and these patterns ensnare her.
Fraser’s quarry is not an individual perpetrator, and her book is not a whodunnit, at least not in the traditional sense. The stories she recounts have been settled. Ted Bundy, the principal vector of Fraser’s narrative, was a sadist who spent the nineteen-seventies raping and killing dozens of women—first in Washington State, then in the intermountain West, and finally in Florida—before he was executed, by electrocution, in 1989. He generally approached his targets posing as an injured man in need of some sort of aid; once in or near his car, he bludgeoned them as a prelude to rape, murder, and extended necrophilia. He squirrelled away the remains of his victims on remote logging roads or mountain passes, revisiting the sites until decomposition or wild animals rendered further abuse unfeasible. Fraser details these atrocities with clinical precision. She declines to indulge the allure of Bundy’s Lecter-like cunning, emphasizing instead the innocent lives he cut short—and the raft of mistakes made by law-enforcement officers in their ham-handed pursuit.