Chemical reaction? How this Washington city became the serial-killer capitol of America

In 1996, Jack Spillman (a k a the Werewolf Butcher) confessed to murdering three people, two of them children and one just 9 years old.

His brutality was staggering, not just raping his victims but dismembering them, drinking their blood and removing their sexual organs.

Bob Keppel — the chief criminal investigator for the attorney general of Washington state, where the murders were committed and Spillman lived — told reporters that “killers like Spillman, mutilators who commit cannibalism, vampirism, and necrophilia, are exceptionally rare, representing less than a tenth of 1 percent of all murderers,” writes Caroline Fraser in her new book, “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers” (Penguin Press), out June 10.

What he failed to mention was that many of these “rare breed” serial killers had “spent quality time in Tacoma, a place where paraphilias flourish like fungi,” she writes.

The Pacific Northwest is known for five things, writes Fraser: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee and serial killers. “If you take a ruler and lay it down in 1961 and connect the dots between Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway, you can practically draw a straight line,” writes Fraser.

Is it just an unlucky coincidence? Or could it, wonders Fraser, have something to do with the region’s high concentration of smelters, factories that release high levels of arsenic, cyanide, lead and other dangerous chemicals into the air?

In 2018, Washington state’s Department of Ecology launched an online resource called “Dirt Alert,” a block‑by‑block map of lead and arsenic contamination.

Of the four major “plumes” — the largest area of contaminated soil, usually located near smelters, industrial factories used to extract metals from ore — every one of them “has hosted the activities of one or more serial rapists or murderers,” writes Fraser.

The author fully acknowledges that pollution is far from the only explanation. “Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps deliveries, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect,” she writes. “But what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma?

Ground zero for this theory is Tacoma, a port city 30 miles southwest of Seattle.

It’s been home to a staggering 53 industrial plants, including one run by the American Smelting and Refining Company.

Since the early 20th century, the putrid odor of sulfur, chlorine, lye and ammonia coming from these factories has been dubbed “the aroma of Tacoma.”

It was also the home of Spillman, who moved there with his mother at age 7. Between 1976 and 1982, he lived 6 miles from ASARCO.

Gary Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer was one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, strangling at least 49 prostitutes, runaways and teenage girls.

He grew up just a few miles from the Seattle-​­Tacoma International Airport, where in addition to pollution from the Tacoma smokestacks, he also ingested jet fuel fumes from airplanes still flying on leaded gas. 

Ted Bundy — who confessed to murdering 30 women before being sentenced to death by electric chair in 1989 — moved to Tacoma with his mom when he was just 3, to a neighborhood where smokestacks “filled the air with redolent particulates.”

Charles Manson, soon-to-be leader of a murderous cult, spent five years behind bars on Tacoma’s McNeil Island during the early ’60s, where “virtually everything Manson eats and drinks comes out of the earth, where particulates from the Ruston plume have been drifting down to the ground since 1890,” writes Fraser. “He’ll live on McNeil Island longer than he’s lived in any place in his life.”

Even David Brame, a former police chief at Tacoma, became a killer, murdering his wife in front of his two young children, 8 and 5, and also allegedly raping a woman at gunpoint in 1988.

Studies have backed up Fraser’s theory, proving again and again that “childhood lead exposure is associated with aggression, psychopathy, and crime,” writes Fraser.

A 2001 study examined homicide rates and air lead levels in 3,111 counties across the US. Researchers found that “the incidence of homicide is nearly 4 percent higher in counties with high air lead concentration than in counties with no lead,” writes Fraser.

The connection between air quality and serial killing may have a longer history than we realize.

As Fraser points out, Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London in 1888, was breathing air contaminated by burning bituminous coal, which produced “prodigious amounts of soot, smoke, gas, and ash,” writes Fraser.

The ASARCO smokestack was finally demolished in 1993, and many other smelters soon followed. “Their profitability slashed by falling prices and by EPA regulations,” writes Fraser. But the damage is still lingering.

“Whatever’s left in the environment is still there,” writes Fraser. “It coats the medians and byways of every major interstate . . . It’s in the bodies and bones and teeth of everyone who grew up with it.”

Every once in a while, she writes, “it sets loose another Frankenstein’s monster.”