I have written before about the possible connection between the presence of lead in the environment and violent crime by young men. Much of the evidence is correlational but nonetheless suggestive. What researchers such as Rick Nevin found was that the amount of lead in things like gasoline and paint was phased out at different times in different parts of the world (and in different states in the US) and that crime started to drop about two decades after the drop in blood lead content.

This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent crime rate trends over several decades in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. The relationship is characterized by best-fit lags (highest R2 and t-value for blood lead) consistent with neurobehavioral damage in the first year of life and the peak age of offending for index crime, burglary, and violent crime. The impact of blood lead is also evident in age-specific arrest and incarceration trends. Regression analysis of average 1985-1994 murder rates across USA cities suggests that murder could be especially associated with more severe cases of childhood lead poisoning.

Now a new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser takes a look at whether exposure to lead in childhood resulted in the creation of serial killers. Fraser notes that notorious serial killers Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway all grew up in the same neighborhood near Tacoma, WA around the same time as her, a location with high lead content, which she uses as a springboard for her support of the lead -crime hypothesis.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus has a review of the book.

Fraser wastes little time trying to figure out what went wrong for Bundy on the level of moral psychology. She is more interested in what went wrong in general: “There are 55 serial killers in 1940, 72 in 1950, 217 in 1960. By 1970 there are 605. By 1980, 768.” Her childhood was colored by a sense of accelerating disorder. In 1975, in the middle of Bundy’s spree, violent crime increased by fourteen per cent in Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane. Tacoma measured a sixty-two per cent rise in murder and a twenty-eight per cent rise in rape.
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Fraser thinks the master key is to be found in the fact that these serial killers disproportionately originated in the counties and milieu of her childhood. The area south and southwest of Seattle was home to massive ore-processing facilities, and she, her classmates, and her subjects were reared in their murky, particulate shadows. “Spare some string for the smelters and smoke plumes,” she writes of her crazy wall, “those insidious killers, shades of Hades.” The smelters caused a profusion of heavy metals in the region’s air and water, and toxins such as lead and arsenic were found in staggering concentrations in the blood of Tacoma’s postwar children. Some were merely dulled, or delinquent; a few became tabloid monsters. Bundy was the most famous figure in “a long line of outlandishly wanton necrophiliac killers who’ve lived, at one time or another, within the Tacoma smelter plume.”
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The perpetrators of these environmental crimes have been hiding in plain sight for generations: “It takes two great American family fortunes to build a city of serial killers: the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims.” The Rockefellers built the American Smelting and Refining Company, and in 1901 the Guggenheims assumed its ownership. asarco ultimately controlled virtually all of American lead production—much of it at the company’s sprawling Tacoma plant. Fraser’s portrayal of the family is akin to my colleague (and friend) Patrick Radden Keefe’s genealogy of the Sacklers, in his book “Empire of Pain,” as the malevolent force behind the opioid epidemic. Both dynasties knew what they were doing while they were doing it, and both went on to whitewash their exorbitant sins with exorbitant largesse. Meyer Guggenheim’s money, she writes, “keeps throwing off culture the way clay flies off a potter’s wheel, obliterating any association with slag and smoke.”
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By 1990, the year after Bundy’s execution, lead had been almost entirely phased out of gasoline. The country simultaneously began to phase itself out of serial killing, which followed lead exposure on a twenty-year time lag: “Throughout the 1990s, nationwide there are 669 serial killers. In the 2000s: 371. From 2010 to 2020: 117.”

The lead-murder connection is suggestive but by no means a slam-dunk and has been debated and alternative explanations postulated.

The economists Steven D. Levitt and John J. Donohue III, of the University of Chicago and Stanford University, respectively, have argued that the decline in U.S. crime rates was the combined result of an increase in the number of police, hikes in size of the prison population, waning of the spread of crack cocaine, and the widespread legalization of abortion from the 1970s onward. Possible other factors include changes in alcohol consumption. Later studies have upheld many of these findings while disputing others.

A meta-analysis found that lead explained at most an upper limit if 28%. This is not nothing but suggests that “poverty, crude forceps delivery, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect” can all play roles. There is also what is called the ‘routine activity theory”, something that Fraser’s book apparently ignores.

There is a third possible explanation for the serial-killer epidemic, and although Fraser doesn’t mention it, it happens to be the prevailing inclination among contemporary criminologists. “Routine-activity theory,” which was first elaborated by sociologists in the late nineteen-seventies, treats crime as a matter of ecology. The “golden era” of serial killers was made possible by the contingent rise of some technologies and practices—the automobile, the interstate highway system, the prevalence of hitchhiking—that happened to facilitate crimes of opportunity. In the last quarter century, the development of other technologies and practices—surveillance cameras, phone tracking, interjurisdictional coöperation, and DNA evidence, along with a much greater degree of interpersonal paranoia—have drastically limited those opportunities. Ted Bundy might have been profoundly lead-poisoned, but he also lived in a time and a place where it wasn’t hard to kill with impunity.
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What’s ultimately bizarre about Fraser’s omission is that “Murderland” presents just as much evidence in favor of routine-activity theory as it marshals in support of the lead-crime hypothesis: Ted Bundy is constantly filling his 1968 VW with gas, prowling dark, unsupervised parking lots in pursuit of innocently unparanoid victims, leaving their corpses in remote ravines, and driving on to some other jurisdiction. Doors are frequently unlocked, parents aren’t home, and windows are easily pried open. Bundy was caught, but many cold cases, like that of the Golden State Killer, went unsolved until DNA evidence became tractable.

Serial killers were able to evade detection and capture more easily in the age before DNA evidence became available because it was not easy to connect crimes to a single perpetrator and zero in on him.

Bundy was caught, but many cold cases, like that of the Golden State Killer, went unsolved until DNA evidence became tractable. This additional story is perfectly compatible with Fraser’s prosecution of lead—and with her overarching point that there is no mystery to be solved, only history to be laid bare. It doesn’t excuse the Guggenheims or the Rockefellers.

The fact that the rates of violent crime have been decreasing everywhere is to be welcomed. The fact that lead is known to be a factor, even if not as large as once thought, and that great strides have been taken towards reducing it in the environment, is also to be welcomed.

But given the extremely hostile attitude towards the environment that we now have in the US with Trump and his gang in charge that seem determined to reverse all the progress that has been made and open the doors wide for businesses to do anything they want, how long will it be before we hear calls to ‘male lead great again’ and remove the elimination of lead in gasoline so that engines can become more powerful?