bundy

Caroline Fraser’s scorching, seductive “Murderland” chronicles the serial-killer epidemic that swept the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s, focusing on her native Seattle and neighboring Tacoma, where Ted Bundy was raised.

In Tacoma, 35 miles to the south, Ted Bundy grew up near the American Smelting and Refining Co., which disgorged obscene levels of lead and arsenic into the air while netting millions for the Guggenheim dynasty before its 1986 closure.

Bundy is the book’s charismatic centerpiece, a handsome, well-dressed sociopath in shiny patent-leather shoes, flitting from college to college, job to job, corpse to corpse.

Crime: In August 1975 a policeman stumbled on Bundy’s car parked in front of a house where two girls were home alone.

Israel Keyes claimed Bundy as a hero.