Review: What does smelting have to do with Ted Bundy? A lot, argues ‘Murderland’ author

The first film I saw in a theater was “The Love Bug,” Disney’s 1969 comedy about a sentient Volkswagen Beetle named Herbie and the motley team who race him to many a checkered flag. Although my memory is hazy, I recall my toddler’s delight: a car could think, move and communicate like a real person, even chauffeuring the romantic leads to their honeymoon. Nice Herbie!

Or not so nice. A decade later, Stanley Kubrick opened his virtuosic “The Shining” with fluid tracking shots of the same model of automobile headed toward the Overlook Hotel and a rendezvous with horror. Something had clicked. 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 Bun