"This dark history has a happy ending, sort of. The Environmental Protection Agency began forcing smelting companies to install pollution controls in the 1970s. The EPA's phaseout of leaded gasoline, fought by oil company lawsuits for years, was basically complete by the mid-1980s. Blood lead levels in the population dropped 78 percent from 1976 to 1991, and crime rates began dropping dramatically in 1992. The correlation was so close it gave rise to a 'lead-crime hypothesis' among epidemiologists. The nationwide number of serial killers, whose average age is 22, dropped, too, from 669 in the 1990s to 117 by the decade ending in 2020; a 2007 analysis concluded that there was a 'robust' connection between childhood lead exposure and violent crime. Whatever inborn tendency to serial murder that seems to exist in some men may have lost its environmental trigger."
In a 2025 Washington Post article, Wendy Smith reviews Caroline Fraser's Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.
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