Welcome to The Newsfeed.

I'm Venice Buhain, in for Paris Jackson.

For nearly a century, a copper smelter in north Tacoma pumped the air with lead, arsenic and other heavy metals.

The pollution settled into the soil over an area that stretches a thousand miles along the Puget Sound basin.

A new book makes the argument that this industrial pollution, particularly lead from the Tacoma smelter and exhaust from leaded gasoline, may help explain why the Pacific Northwest became a hotbed for serial killers in the 1970s and 80s.

In Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, author Carolyn Fraser traces that toxic legacy to killers like Ted Bundy and the Green River killer, Gary Ridgway Doctor Bruce Lanphear, an epidemiologist and professor at Simon Fraser University, says the authors hypothesis doesn't seem outlandish to him.

He says scientists can't prove an association between lead and serial killers because it's such a rare event.

But we have study after study after study showing that lead exposure increases the rate of conduct disorder in children.

That's acting out behavior, bullying, pulling hair, starting fires in children.

And the evidence is very consistent.

We have evidence that it diminishes IQ and increases ADHD.

And those are correlated with criminal behavior.

Of course, the vast majority of people who grew up in the shadow of the pollution plume never became serial killers.

It could be that some of these serial killers actually had higher exposure than other people on average.

It could be that the duration of exposure was longer, perhaps maltreated as a child that those, collectively that those add up.

We'll continue our coverage of the environment this week with a story about the Stillaguamish Tribe restoring farmland into an estuary.

Thanks for watching The Newsfeed