Why is Brownstown Township, Michigan so murdery?

Brownstown Township sits in Wayne County in south-eastern Michigan, about half an hour from downtown Detroit: close enough to be commuter country, far enough that in the 1970s, when its case takes place, it was still largely farmland. It was carved out of 43 square miles south of Detroit in 1827, and its population has climbed 65 per cent since 1990 to 31,026. The name comes from a local legend about an eight-year-old boy carried off in a raid on a fort in Virginia in 1764, the sort of origin story a place tells after being French, British and then American in quick succession.

The show's cases spread across the decades: 1977, 1985 and 2012, one victim each, in Brownstown itself, Canton Township and Grosse Pointe Park. No single episode with a houseful of victims carries this count. Three separate killings add up to three: a family man in his thirties with two children, a 1985 case, and a senior marketing manager.

Worth saying plainly, this counts the show's cases, not crime statistics. James and Jimmie choose the towns, so a rank of 355 overall and second in Michigan says more about the podcast's map than about life in Wayne County.