Why is Burlingame, California so murdery?

Burlingame is an expensive suburb twenty-five minutes south of San Francisco, in San Mateo County, and the hosts introduce it by way of the eucalyptus trees a San Francisco merchant planted on his land, the stand that made it the City of Trees. Its murder count is modest and oddly shaped: six within twenty-five miles, five of them in Burlingame itself, arriving in three episodes.

The dates run from July 1978 to October 2005, a long spread for so few cases, and the middle of it does the heavy lifting. Episode 107 accounts for four victims from 1991, so one episode carries most of the count. Episode 106 adds a single case from 1978, and episode 712 supplies the last from twenty-five miles away in Contra Costa County.

It is worth being honest about what this measures. This is a count of the show's cases, not of crime, and the show chooses its towns. Burlingame gets a rank partly because James and Jimmie found one very bad year.