Why is Burlingame, Kansas so murdery, by murders?

Burlingame sits in Osage County, about 25 minutes outside Topeka, a railroad town that got its start in the 1850s and still measures itself by the place where rail crosses trail. In 2017 the show put its population at 892. That is small enough that a single bad night can define a town's whole entry in a murder league, and here it does.

All four of the hotspot's murders come from a single episode, episode 9, which aired in 2017 and dealt with a family in a case dated November 28, 2009. Four victims, one date, no spread across the decades. There is no accumulation of old cases in Burlingame, no long ledger of separate tragedies, just one story told once.

That single episode carries the town to rank 109 overall and second in Kansas. Founded after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, thinned by malaria in 1856, connected to Topeka by rail in 1868: the town has survived worse odds than a ranking. Still, four is four.