Why is Chester, Pennsylvania so murdery?

Chester sits about twenty-five minutes outside Philadelphia, in Delaware County: the oldest city in Pennsylvania, founded by Swedish settlers in 1644 and renamed for an English city after a Quaker proprietor landed in 1682. Its motto is 'What Chester makes, makes Chester', which has had to work hard since the town declared bankruptcy in 2022. James and Jimmie count 24 of the show's murders within 25 miles of it, and only three of those happened in Chester itself.

The rest ring the town in a loose arc of small towns and suburbs on both sides of the Delaware line: Claymont, Wilmington and New Castle to the south, Pitman and Berlin over in New Jersey, Upper Merion, Bridgeport and Collegeville up in Montgomery County. The decades spread just as widely, from the late 1970s to 2013, and no single era carries the number. Nor does one episode: episode 405 accounts for five victims and episode 497 for four, but most are one or two, adding up quietly in the background.

It counts the show's cases, not crime statistics. The show chooses the towns, and this one simply sits near a lot of them.