Why is Claymont, Delaware so murdery?

Claymont sits at the north-eastern tip of Delaware, in New Castle County, a place of about 9,500 people that grew from the seventeenth century to the twentieth on grist mills, farms, lumber mills, steel and later a chemical plant. The show's 23 cases within 25 miles fan out across three states. Chester and Wilmington are six miles off; Hockessin, Pitman, Upper Merion, Port Penn and Bridgeport stretch the radius out to 22.

Nine episodes in nine towns, and only one of them in Claymont itself. The cases run from 1978 to 2013, with a cluster in the mid-1990s, and no single episode carries the count: episode 405, the biggest, has five victims, and most of the rest have one, two or three. Rank 10 is built the slow way.

Plainly, this counts the show's cases, not the town's crime statistics. James and Jimmie choose where to go, and they have come back to this old industrial corner of the Philadelphia suburbs nine times.