Why is Corcoran, Minnesota so murdery?

Corcoran sits in Hennepin County, roughly thirty minutes from downtown Minneapolis: commuter belt, small population, the sort of quiet suburb the show likes to visit. Its 11 murders within 25 miles arrive in six episodes across six different towns, and only one happens in Corcoran itself.

The decades are evenly unkind. Episode 287 covers 1978, episode 188 covers 1980, then 424 in 1993, 16 in 2000, 375 in 2008 and 608 in 2021: a case about every decade, spaced out as if somebody were pacing themselves. But the count is carried less by accumulation than by one episode doing the lifting. Episode 16 accounts for five of the eleven, nearly half the total in a single sitting.

This measures the show's caseload, not local crime. The show picks the towns, and rank 90 overall, second in Minnesota, says more about where James and Jimmie pointed the microphone than about the streets. The introduction, for what it is worth, spent its time on a birch bark canoe and a fifteen-day river journey; the murders, when they came, were nearer home.