Why is Ellington, Connecticut so murdery?

Ellington sits in Tolland County, north central Connecticut, about half an hour from Hartford, a town of 16,339 that calls itself "a great place to grow". Its rank of 33rd, second in Connecticut, rests on 17 cases in seven episodes, and just one of those happened inside the town itself.

The other sixteen are spread round a ring of towns within 25 miles: Stafford at nine miles, Willington at ten, Agawam and Chicopee across the state line, Simsbury at twenty and New Britain at twenty-four. The cases date from 1992 to 2020, taking in 2003, 2007, 2011, 2014 and 2015 along the way, so no single bad decade carries the total.

Many small cases do not add up to the count either: five episodes bring one victim each, while two bring twelve of the seventeen between them, one with five and one with seven. And this is a tally of the show's cases, not of crime itself. The show picks the towns, and it keeps picking this corner of Connecticut.