Why is the Chicago, Illinois area so murdery, by episodes?

The Chicago area here is less a hotspot than a ring around one. Palos Park sits 14 miles from the centre, Hammond 18, and Hammond is about half an hour from Chicago and technically one of its suburbs. Chicago is the centre, yet its own contribution is a 2019 bonus episode with no case in it at all: James and Jimmie fill the time with lonely-hearts adverts placed by Minnesota inmates. The introduction never names a town as the subject; the nearest it gets is a claim that one speaker's life began in Chicago. Rank 60 overall, second in Illinois, feels about right for a thin patch.

The two actual murders fall a year apart, March 1982 in Palos Park and March 1983 in Hammond, one victim each. Nothing here is a single bad night with a body count; it is two separate suburban tragedies in the towns where the city loosens into something quieter.

Hammond in 1983 was a city of some 83,000 people, already in decline, thirty minutes from Chicago and technically a suburb of it.