Why is the Fair Lawn, New Jersey area so murdery, by episodes?

Fair Lawn sits in Bergen County, New Jersey, about thirty-five minutes from New York City. It's an affluent commuter town that started as Lenape land sold to Dutch and Irish settlers, was cut into farm lots, and then spent years as Sluder Dam, a name so unappealing that nobody would move there until the lots were broken up again in 1791. The hosts note the area code, 201, as though that settles the matter.

The Fair Lawn area, as this hotspot runs, is the northern New Jersey commuter belt plus one hamlet over the New York line. Eight episodes spread across eight towns: Fair Lawn itself, then Garfield, Demarest, Ramsey, Hanover Township, Chatham Township, Denville and Chappaqua, the last twenty-four miles away.

No single case carries the count. The fourteen murders come in ones, twos and one three, and the case dates run from 1971 to 2010, four decades across a handful of quiet, expensive towns where the train to the city is the main fact of life.