Why is the Lafayette, California area so murdery, by episodes?

Lafayette sits in Contra Costa County, and the area around it reaches out to two suburbs roughly twenty-five miles away on either side of San Francisco: Terra Linda, a small community within San Rafael in Marin County to the north, and Burlingame, an expensive suburb in San Mateo County to the south.

The four episodes stretch from June 1975 to October 2005: two victims at Terra Linda in 1975, one at Burlingame in 1978, four at Burlingame in April 1991, and one back in Lafayette in 2005. No single episode carries the total, though the April 1991 one comes closest, four victims across three cases in a single week.

Lafayette is a town of 25,384 in 2026, named after a French military officer of the American Revolutionary War and given a post office in 1857 by the owner of a hotel and general store, after his first choice of Centerville turned out to be taken. The deaths split one in Lafayette, two in Terra Linda and five in Burlingame, which makes the centre of the hotspot its quietest corner.