Why is Fair Lawn, New Jersey so murdery?

Fair Lawn is Bergen County commuter country, about 35 minutes from New York City, and the show paints it as an affluent town that grew from farm lots into a quiet, largely Italian-American borough where the volunteer fire chief counted as a local celebrity. Its own case, in episode 251, supplies two of the fourteen victims, at zero miles.

The other twelve are scattered across seven other towns, from Garfield four miles away to Chappaqua twenty-four miles off in Westchester County. The dates run from 1971 to 2010, so the show has been dropping in on this corner of New Jersey and its northern edge for four decades without ever quite leaving.

No single episode carries the count. Episode 205 has three victims; the rest have one or two apiece, which makes fourteen look less like an outbreak than a habit. Fair Lawn tops the show's New Jersey table at 47th overall. And it is a habit of the show, not a crime statistic: the league counts the cases the show chose to cover, and the show chooses the towns.