Why is Fishkill, New York so murdery?

Fishkill sits in southeastern New York, in Dutchess County, on land that was the territory of the Wappinger people and was settled in 1685. The name is Dutch: fish, and kill for stream or creek, after the Fishkill Creek that runs there. In 1996 PETA asked the town to change it to something less suggestive of violence toward fish. The town said no, which is hard to argue with.

Six of the show's murders fall within 25 miles, five of them in Fishkill itself, and they come in just two episodes spread across a decade. Episode 213, from January 2007, carries all five local victims in a single case: a family in a rented house on Route 82. Episode 295 adds one more, eighteen miles away in the college town of New Paltz, back in 1997.

The ranking, 216th overall and third in New York, therefore rests on one dreadful case rather than a pattern. It also counts the show's murders, not the town's crime statistics. James and Jimmie go where the stories are, and Fishkill's story arrived all at once.