Why is Fremont, New Hampshire so murdery?

Fremont sits in southeastern New Hampshire, a small Rockingham County town of about 4,600 a little outside Manchester, in the commuter orbit that runs from the Massachusetts line up towards the coast. Within 25 miles of it the show has found 14 murders in eight episodes, spread across eight towns: Fremont itself, Epping three miles off, Deerfield, Hampton, Salem, Dover, Hooksett and Kittery over the Maine border. Only one of the 14 happened in Fremont.

The cases run from 1964 to 2012, so this is not one bad year but a slow accumulation across five decades, with a cluster in the late 1980s and 1990s. No single episode carries the total. The biggest are two episodes with three victims each, and the rest are ones and twos, so the rank is built by volume of episodes rather than by one atrocity.

It counts the show's cases, not crime statistics. The show picks the towns, and this corner of New England, small towns strung between Boston and the coast, keeps getting picked.