Why is Kirkland, Washington so murdery?

Kirkland sits on the east side of Lake Washington, in King County, about twenty minutes from Seattle: a commuter suburb of just over ninety-one thousand people, with a nineteenth-century origin story about a British businessman who promised a Pittsburgh of the West and delivered a town named after himself instead.

The show's seven murders within twenty-five miles arrive in two episodes, and no single one carries the count. Episode 583 accounts for three, all dated to the summer of 1990 and all in Kirkland itself, opening with a young woman found in a restaurant car park before dawn. Episode 113 adds four, ten miles away in Clearview, with cases dated to 1974 and 1982.

So this is less a town with a bloody decade than a corner of the map the show keeps returning to, its dates spread across 1974, 1982 and 1990. And it is worth saying plainly that seven is a count of the cases James and Jimmie chose to cover, not a crime statistic. The show picks the towns.