Why is McLean, Virginia so murdery?

McLean sits at the tip top of Virginia's upper panhandle, close enough to Washington that the 911 dispatcher answers as Fairfax County police and fire, and close enough that a 1902 railroad charter was all it took to turn it into a commuter town. The show's version is a rich suburb of about 49,000 people, where an estate worth eight million dollars can sit quietly behind the trees.

Its eighteen murders come in only four episodes, and the arithmetic is lopsided. Episodes 573 and 621 carry seven victims each, fourteen of the eighteen between them. The remaining four arrive in pairs: episode 444 in McLean itself in 2017, and episode 298 in Woodbridge in 2001. The show did not keep coming back here; it came once, then worked the ring of towns around it.

The dates run from claimed killings reaching back to 1974, through the 1980s and 1990s, to 2008 and 2017. That is less a pattern than a reminder that these are the show's cases, picked by the show, not a crime map of Fairfax County. Ranked 29th overall and first in Virginia, it is a suburb that supplied a handful of stories rather than a reputation.