Why is New Britain, Connecticut so murdery?

New Britain sits in north central Connecticut, fifteen minutes outside Hartford, a hardware town that got its nickname from Stanley Works and the American Hardware Corporation and still calls itself Hardware City. The show's map around it is a ring of Connecticut towns: Middletown eleven miles out, Simsbury fourteen, Barkhamsted twenty, then Guilford, Bantam and Ellington all at twenty four. Seven episodes, eighteen murders, seven of them inside the city itself.

The decades are spread wide, from a Barkhamsted case in 1965 to an Ellington one in 2015, with stops in 1973, 1993, 2000 and 2003. But the count is not evenly shared. Episode 613 alone accounts for seven of the eighteen, and episode 129 for four, so two episodes carry more than half of it while the rest add a victim or two each.

It is worth saying plainly that this is a count of the show's cases, not of crime. James and Jimmie pick the towns, and a quiet borough of about 725 people can get a full hour of history before the murders start. New Britain simply sits at the middle of a patch of Connecticut they keep returning to.