Why is Pewaukee, Wisconsin so murdery?

Pewaukee sits just west of Milwaukee in Waukesha County, a village approved around 1840 that grew as a farming community and did not become a city until 1999. Its clear spring lake was harvested for ice, one of the town's major industries, and today the hosts put the population at 15,589. It is commuter belt, in other words, and the show's six murders within 25 miles arrive in four episodes spread over four different towns.

Only one of those cases happens in Pewaukee itself, episode 571. The others ring the city at 13, 22 and 23 miles, in Oconomowoc, Raymond and Grafton. The decades are just as spread: two cases in 1982, one in 1990, one in 2018, which reads less like a murder wave than a show working through a back catalogue and occasionally checking in on the present.

Two of the episodes carry two victims each and two carry one, so the count builds by addition rather than one terrible night. And it counts the show's cases, not the town's crime rate. The show picks the towns.