Why is Salem, New Hampshire so murdery?

Salem sits in the southeastern corner of New Hampshire, close enough to Boston that the hosts call it a suburb of the city, about 35 minutes out. It has been on the map since 1652 and spent its first stretch as a parish of a Massachusetts town before a boundary line moved it into New Hampshire and gave it a name borrowed from the Salem further down the coast. The show's version of the place is not a rusty factory town: long tree-lined streets, lakes, arcades and dance halls, and some 30,000 people.

Spread across the years, the nine episodes run from the mid 1980s to 2017. Two cases fall in the 1980s, two in the 1990s, four in the 2000s and one in 2017. Only two of the 17 murders happened in Salem itself; the rest sit in towns 16 to 24 miles out. No single episode carries the count. Episode 656, with four victims, three of them from one family, is the largest, and the others run from one to three apiece.

Worth saying plainly that this counts the show's cases, not crime statistics. The show picks the towns.