Why is Sharon, Massachusetts so murdery?

Sharon sits in Norfolk County, and the show's 14 murders within 25 miles spread in rings around it: one in Sharon itself, then Needham at 12 miles, Raynham at 15, Woonsocket and Framingham at 18, Pawtucket at 19, North Smithfield at 21 and East Providence at 24. That is eight towns and nine episodes, ranked 45th overall and third in Massachusetts. No single case carries the count. Episode 225 has three victims, three episodes have two each and five have one.

The dates run from 1961 to 2003: 1961, 1963, 1968, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1995 and 2003, with no decade doing more than its share. Sharon's own episode, 697, is a 1983 case about a young woman who grew up near Lawrence and worked in Boston's Combat Zone, a district the introduction takes care to explain.

Fourteen murders across eight towns and forty years is not a crime wave. It is what a show with a map looks like when it keeps circling the same few miles of Norfolk County and Rhode Island. The show picks the towns, and the towns do not pick the murders.