Why is Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania so murdery?

Upper Merion Township sits in Montgomery County, about fifty minutes from Philadelphia: a township older than the country that contains it, incorporated in 1713, with an inn built in 1719. Its population in 2023 was 33,153. It is the sort of place the show reaches for when it wants respectable suburban ground under a grim story.

The seventeen murders within twenty-five miles arrive in six episodes and six towns, spread from 1978 to 2013. Only one of those episodes happens in Upper Merion itself, but it is the big one: episode 405, five victims, the town at zero miles, doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the count. The rest is a ring of small boroughs and old industrial towns: Bridgeport two miles out, Collegeville at eight, Chester and Pottstown at seventeen and eighteen, Claymont at twenty.

Two things worth saying plainly. This counts the show's cases, not the town's crime statistics, because the show picks where it goes. And episode 405 alone accounts for nearly a third of the total; the other five add the rest, one or two at a time.