Why is the Westport, Connecticut area so murdery, by murders?

Westport sits on Long Island Sound in southwestern Connecticut, an old onion-growing centre that became a shipping town and then a leafy commuter town for New York, and its 11 murders fan out from there across the water and up into the hills. The Westport area takes in Redding and Newtown inland in Fairfield County, and Northport and Belle Terre on the north shore of Long Island, all within 20 miles of the centre. Four of the five towns are small and comfortable; the sound ties them together as much as the county line does.

The cases run from 1962 to 1995, with four of the five packed into the 1980s and 1990s. They are not a steady drumbeat. A single 1995 case in Redding, with five victims, carries nearly half the count; the rest are pairs in Westport in 1962 and Belle Terre in 1988, and single deaths in Northport in 1984 and Newtown in 1986. This is less a town with a bad year than a widening ring of quiet, well-off places where something went badly wrong once.