Madison's annual homicide count hit a high-water mark of 10 in 2008, two more than last year's tally and the most since at least the 1970s.

"This clearly was an unusual year," said Madison Police Capt. Jay Lengfeld, whose West District handled four of the 10 cases.

Newspaper records dating back to 1970 show no year with as many killings in Madison.

Madison police this week also could not recall that many homicides in a single year for decades. But Lengfeld cautioned that one year of double-digit killings doesn't necessarily mean homicide rates are climbing.

"We're talking about such small numbers," he said. "That's the problem. It doesn't take much (criminal activity) to have an increase."

Over the past decade, the number of homicides in Madison has varied between three and eight, although the city has seen a steady rise since 2005. Madison's population also has grown nearly 12 percent since 1998.

West Side resident Tom McKenna said his Orchard Ridge neighborhood was "fortunate" to post no murders in 2008, but he took no particular comfort in that.

McKenna was more concerned about what he said was the continuing scourge of lower-level and quality-of-life crimes in his neighborhood, located south and west of the Beltline near Verona Road.

"We're surrounded by problems," he said, citing recent garage break-ins, thefts from cars and the Christmas Day ransacking of a neighbor's home in which television sets and jewelry were stolen. "Our reputation is going down because we're getting hit by petty crimes that we can't stop."

Fellow West Sider Larry Luther was more upbeat, noting he was not "too worried" about this year's homicide increase and calling the total low for a city of Madison's size.

He also believed crime problems were getting more attention, especially after a series of community meetings held with police and city officials following a fatal West Side shooting outside a duplex in 2007.

"I think the Madison Police Department has finally realized they really need to do something and the city people from the mayor on down realize that they need to be more proactive on a lot of this stuff," Luther said. "I'm pretty happy with the way things are going."

Beyond population growth and economic troubles, Lengfeld said each year's homicide tally inevitably reflects the individual circumstances and personal turmoils of the relative handful of people involved.

For example, nearly half of this year's 10 homicides were domestic crimes, from the shooting of 12-year-old Kyle Dutter by his father, who then fatally shot himself, to the beating death of Viviana Tellez-Giron by her husband, who then hanged himself.

Romantic relationships also proved deadly for Cassandra Mays, stabbed to death by her estranged boyfriend, and for Mark Johnson, who police say was punched and kicked to death by his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend in Lake Edge Park.

Tyree Jacobs was killed by two punches thrown by an extended family member outside a party on the Southwest Side.

That relatively freakish occurrence in March was improbably followed by the death of Eduardo Cademartori, who died after police say he was struck once in the head in a bar-related fight this month Downtown.

"That's a little unusual," Lengfeld said. "I think you'd have a hard time finding two of those in a year."

Juan Bernal also was killed in a bar fight, stabbed twice in the chest three months before and within one block of where Cademartori was attacked.

Lengfeld said the two murder-suicides, both in his West District, also stood out as unexpected in a single year, along with the grisly homicides by strangers of Joel Marino and Brittany Zimmermann.

They were both stabbed to death at their homes in the middle of the day. Marino was killed by a man he'd never met before; police believe Zimmermann's killer also was unknown to her.

Marcus Hamilton, shot to death in his home near McKee Road, also didn't know his killers, but they knew of him, Lengfeld said, and they believed either rightly or wrongly that he had drug money there to steal. He was killed after the planned robbery went wrong.

"If you really look at these (2008) homicides, you have only a few of them where it was a total stranger or where it wasn't tied to another criminal activity," he said. "But those are the scary ones for most people, where it's a random act."