Why is Alvo, Nebraska so murdery?

Alvo is a railroad town in eastern Nebraska: about a hundred people, half an hour from Lincoln, forty minutes from Omaha. Settlers came around 1869, the railroad was the reason the place exists, and it is named after the first child born there, the daughter of the railroad master. Its motto is 'It is unique', and no other American community is known by the name. James, finding no reviews for Alvo, reads out reviews of nearby Eagle instead. That is the level of local colour on offer.

The count is three murders across two episodes and two towns. One belongs to Alvo itself, from May 1980, in episode 325. The other is episode 373, seven miles away in Murdock, where in April 2006 a couple were shot in the upstairs bedroom of their farmhouse; he sold hay and grain, she was a teachers' aide who made wedding cakes.

So two episodes carry the whole total, no single case with a crowd of victims. And it counts the show's cases, not Nebraska's crime figures. The show picks the towns, and here it picked a place of a hundred people.