Why is the Amherst, Virginia area so murdery, by murders?

Amherst sits in the dead centre of Virginia, twenty five miles southeast of Lexington and forty four miles from Charlottesville: a town of 2,210 people in a county where trading posts ran from 1710 to 1730 and settlers came to grow tobacco. The town itself was founded in 1807.

The Amherst area reaches out to Lynchburg, fifteen miles away, and the two towns between them hold six murders across two episodes. That is rank 60 overall and first in Virginia.

Both cases land in the 1980s, one in March 1985 and one in September 1987, so nothing has been quietly piling up over the decades. Nor does a single bad episode carry everything: episode 57 brings four victims, episode 649 brings two. Two episodes is hardly a crime wave, but it is enough to sit top of the state.