Why is the Ashburnham, Massachusetts area so murdery, by murders?

The Ashburnham area is two small New England towns in the hills near the Massachusetts and New Hampshire line, each a little more than an hour from Boston. Ashburnham sits high on the central New England divide, water running off it to the Merrimack and the Connecticut. In the early 1800s that water powered tanneries, mills and lumber operations; by 1870 to 1880 the town was the second largest chair manufacturer in the world. The chairs have gone. Open space is what it prizes now.

Three murders in two episodes, nine years apart. Episode 462 stays in Ashburnham for one killing in June 2018, a woman in a smaller house behind the main one on her father's land. Episode 635 goes 21 miles to Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, where two people died in October 2009 in a town that had not seen a murder since an 1840 tavern brawl, and which the show calls a quiet, affluent commuter community of 2,580.

So the count is carried by one episode with two victims, not by a long accumulation of them. Two deaths in a well-off hill town, one in the chair town, three in all: rank 141.