Why is Beckley, West Virginia so murdery?

Beckley is in southern West Virginia, the county seat of Raleigh County, which is about as much placing as the hosts need to do. Within 25 miles the show finds four towns: Beckley itself, Pemberton five miles away, Layland at 13 and Lashmeet at 24. This is not a commuter belt or a string of suburbs along one road so much as a scatter of small places in the hills. It ranks 40 overall and third in West Virginia.

Sixteen murders across four episodes, and 13 of them arrive in a single one, episode 304, which tells two cases at once: a 1988 murder in Beckley and a 1969 fire in another part of the state. The remaining three episodes bring one victim each, in 1983, 2011 and 2020. So the decades are touched rather than covered, with wide gaps in between.

What the map really shows is one episode doing the heavy lifting while three single cases fill in the edges. It counts the show's cases, not the town's crime rate. The show picks where it stops, and here it stopped for a long, two-case look.