Why is the Bellaire, Ohio area so murdery, by murders?

Bellaire sits on the Ohio River in far eastern Ohio. French trappers were the first Europeans in the area. The town was founded in 1836, and natural gas brought people in and made glass manufacturing huge. The glassworks are long gone, and the 2025 population is 3,927. Five miles away, across the state line in West Virginia, Wheeling sits where Wheeling Creek meets the same river, about an hour from Pittsburgh. The Bellaire area is those two towns, five miles apart on one stretch of water, one in Ohio and one in West Virginia.

The six victims are spread across the decades: November 1948, September and October 1995, August 2018. Episode 479, from Wheeling, carries four of them in two cases seventy years apart. Episode 658, from Bellaire, has the other two, both from the same two days in 1995.

One episode does most of the work. Rank 61 overall and second in Ohio, the Bellaire area is a pair of river towns. Wheeling peaked in population in 1930 and has declined for a hundred years, and Bellaire's glassworks went the same way.