Why is Belle Fourche, South Dakota so murdery?

Belle Fourche sits in Butte County in western South Dakota, a town of 5,561 at the meeting of two rivers and a creek, named by French explorers and later laid out as a place to load cattle onto freight cars. It tops the show's South Dakota table at rank 354 overall, and its three cases are spread thin across the western part of the state: one in Belle Fourche itself in July 2004, one twelve miles away in Spearfish in March 2000, and one eighteen miles off in Whitewood in early April 1991.

That is one victim per episode, one episode per town, across three decades, so no single hour of the show carries the count. Episode 596 handles the town's own case, a case that begins with a young man and methamphetamine. Episode 453 takes in a former Queen City that made its living supplying the mining camps after the 1876 gold rush. Episode 386 opens with a couple who married in 1958 and settled in Whitewood.

Plainly: this is three of the show's chosen cases, not a crime rate. The show picks the towns, and here it picked three small ones in the same corner.