Why is the Belmont, New Hampshire area so murdery, by murders?

Belmont is a mill town in Belknap County, chartered in 1727 as Upper Gilmanton and powered by the Tioga River. It sits half an hour from Concord, two hours from Boston, and in 2018 held 7,315 people. The Belmont area runs north to Plymouth, twenty-three miles away: a college town of 6,916 people and twenty-eight square miles of woods, incorporated in 1763 on the site of an Abenaki village burned in 1712.

Six murders in two episodes is thin ground for a hotspot, and four of them come from one telling. Episode 254, aired in 2021, carries the Plymouth cases, spread across 1989, 1991, 1992 and 1994. Episode 97, aired in 2018, adds two from Belmont itself: a September 2006 case involving a twenty-six-year-old woman who worked in a retirement home and a household tangled up in drugs.

So the count is one packed episode plus a quieter one, not a town with a habit. What joins them is geography: a mill town and a college town in central New Hampshire, one half an hour from Concord, the other between the lakes and the mountains. Together they are enough for second in New Hampshire and sixty-second overall.