Why is the Big Lake Township, Minnesota area so murdery, by murders?

Big Lake Township is 50 minutes from Minneapolis and old enough to have been somewhere else first. It was settled in 1848 as Humboldt, organised as a township in 1858, and kept the county seat until a vote moved it to Elk River in 1867. Two villages grew up in the area, one of them Arono, an Elk River village. By 2024 the population was 7,886, a respectable size for a place that lost its county seat to a neighbour.

The Big Lake Township area, with Moose Lake 19 miles away, claims five murders across two episodes, and one episode does most of the work. Episode 249, aired in 2021, brings four killings from Moose Lake between 1983 and 1999, three of them bunched into the last six years: 1993, April 1999 and 26 May 1999. Episode 469, aired in 2024, adds a single case in Big Lake Township itself, on 24 February 1992. That puts the area at rank 77 overall and second in Minnesota, on the strength of one small town's long run of trouble and one more killing at the centre.