Why is Blooming Prairie, Minnesota so murdery, by murders?

Blooming Prairie sits down in southern Minnesota, in Steele County with one boot over the line into Dodge, about an hour and twenty minutes from Minneapolis. Two thousand and seventy four people, a motto promising 'a great place to spend the next hundred years', and a founding date of 1868, when the town borrowed the name of the township around it and dropped the extra word. Before Prohibition its position near the meeting of several counties made it a handy place to stop for a drink; in 1917 Steele County was the only one of the four around it where alcohol could still be sold. A town that spent its early years as the wettest spot on a county line has a certain reputation to keep up.

Both murders arrive in one episode, 561, and both cases fall in the same spring, March and April 2018, a month apart, right in town. No decades-long drift, no county quietly stacking up cases: one episode carries the whole count, with two victims, and lands the place at rank 207 overall and third in Minnesota.