Why is the Chester, South Carolina area so murdery, by murders?

Chester is a small South Carolina town of about 5,360 people. The show sets its scene the long way round: Cherokee inhabitants first, traders in the early 1700s, then Scotch-Irish settlers from Pennsylvania taking up land along Rocky Creek and Fishing Creek in the 1750s.

The three murders come in two episodes and two towns. Episode 396 reaches back to January 1990 in Rock Hill, twenty miles from the centre, where a 22 year old teaching assistant had just started at an elementary school. Episode 345 returns to the night of 28 November 2001 in Chester itself, and that single night supplies two of the three victims.

A county town and a neighbour twenty miles off, with eleven years between the cases. Each one involves a life that was ordinary until it was not.