Why is Chugiak, Alaska so murdery?

Chugiak is the kind of place the show reaches for when it wants somewhere that sounds invented. James and Jimmie had to spell it out: c-h-u-g-i-a-k. It sits along the Palmer Highway north of Anchorage, Dena'ina Athabascan country for thousands of years, named in 1947 and first heavily settled in the 1950s by former service personnel who had been stationed in Alaska during the Second World War and stayed. A town of 6,563 people, in other words, with a name said to mean 'place of many places'.

The show's four cases here arrive in two episodes, spaced almost a generation apart. Episode 594 accounts for three of them on one night in October 1990, when three eighteen-year-olds set out from the Chugiak area for a room, a drink and MTV, and a car passed them on the Glenn Highway. Episode 428, twenty miles away in Palmer, is a single victim in 2016: a sixteen-year-old who built his own computer.

That is the count: one bad night and one later case. Rank 314 is not a crime statistic. The show chooses its towns.