Why is Colton, Oregon so murdery?

Colton is a town of 3,392 about fifty minutes outside Portland, a place that began as a Swedish logging community and still has half a dozen churches, no taverns and no grocery store of its own. James and Jimmie make it sound rural and quiet, which is rather the point: its twelve murders within twenty-five miles are not clustered in Colton but scattered around it, across three towns and three decades.

Only two of the twelve sit in the town itself, both from episode 454, where the two victims were a couple married forty-one years who had lived in the same house for twenty. The rest of the count is carried by its neighbours. Episode 631, nineteen miles away in the Portland suburb of Oak Grove, has nine victims in a single case dated to 1987. Episode 240, twenty-three miles away in Gresham, adds one from October 1989.

A lopsided ledger, then, and worth saying plainly: this counts the show's cases, not crime statistics. The show picks the towns. Colton just sits close enough to be picked.