Why is Cortez, Colorado so murdery?

Cortez is the kind of town you reach on purpose or not at all: south-western Colorado, near Four Corners, seven hours from Denver, with Wolf Creek Pass in between. It was built in 1866 to house the men digging the tunnels and ditches that pulled the Dolores River into the Montezuma Valley. In 1959 a U-2 out of Texas had to put down on its runway at night after the engine quit, the pilot not knowing the airport was there. Even the spy planes found Cortez by accident.

The show's ledger here is a single entry: episode 348, three murders, all of them in town, dated January 1982. A man of 36 had built his own eight-sided house on a hill outside Cortez; his 17 year old son lived there with him. One episode carries the whole count, and with it the whole town.

Worth saying plainly: this league ranks a town by the cases a podcast chose to cover, not by its crime rate. Cortez appears once because James and Jimmie went there once. The table is a map of the show's curiosity, not of anybody's danger.