Why is Dickinson, North Dakota so murdery?

Dickinson is a town of some 23,500 people, the sort of place where a motel on the main drag lets rooms by the week or the month to transient oil workers. All three of the show's murders within 25 miles happened here, in the town itself, and all three come from a single episode, episode 305.

That episode is a family story: a 52-year-old woman who had raised nine children, who moved to Dickinson to manage an old single-storey motel, and who looked after her seven-year-old granddaughter in the manager's quarters. The case carries two dates, November 1981 and June 1988, so one episode stretches across most of a decade.

Three victims in one episode is the whole of Dickinson's tally. It ranks 420th overall and third in North Dakota, which says less about crime in the town than about what the show chooses to cover. James and Jimmie pick the towns; the league just counts them.