Why is Dimmitt, Texas so murdery?

Dimmitt sits in the Texas panhandle, southwest of Amarillo, in Castro County, on the old Ozark Trail, the road system built to get from St Louis to El Paso. It is a small town, 4,005 people as the hosts put it in 2021, with an 1892 wooden-frame courthouse and a founding story involving buffalo hunters who had cleared the area of buffalo by the early 1880s and a lumber and wagon man who waged an unceasing war on cattle rustlers.

Its entire tally of three murders comes from one episode, 247, and one night: Halloween, 1977, in the town itself, zero miles away. The family at the centre had farmed 300 acres of grain and cotton in the county since 1943, raised two daughters, leased the land to neighbours and moved to Amarillo, carrying a long interest in the paranormal and a Wiccan church with them. Three victims in a single case means the count is one terrible night rather than a pattern of them.

One caution: this counts the show's cases, not crime statistics. The show chooses the towns.