Why is Eatonton, Georgia so murdery?

Eatonton sits in Putnam County, central Georgia, about an hour and a quarter southeast of Atlanta: commuter distance, if a long one, in a county of small towns strung out along the roads between the cities. The show's five murders here come in just three episodes, spread across three towns, with two of the five inside Eatonton itself.

The spread is genuinely wide in time: a pair of killings in and around the town in the early 1990s, another pair near Rutledge in 2002, and a single killing in Milledgeville in 2019. No one episode carries the count; three episodes each bring one or two, and the distances run from zero miles to 24, so the league total is really a county total with Eatonton as its centre of gravity.

It ranks 249 overall and third in Georgia, which is modest. Worth remembering that this counts the show's cases, not crime statistics: the show picks the towns, so a place with an ancient mound and a handful of dark stories can climb a league it never entered.