Why is the Elizabeth, West Virginia area so murdery, by murders?

Elizabeth sits in a holler in Wirt County, a small valley between two hills with nothing much around it for a while, and James says it was named after the queen. It had 819 people as told in 2022. Two episodes reach out from there and claim nine murders between them, which is a lot of work for one valley. Episode 272 stays put, in Elizabeth itself, on a June day in 1980, when a quarrel ran all day and became a running gunfight; one person died.

The other eight belong to episode 605, sixteen miles away in Parkersburg. They spread across six cases between 1978 and 1983, eight victims in a town an hour and fifty minutes from Columbus with a drug trade running through it. What holds the Elizabeth area together is that road out to Parkersburg. Junk collected in the hills went there to be sold, which is how two men met in a tavern in Elizabeth in 1980.