Why is the Acme, Washington area so murdery, by episodes?

Acme sits in a river valley in Whatcom County, north of Seattle and close enough to the Canadian border that Everson, fifteen miles away on the Nooksack, counts as a neighbour. The name means the highest point, though the town took it from a hymn book, which is a large claim for a place that grew around a school, a post office, a general store and dirt roads laid over walking trails. Call it the Acme area: two small towns in the same north-western corner of Washington, one valley, one river.

Its three murders arrive in two episodes and three decades. Episode 719 holds one, a 1989 case in Acme, a young woman whose family had moved south from Alaska six years before. Episode 540 holds two, both from Everson, one in 1994 and one in February 2010, in a town of about 2,859 people an hour and three quarters from Seattle.

No single episode carries the total, then: one here, two there, spread across a generation. Rank 92 overall, third in Washington. Acme, the highest point, ninety-second. The hymnal had ambition.