Why is the Agawam, Massachusetts area so murdery, by episodes?

Agawam sits at the centre of a hotspot that spreads outward in a line. Its three claimed cases are 18, 19 and 24 miles away, from Northampton in Hampshire County to two towns further out, the last of them a wooded place of about 5,000 people in north-eastern Connecticut. That is commuter distance, give or take, and it earns Agawam rank 33 overall and first place in Massachusetts, a title the state was probably not fighting for.

The decades are evenly unkind. Four victims in 1995 and 1996, one in March 2007, five across a single weekend in May 2020. Two of the three episodes carry nine of the ten murders between them, so no single eruption inflates the total and no quiet stretch lasts long. This is a hotspot assembled in instalments.

What ties the towns together is reach. A centre town, a former factory town that remade itself as a cultural centre, and two smaller places out at the edge of the radius, all within an hour of one another. Agawam holds the middle and takes the credit. The map does the rest.