Why is the Anniston, Alabama area so murdery, by episodes?

Anniston sits in Calhoun County, in the north-east of Alabama near the Georgia line, and its city website calls it "the model city". It was incorporated in 1883, on ground that had held a Confederate iron furnace until Union cavalry burned it in 1865 and hanged a local farmer they wrongly blamed for the attack. The iron went. The town stayed, and by 2017 it had 22,347 people.

The Anniston area's eighteen murders come in four episodes and cluster in the late 1970s and mid 1980s, in three towns strung across the ground between Birmingham and Atlanta. Anniston supplies four of them in two episodes, two victims each: a bungled blackmail plot in 1986, and a poisoning in 1979 that had been building since 1975.

Jacksonville, ten miles out and built around Jacksonville State University, adds four victims across two cases in 1977. Talladega, twenty-four miles out, supplies the other ten in one episode, episode 627, whose seven cases run from 1979 to 1986. That single episode carries more than half the hotspot's murders. Remove it and the model city looks almost quiet.