Why is the Arkansas City, Kansas area so murdery, by episodes?

Arkansas City sits in Cowley County, south central Kansas, about an hour from Wichita, and it took its time over a name: Adelphia, then Creswell, then Walnut City, before a post office arrived in 1870 and settled the matter. Railroad companies ran a line from Florence to El Dorado in 1881, extended it to Douglas and later on to Arkansas City, which is roughly how towns of this shape get built. The population, as told in 2023, is 12,028.

The Arkansas City area means the centre plus Wellington, 25 miles away: two small towns sharing a stretch of southern Kansas. The cases sit a decade and a half apart, one from December 1992 in Wellington and one from January 2007 in Arkansas City, and each carries a single victim in its own episode, 290 and 393. Nothing here is one sprawling case with a body count. It is two episodes adding up, one apiece, which is how a place reaches rank 109.