Why is the Brownstown Township, Michigan area so murdery, by episodes?

Brownstown Township is a place defined by what it used to be. The original 43 square miles south of Detroit became a township in 1827, having passed through French and British hands and picked up a War of 1812 story along the way. In the 1970s it was still mostly farmland; by 2020 it held 31,026 people, up 65 per cent since 1990, half an hour from downtown Detroit. Even the name is a legend about a boy taken in a raid in 1764.

The Brownstown area takes in three towns within 25 miles of the centre: Brownstown itself, Canton Township nineteen miles out and Grosse Pointe Park twenty-four miles out. The decades are just as spread, with one case in 1977, one in 1985 and one in 2012, each with a single victim and each the subject of its own episode (200, 358 and 703). Nothing here arrives in a cluster. Three separate stories, decades apart and miles apart, are enough for rank 57 overall and first in Michigan.