Why is Canistota, South Dakota so murdery, by episodes?

Canistota is small even by South Dakota standards: 638 people in a little over half a square mile, in McCook County in the south-east corner of the state, about forty minutes from Sioux Falls. The Chicago Northwestern Railroad chose the site in 1883, the town was incorporated in 1900, and a railroad man named it after his home town in New York. A clerical error on the post office application left town and post office spelling the name differently until 1919. The local economy, as a 1987 newspaper article told it, rested on a chiropractic clinic run by a family dynasty of back-crackers going back to about 1915.

This is a one-town hotspot, and one episode carries it. Episode 72 claimed all three murders, and all three cases sit inside two and a half years in the mid-1990s: August 1994, November 1994 and July 1996. Nothing either side of that stretch adds to the count. At rank 184 overall, and second in South Dakota, Canistota is less a hotspot than one bad stretch of the 1990s that happened to land in a town of 638 people.