Why is the Chester, South Carolina area so murdery, by episodes?

Chester is a town of 5,363 in Chester County, South Carolina, and its history goes back to Cherokee inhabitants, traders in the early 1700s and Scotch-Irish settlers who arrived in the 1750s around Rocky Creek and Fishing Creek. The Chester area takes in two towns twenty miles apart, Chester itself and Rock Hill, and the show's two cases sit at opposite ends of its timeline: a January night in 1990 in Rock Hill and the night of 28 November 2001 in Chester.

Neither case is a mass killing. Episode 345 has two victims and episode 396 has one, so the three in the count come from two separate tragedies. One has a teenager moved around the country, a mother who came back and then withdrew again, and medication that kept changing. The other has a 22-year-old teaching assistant and former beauty queen, weeks into a new job and weeks away from leaving for Ohio.

That puts the Chester area at rank 97 overall and third in South Carolina, from two episodes and three lives. The show came for the county's deep history and found the more recent sadness instead.