Why is the Chugiak, Alaska area so murdery, by episodes?

Chugiak is a small place with a large name. The Dena'ina Athabascans had the country along the Palmer Highway for thousands of years before non-native arrivals gave the settlement its name in 1947, said to mean "place of many places". It holds 6,563 people, many of them former military personnel who were stationed in Alaska during the Second World War and stayed. A town north of Anchorage with a frontier past.

Three of the hotspot's four murders come from one episode, 594. On an October evening in 1990, three eighteen-year-olds from the Chugiak area set out for a night in Anchorage, planning a motel room, drinks and MTV. A car passed them on the highway and a bullet came through the rear window. A second case followed in September 1991. The fourth is one murder in Palmer, twenty miles away, in November 2016: a sixteen-year-old who built his own computer and hoped for a technical high school.

So the count rests on one terrible night and one later killing, with twenty-five quiet years between them. Chugiak ranks 86 overall and first in Alaska, which says less about the town than about the field.