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

The Conway area covers three places in Horry County, northeastern South Carolina: Conway itself, Nixonville nine miles out and Socastee ten. Conway is one of the oldest towns in the state. The county was created in 1801. The town was Kingston before it became Conway Borough in honour of a general, and plain Conway in 1883 because the full name was too long. Nixonville has no town status; it's an unincorporated community about twenty minutes from Myrtle Beach. Rivers, swamps and ocean kept the county so cut off that locals called it the independent Republic of Horry. By the 2000s retired people and second-home owners were moving in, and gunshots were common enough that neighbours did not always notice them.

The five murders sit in three episodes across three decades, so no single case accounts for most of them. Episode 294 covers a seventeen-year-old in Conway in November 1991. Episode 537 covers three victims in Nixonville, in April 2005 and November 2013. Episode 445 covers a twenty-year-old in Socastee in December 2013. One episode holds three of the five and the other two hold one each. Five murders is thin for a hotspot, and it still comes to rank 45 overall and second in South Carolina.