Why is the Cosby, Tennessee area so murdery, by episodes?

Cosby sits in eastern Tennessee, pressed against the Smoky Mountains with the North Carolina line close by. It is a small place, 742 people at the count the hosts gave, and it cannot even agree on where its name came from: a trapper and distiller, or a Revolutionary War veteran with a famous friend. The name shows up as Cosby Creek in 1838 and only later settles into Cosby. Two murders make a modest haul for a hotspot, but it is enough for rank 115.

The Cosby area takes in Pigeon Forge, 18 miles off, and the two cases land a decade apart, in 1987 and 1997, one murder each, so no single terrible night carries the count. Episode 521 stays in Cosby, at a commercial campground run by a family that had moved from Michigan to Cleveland, Tennessee, before settling there, and brought a pair of twins who had bickered since school. Episode 182 goes to Pigeon Forge in the summer before the tourist boom arrived, to a T-shirt shop in a cluster of souvenir shops. One mountain town and one tourist town, two cases between them.