Why is the Fletcher, Vermont area so murdery, by episodes?

The Fletcher area takes in six towns and nine murders inside twenty-two miles, twelfth overall and first in Vermont. Its centre is a town of 1,348 in the far north-west corner, up by the Canadian line. Franklin County stayed quiet until 1855, when a property dispute between two farmers, a pint of rum and a butcher knife produced the area's first recorded murder. A ten-year-old boy got away.

No single episode carries the count. Three murders fall in the 1970s (episodes 355 and 181), three in the 1980s (episodes 83 and 463), two in the 1990s (episode 598) and one in 2013 (episode 692). Three episodes carry two victims each and the rest one, so the total accumulates case by case.

What ties the towns is the ring they form around Fletcher, from the Canadian line down to the farm and ski country south of Burlington: St. Albans eleven miles out, Enosburgh and Essex fourteen, Stowe twenty, Richmond twenty-two. Fletcher itself has a history of escape: the only one of seven communities the 1918 to 1920 flu pandemic left alone, and the fewest COVID cases in the state. The league, evidently, was not something it could dodge.