Why is the Golden Valley, Arizona area so murdery, by episodes?

Golden Valley is less a town than a stretch of desert with its own area code. It covers 79 square miles of Mohave County in Arizona's northwestern panhandle, fifteen minutes from Kingman, three and a half hours from Phoenix and an hour and forty minutes from Las Vegas. It remains unincorporated: residents have never voted to be annexed by Kingman and have no vote in Kingman's elections. The state prison has a Golden Valley address even though it calls itself Kingman.

The Golden Valley area claimed two episodes and five murders across two towns, ranking 82nd overall and second in Arizona. The cases sit five years apart, 1991 and 1996, and no single episode carries the count: one has three victims, the other two. Grasshopper Junction is a dot in the desert thirteen miles west on the road to Las Vegas and the California line, with no population at all when its episode was made. A family of six on paper, two people in practice.

What ties them is Kingman and the desert around it: one town fifteen minutes out, the other a dot on the road west, both in a thinly settled stretch of Mohave County.