Why is the Joppatowne, Maryland area so murdery, by episodes?

The Joppatowne area is a slice of Baltimore's commuter belt that got planned twice. Joppatowne sits half an hour out of the city in Harford County, 12,992 people, and was assembled from three older settlements, Gunpowder Town, Foster's Neck and Joppa; then in 1961 a company bought the string bean farmland and began laying out suburbs on it. Gunpowder, the first English attempt on the river, was abandoned for being badly sited. The second attempt stuck.

Seven miles away, Middle River did the same job less tidily. It is unincorporated Baltimore County, and James says it was once nicknamed Little Appalachia, because families came down from West Virginia for wartime and factory work and then stayed. Online reviews, he notes, are unkind about the noise. That is the tie between the two: places built for people who arrived to work and found no reason to leave.

It ranks 83rd overall and second in Maryland, and the count is evenly spread: two episodes, five murders, twenty-two years apart, three in 1990 and two in 2012. Episode 178 carries Middle River, episode 442 carries Joppatowne, and neither leans on the other for the total.