Why is the Lemmon Valley, Nevada area so murdery, by episodes?

Lemmon Valley sits on Reno's northern edge, about fifteen minutes from the city and close enough that the commute explains the postcode. The valleys strung round Reno, Sun Valley among them, got their shape from plumbing: sewage rules stopped conventional building, so people parked trailers on the sand instead. In 1974 that meant trailers on dunes, dirt roads, a good many horses and not much air conditioning, while Reno itself stayed bunched around its casinos and its six-week divorces. The Lemmon Valley area, taking Sun Valley six miles down the road with it, is the kind of place people drive past on the way to somewhere else.

The two cases sit twenty-eight years apart, which is about as far as this hotspot stretches. A fifteen-year-old girl rode out on the horse she took everywhere, along Lemmon Valley Road toward Antelope Valley, on the evening the Fourth of July weekend began in 1974. In 2002 the count came from a household in Sun Valley. One killing then, two later: no single episode carries the total, and nothing here arrived in a cluster. Rank 106 is a modest sort of notoriety, earned slowly and six miles apart.