Why is Manhattan, Montana so murdery, by episodes?

Manhattan is a Montana town, and you place it by what's around it: twenty-five minutes from Bozeman, an hour from Helena and Butte, out in Gallatin County cattle country. It was the first town established in the area, in 1865, and started life as Hamilton. By 1874 it had a store, a blacksmith's shop and a schoolhouse, and in 1883 the Northern Pacific Railroad ran about a mile north of it. Through the 1960s and 1970s it was a ranching town of roughly 800 people, where everybody knew everybody and children played outside with little supervision. It now holds 1,884.

The hotspot ranks first in Montana but only 168th overall, and its whole count comes from episode 429: four murders in one episode, in March 1967, early May 1968, June 1973 and 1974. Most towns this size climb the league an episode at a time. Manhattan did it in a single sitting.

Three of the four were children. For years the town treated each death as an accident or bad luck, and carried four of them that way.