Why is the Mineral Point, Wisconsin area so murdery, by episodes?

The Mineral Point area is two small towns in south-west Wisconsin. Mineral Point is the old lead-mining town itself, an hour from Madison in Iowa County, and Mount Horeb is half an hour from Madison in Dane County. Mineral Point grew on galena from 1828 and now trades on its stone buildings, while Mount Horeb began as the Corners and has a Norwegian heritage. In the 1980s it lined Main Street with carved trolls to pull traffic off the highway. Both have a Main Street rebuilt to give people a reason to stop the car.

The cases run across the decades. Mount Horeb's cases reach back to 1952 and to a November day in 1981. Mineral Point's begin with a story that starts in 1968 and arrives at May 1983, then run on into stalking cases between 2009 and 2015. Episode 64 carries four of the six murders, and episode 389, twenty-five miles out, carries two.

It is ranked 74th overall and third in Wisconsin, off a population of 2,494 in 1.89 square miles. That is small enough that a bad decade shows.