Why is Okarche, Oklahoma so murdery, by episodes?

Okarche sits where Canadian and Kingfisher counties meet, about 45 minutes from Oklahoma City, which makes it the sort of place people call quiet right up until the show turns up. A post office arrived in 1890, the land was opened by a land run in 1892, and the name is three words squeezed into one: Oklahoma, Arapaho and Cheyenne. German settlers were the bulk of the population by the late 1890s. In 2022 the population was 1,334.

The hotspot is a single town and effectively a single episode: episode 275 carries all six murders by itself. Both cases fall in the autumn of 1979, weeks apart, one in mid-October and the second in November. The first centres on a pastor, his wife and their household, a family known well beyond Okarche through his church work in Warr Acres and a book published the year before.

So this is not a county with a long, grim ledger. It is one bad season in a small town on the edge of the commuter belt, and one episode holding all of it.