Why is the Pittsfield, Massachusetts area so murdery, by episodes?

The city website calls Pittsfield the heart of the Berkshires, and is not shy about it. The town sits in the north-western corner of Massachusetts, in Berkshire County, about two and a half hours from Boston, with a population of roughly 43,900. The Pittsfield area reaches out to North Adams, seventeen miles away, a mill town of shoe factories, brickyards and machine shops, and over the New York state line to Hillsdale, twenty miles off, where farms, rolling hills and old cemeteries cover about forty-eight square miles.

Three episodes and seven murders land it at 42nd overall and second in Massachusetts. The dates sprawl: October 1979 in North Adams, February 2006 in Hillsdale, and in Pittsfield a knot of cases from 1997 and 1999 through to August 2011, when three men disappeared from a first-floor apartment. Episode 413 accounts for five of the seven victims, so the ranking rests mostly on one episode, with a single murder in each of the other two.

The motto is 'Benigno Lumine', which James renders as benign power. Berkshire County might want a word.