Why is the Port Angeles, Washington area so murdery, by episodes?

Port Angeles sits on the north coast of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, in Clallam County, two and a half hours northwest of Seattle and about two hours by water from Victoria. It began in the 1850s as a whaling, fishing and shipping village trading with British Columbia. It boomed on logging from 1914 and lost its last mill in 1997. By 2023 it held 19,888 people. Seventeen miles east along the same coast is Sequim, close enough that the two make one Port Angeles area.

The four murders are spread over two episodes, two in each. Episode 399 stays in Port Angeles for two killings in early 1998, opening with a young couple, twenty-two and twenty, bringing their three-day-old son home from hospital. Episode 354 goes out to Sequim for a 1993 case with two victims, in a town where a forty-year-old ran a five-acre farm of ostriches, emus and rheas and sold cocaine on the side.

The two towns sit in the same coastal county, five years apart. That makes Port Angeles second in Washington and ninety-first overall, a hotspot put together from two small clusters.