Why is the Sanford, Maine area so murdery, by episodes?

Sanford sits in the small southern Maine panhandle that presses against New Hampshire. It's a mill town on the Mousam River, with a saw mill running by 1745. The Goodall mills came in 1867 and made mohair plush for railway seats and Palm Beach cloth for summer suits. Burlington Mills bought them in 1954, shut the plants and put much of the town out of work. Biotech is among the industries there now, and the 2022 population was put at 21,253.

The Sanford area reaches past the town line. Six towns sit inside the circle: Sanford itself, Lebanon at eight miles, Dover at eighteen, then Old Orchard Beach, Kittery and Scarborough between twenty-one and twenty-four. Mills inland, shipbuilding and summer money on the shore: the old working geography of southern Maine ties them together.

The murders come one at a time. Six episodes, thirteen victims, spread from 1984 to 2012: one killing each in Sanford in 1984, Scarborough in 2001 and Dover in 2012, three in Kittery in 1987, three in Lebanon in 1999, and four in a family at Old Orchard Beach in 2008. The area keeps turning up.