Why is Strathroy, Ontario so murdery, by episodes?

Strathroy sits in Middlesex County, about forty minutes outside London, Ontario, and within three hours of Buffalo, Toronto and Detroit. It is commuter country with a rural base: turkey and chicken hatching, farming and pharmaceuticals, a Turkey Festival every June, and a motto, "We advance", adopted when it became a town in 1872. The trails through the land had been in use for some 8,000 years before settlers arrived in 1832 and set the Sydenham River to work at a grist mill. The 2001 merger with Caradoc made a municipality of just under 21,000 people, about 12,000 of them in Strathroy itself.

Its league record is modest: rank 156 overall and second in Ontario, on one episode and five murders. The five murders run from March 1974 to June 1976, all in that stretch, and the one episode covers them. James sets the scene with those old trails and the merged municipality before the cases begin.