Why is the White Earth, Minnesota area so murdery, by episodes?

White Earth is a town of 548 people in Becker County, north-western Minnesota, three hours and 45 minutes from Minneapolis and an hour and ten minutes from Fargo. It sits inside the White Earth Reservation, created in 1867 by a treaty between the United States and the Mississippi Band of the Chippewa Indians and spread across three counties. The town covers 3.9 square miles, much of it on a lake, with a median age of 28.6 and a median household income of $20,547.

The country around it is flat, wooded and full of lakes, and the boundaries between the small towns are largely lost in the trees. That is this hotspot in miniature: towns that run into one another until nobody is quite sure where one stops, and a case sitting right at the centre of it.

For all that ground, the count is one murder, from a single case in April 2007. Rank 128 overall and third in Minnesota is not a hotspot built on volume. It is one death in lake country, in a town small enough that the trees do the boundary work for it.