Why is Flora Vista, New Mexico so murdery?

Flora Vista is a small town in San Juan County, north-western New Mexico, up in the Four Corners, with a population of 2,115 as the show told it in 2018. The county's land is mostly held elsewhere: the Navajo Nation owns 60%, the federal government 29%, and only 11% is privately owned. Roughly one acre in nine is anybody's to build on, which makes the town feel less like a suburb than a settlement tucked into other people's maps.

The show's five murders within 25 miles arrive in two visits. Episode 82 covers a single killing in the town itself, a seventeen-year-old girl, in February 1994. Episode 701 accounts for the other four, six miles away in Farmington, with dates running from November 1996 to June 2000. So this is not a town the show keeps circling. It is one episode at home and one episode nearby carrying most of the count, and no other episode lands within 25 miles.

None of it is a crime statistic. It counts the show's cases, and the show picks the towns.