Why is Golden, Colorado so murdery?

Golden is a nine square mile town twenty miles outside Denver, sitting at 5,675 feet and founded on 16 June 1859 as Golden City in the middle of a gold rush. It was the first capital of the Colorado territory, with the capital shuffling back and forth to Denver City, and colleges arrived around it in the 1870s. The show places it on the western edge of the Denver sprawl, the sort of small town that gets located by its distance from somewhere bigger.

All three of the show's murders within 25 miles happened in Golden itself, so there is no ring of neighbouring towns sharing the blame. They come in a single episode, episode 18, and they are three victims rather than three separate cases, which makes this a thin entry in the league table: rank 422 overall and three murders logged in Colorado.

Honesty requires the usual note. This counts the show's cases, not crime statistics; the show picks the towns. Three victims in one episode means Golden's ranking says more about a bad summer in 1998 than about the town's character. James and Jimmie had one episode to work with, and they used it.