Why is Golden Valley, Arizona so murdery?

Golden Valley is less a town than a stretch of desert with an address. Seventy nine square miles of unincorporated Mohave County in Arizona's northwestern panhandle, about fifteen minutes from Kingman, three and a half hours from Phoenix and an hour and forty minutes from Las Vegas. Residents have never voted to be annexed by Kingman and get no vote in its elections, and Arizona State Prison Kingman has an address here even though it says Kingman. Population in 2020: 8,694.

The show has found five murders here in two episodes, both in the 1990s. Three are in Golden Valley itself, in episode 197, dated August 1996. Two more are thirteen miles away at Grasshopper Junction, a dot in the desert west of Kingman whose official count was six people, all one family, though only two really lived there, in episode 636, dated May 1991. So one episode carries most of the count.

This is a tally of the show's cases, not of local crime. The show chooses the towns, and a vast unincorporated community on the road out to Las Vegas gives it plenty of quiet ground to choose from.