Why is Green River, Wyoming so murdery?

Green River is a one-case town, and the show does not pretend otherwise: rank 644 overall, third in Wyoming, a single murder within 25 miles, all of it in episode 410. The case is a mid-August night in 2002, when a 41-year-old woman with four daughters was killed in Jamestown, a little town on the edge of Green River. One episode, one victim. There is no pile-up to explain, only the show's habit of dropping in for a single bad night.

What it does have is a reason to exist. The Union Pacific platted it in 1867, when the ground was still Dakota Territory. Wyoming Territory arrived the next year, and the town incorporated a month later under Dakota law because Wyoming had not got round to writing its own. It then spent about 20 years arguing over whether it was really a town before reincorporating in 1891. In 1931 it passed the Green River ordinance, banning door-to-door salesmen, the first town known to have done so.

So the league table puts a railroad town of 11,887 in western Sweetwater County on the strength of one bad night. James and Jimmie count their own cases, not the town's crime.