Why is Greenwood, Florida so murdery?

Greenwood sits in Jackson County, in the middle of the Florida panhandle: 797 people, an hour and a quarter from Tallahassee, ten minutes from Two Egg. It is exactly the kind of town the show likes to spring on listeners who have probably never heard of it. Its ten murders within 25 miles arrive in only two episodes, and just two of those happened in Greenwood itself.

The two cases are sixteen years apart and nothing alike. Episode 164 is a September 1989 case in the town itself, two victims, at a gas station whose family lived in a trailer behind it. Episode 326, twenty miles away at Donalsonville across the Georgia line, carries eight of the ten by itself: six members of a farming family killed in spring 1973.

James and Jimmie framed the town with the county's older reputation, violence after the Civil War, an early Klan stronghold where a historian said government was powerless and the sheriff resigned in 1871. That is background, not the count. This tallies the show's cases, not crime statistics. The show picks the towns.