Why is Gresham, Oregon so murdery?

Gresham sits outside Portland in Multnomah County, a town defined by its distance from a bigger city, and that is the shape of this corner of the league table. Three of the four episodes are Portland fringe rather than Gresham itself: a suburb twenty minutes from downtown, a tiny gorge town across the water in Washington state, and a rural former logging community fifty minutes out with no tavern and no grocery store. Only one case happens in Gresham, which is how a town of 110,031 people ends up 44th overall and still first in Oregon.

The count leans on a single episode. Episode 631 carries nine of the fifteen victims, its dates running from 1972 to 1987, so more than half the total arrives in one go. Episode 246 adds three, episode 454 adds two and episode 240 adds one. The years run from 1972 to 2017, so this is not a sudden cluster but a place the show comes back to every decade or so.

Worth saying plainly: this counts the show's cases, not crime. James and Jimmie choose the towns, and one suburban bad decade can outrank a city ten times the size.