Why is the Hastings, Michigan area so murdery, by murders?

Hastings got built twice. In 1836 three entrepreneurs bought 480 acres from a Detroit banker and named the settlement after him. From about 1865 the sash, door, blind and hardwood lumber works set up in town, and the first house given over to entertainment was a boarding house for mill hands that served drink as well, which tells you plenty. Population as the show had it in 2021: 7,289.

The three murders arrive in two episodes, ten miles apart. Episode 233 stays close to home, with two deaths in a mobile home outside Hastings in the mid-1980s. Episode 161 heads west to Nashville, where a passer-by took a small man lying beside a dirt track for an animal carcass, and a housefly tattoo was the detail that made him a person again.

The two towns share a decade and the short run of country between them: 1984, 1985 and 1986, all inside a couple of years. The paired deaths in one episode carry most of the count. The third is a stranger found out on the road.