Why is High Point, North Carolina so murdery?

High Point sits in the North Carolina Piedmont, a manufacturing town of about 113,000 that Quakers and German immigrants settled before 1750, and whose central position once made it a useful go-between for shipping. In the show's league it is the state's second town, ranked 83 overall. Its 12 murders are not crowded into the city itself: only one case happens within the town limits. The rest are scattered around the ring of smaller places nearby, Wallburg ten miles out, Summerfield at fifteen, Clemmons at twenty-two.

The decades are spread just as widely. Episode 409 covers a 1984 and 1985 case in Summerfield with seven victims, episode 364 a 1991 case in High Point, episode 451 a 2009 and 2010 case near Clemmons with three, and episode 665 a 2015 case in Wallburg. So this is largely one episode's count: seven of the twelve come from Summerfield alone.

That is a tally of the show's cases, not a crime rate. James and Jimmie choose where the show goes, and a town this size with four episodes in reach says more about the map than the streets.