Why is Hot Springs, Montana so murdery?

Hot Springs sits in a valley in western Montana, close to the Idaho border and about an hour and twenty minutes from Missoula. The town began as the settlements of Pineville and Camas in the 1890s, took its present name after being known as Camas and Camas Hot Springs, and was incorporated in 1929. A fire destroyed most of Main Street in 1918 and the town burned again in 1931; the sawmill burned, the hospital closed, and after the mercantile burned in the 1980s falling cattle prices and curtailed logging cut the population to about 400 by 1990. The population as told in 2024 was 618.

Its league tally rests on one episode, episode 490, with two victims in the town itself, a case dated May 2013. That is the whole count: no long spread across decades, no cluster of separate cases, just one episode carrying both. Hot Springs ranks 532 overall and third in Montana. This counts the show's cases, not crime statistics, and the show picks the towns, so a quiet place with one bad night can outrank a city.