Why is Imlay, Nevada so murdery, by murders?

Three murders puts Imlay at rank 173 overall and third in Nevada, and all three come from one episode, 216. One December in 1980 is the whole of it.

Imlay was a railroad town from 1869, laid out on the Central Pacific and named either for a nearby mine or for the engineer who surveyed it. Nobody knows which. It is unincorporated, sits at 4,200 feet in the Majuba Mountains, and has an elementary school, a general store, a post office and a trading post for its 227 people. The mountains are gold mining country, and the mines are the reason the town exists.

The case unfolded about thirty miles north of town, on a gold and silver mining property where a couple in their seventies and their 41-year-old daughter were living in a small trailer. A son and his wife lived nearby. Three victims, a single episode, one date in the record: the hotspot has no other shape to it.