Why is the Joppatowne, Maryland area so murdery, by murders?

The Joppatowne area sits about half an hour outside Baltimore, in Harford County, and it is a suburb with an odd join. Three older settlements, Gunpowder Town, Foster's Neck and Joppa, were merged into one place, and until 1961 the land was farmland growing mostly string beans. Then the Panets Company started building planned communities there, and its population is 12,992. Middle River, seven miles away, is the other half of the hotspot: an unincorporated part of Baltimore County about 25 minutes from the city, which filled up when families came down from West Virginia for factory and wartime work in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and then stayed.

Five murders in two episodes puts the Joppatowne area at 93 overall and second in Maryland. The cases sit more than twenty years apart: three victims in Middle River in the late summer of 1990, and two in Joppatowne in May 2012. One episode carries most of the count and the other adds the rest. Baltimore holds the two towns together, since both are suburbs of it, one a planned community laid out from 1961 and the other unincorporated and settled by factory families.