Why is Lancaster, Texas so murdery?

Lancaster is a Dallas suburb in Dallas County, about 25 minutes from the city, grown from a colony of around 600 families settled between 1841 and 1844. Laid out as a town in 1852 on land bought from a founder's widow, it was still a small place of perhaps eight to ten thousand people in the 1980s and now holds more than 41,000. A criminal duo robbed its bank in 1934. Its one appearance on the show is episode 609, and that single episode carries all seven of the town's cases within 25 miles.

Those seven are not one night's work: the episode's four dates run from November 1978 to June 1986, so the count is spread across eight years rather than piled into a single evening. Every one of the seven sits inside Lancaster itself; nothing in the surrounding suburbs adds to the total.

Worth saying plainly that this is a count of the show's cases, not of crime. James and Jimmie pick where they go, and the league follows them there. Rank 197 overall and first in Texas is a fact about the podcast's map, not about Lancaster's streets.