Why is the Little Compton, Rhode Island area so murdery, by murders?

Little Compton sits in Rhode Island's far south-eastern corner, in Newport County, on the largest of the islands off that coast. It's forty-five minutes from Providence, an hour and a quarter from Boston and forty minutes from Warren. In 2019 it counted 3,521 residents, with a median age of fifty-three. It's an affluent, unspoiled New England town where plenty of people didn't lock their doors. Settlers came from Massachusetts under charter, the land was cut into lots, and twenty-nine of them founded the place. The name is usually read as "where the water pours forth".

The area's two murders arrive twenty-four years apart, and neither episode carries the other. One belongs to 1975, in South Kingstown, twenty-one miles away in Washington County, a town of roughly 15,000 where a family of five lived. The other is Little Compton's own, from May 1999, when the town still held about 3,500 people. Two towns, two cases with one death each, and the hotspot lands at 257.

The link between them is how small Rhode Island is. Twenty-one miles and a county line separate the two, and in towns that size a single death is the whole story.