Why is Manhattan, Montana so murdery?

Manhattan, Montana is a small town in Gallatin County, in the south-west of the state, twenty-five minutes from Bozeman and an hour from Helena and Butte. In the 1960s and 1970s it was ranching country with about 800 people, the kind of place where everybody knew everybody and children played outside with little supervision. The 2023 count is 1,884, so it has more than doubled; the show's four murders all belong to the older, smaller version.

All four arrive in a single episode, 429, and all four happened in the town itself, which is why Manhattan ranks 342 overall and first in Montana on a count that one episode supplies entirely. The dates run from March 1967 to 1974, spread across seven years and four separate killings rather than one bad night. Three of the four were children.

What the facts show is a pattern the town met with accident and bad luck, death by death, which is less a statistical claim than the show's habit of finding one address and returning to it. It counts the show's cases, not the town's crime rate; the show picks the towns.