Why is Menomonie, Wisconsin so murdery?

Menomonie sits in Dunn County, Wisconsin, population 16,721 as the show told it in 2025, with a lumber past running from an 1830 settlement to a company that closed in 1901. It is far enough out that the only other case within reach is ten miles away in Spring Brook. For a town its size it does not come up often: two episodes, seven murders, rank 191 overall and first in Wisconsin.

The count is not spread evenly. Episode 647 carries six of the seven by itself, a cluster of killings around Menomonie dated between the summer of 1985 and the spring of 1987, close enough together to read as one long stretch of a town having a very bad few years. Episode 731 adds a single death in Spring Brook in March 2018, more than thirty years later.

So the shape of it is one crowded episode and one quiet one, decades apart. Worth saying plainly that this counts the show's cases, not the town's crime. James and Jimmie choose where to go, and a place ranks because they went there.