Why is Palmer, Alaska so murdery?

Palmer is the Alaska the show reaches for when it wants somewhere that is not Anchorage: forty five minutes out, in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, population under six thousand. James and Jimmie spend the introduction on coal, the railroad money and the land handed out to veterans, which is a fair summary of a town built by people arriving for work and then staying for the space.

The count is four murders in two episodes, and it leans hard on one of them. Episode 594 carries three of the four, three eighteen-year-olds from Chugiak, twenty miles away, heading into Anchorage for a night out in 1990. Episode 428 is the town's own: one victim, a sixteen-year-old in 2016, and an overview that lingers on the ordinary things he was good at. Two cases twenty six years apart is what a small town's file tends to look like.

This counts the show's cases, not the town's crime rate. The show picks the towns.