Why is Pearisburg, Virginia so murdery?

Pearisburg, in Giles County in north central Virginia, is a courthouse town laid out in 1808 around a 50-acre tract a local landowner gave for the purpose. Population, as the show tells it, 2,878. James calls it Parisburg, pear like the fruit. It sits in mountain country, with the Appalachian Trail on the ridge above, and the show has found seven murders within 25 miles of it: 180th overall, second in Virginia.

The count is lopsided. Four of the seven arrive in one episode, episode 555, and it is set in the town itself, where two 27-year-old social workers from Maine had bedded down at a trail shelter in May 1981, hiking the whole 2,050 miles to raise money for the children they looked after. The other three come singly from towns down the road: episode 487 at Radford, 17 miles away, and episode 565 at Princeton, 20 miles away, both dated 1980, with the dates in the file running from 1956 to 2008.

None of this is a crime statistic. It is a count of the cases the show chose to tell, and the show picks the towns.