Why is Pleasant Grove, Utah so murdery?

Pleasant Grove sits in north central Utah, in Utah County, in the mountains outside Salt Lake City. The show's eleven murders within twenty five miles are spread over five towns in a line running from the capital's sprawl down into Utah County: Pleasant Grove itself, American Fork three miles away, Holladay twenty, Payson twenty three, and South Salt Lake at the edge of the limit. Two of the eleven happened in the town.

Across the decades the cases run from 1978 to 2014, with a cluster in the 1980s and the rest scattered. No single episode carries the total in the way some towns' counts are carried: episode 166 has four victims, and the other seven are spread over four episodes of one or two each. The local case, episode 531, has two victims and dates reaching back to 1986.

Worth saying plainly: this counts the show's cases, not the town's crime rate. James and Jimmie pick where to go, and a town of 37,228 with a fort and a cottonwood grove gets a rank because the podcast looked its way, not because Utah County is unusually dangerous.