Why is the Port Angeles, Washington area so murdery, by murders?

Port Angeles sits on the northern coast of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, in Clallam County, two and a half hours north-west of Seattle and about two hours by water from Victoria. It began in the 1850s as a whaling, fishing and shipping village, boomed with logging from 1914 and lost its last mill in 1997. By 1998 it was a blue-collar town where families worked in lumber, paper and fishing. It now holds 19,888 people.

The hotspot is the Port Angeles area, with Sequim 17 miles east along the same stretch of peninsula coast. The four murders divide evenly. Episode 399 carries two in Port Angeles in the first months of 1998. Episode 354 carries two in Sequim on one March day in 1993. The count comes from two episodes five years apart.

Seventeen miles apart, the two halves have nothing in common. One is a lumber town in its final working years. The other is a five-acre exotic bird farm near Sequim, stocked with ostriches, emus and rheas, run by a martial arts instructor who dealt cocaine.