Why is Pulaski, Tennessee so murdery?

Pulaski sits in Giles County in southern Tennessee, near the Alabama line and about an hour and a quarter from Nashville, with a population the show gives as 7,524. James sets the scene with Civil War fighting in the area and calls it fertile ground for the Ku Klux Klan afterwards, a cauldron with a K. The murders the show brings here are a different kind of local history.

Eight murders in two episodes is a thin count, and it rests on two stories rather than a long run of them. Episode 310 accounts for five victims and reaches from a summer day in 1974 through three dates in 1986, centred on a run-down farmhouse in nearby Elkton where two brothers drew young people in with drugs and drink. Episode 427 adds three more, 17 miles away in Lawrenceburg, with dates in 1982 and 2015.

That is the honest shape of it: a small town the show has visited twice, once for a cluster and once for a single long story. It counts the show's cases, not the town's crime figures. The show picks the towns.