Why is St. Augustine, Florida so murdery?

St. Augustine is a one-episode town. All eight of its murders within 25 miles arrive together in episode 280, so there is no long accumulation of separate cases to explain. One story carries the entire tally, and it sits at zero miles, right in the town itself rather than somewhere out along the road to Jacksonville. Rank 165 overall and second in Florida is a lot of weight for a single episode to hold up.

The town sits in St. Johns County in north-eastern Florida, about fifty minutes from Jacksonville and more than four hours from Miami, which puts it well away from the state's bigger centres. The episode is dated to Christmas 1996, but its eight victims spread across October 1983 to October 1995, so the telling covers roughly a decade rather than one bad night. Founded in 1565 and calling itself the nation's oldest city, it is an unlikely entry in a murder league, which is presumably part of the appeal for James and Jimmie.

It is worth being plain that this counts the show's cases, not crime statistics. The show chooses the towns, and St. Augustine got chosen once, thoroughly.