Why is Strathroy, Ontario so murdery?

Strathroy sits in Middlesex County, Ontario, about forty minutes outside London and within three hours of Buffalo, Toronto and Detroit. It is a small town that got a modest upgrade in 2001, merging with Caradoc into a municipality of just under 21,000 people, around 12,000 of them in Strathroy itself. The place has been advancing since 1832, when white settlers arrived and the Sydenham River turned a grist mill; it was a village in 1860 and a town in 1872, and its motto has been "We advance" ever since. Local industry runs to turkey and chicken hatching, farming and pharmaceuticals, with a Turkey Festival each June.

The show's five murders here come from a single episode, 54, whose case is dated March 1974 to June 1976, and all five fall within the town itself. That makes it second in Ontario and 292nd overall, on the strength of one long case rather than a run of them across the decades. Worth saying plainly, because this league counts the show's cases, not crime statistics. The show picks the towns.