Why is Troy, Illinois so murdery, by murders?

Troy sits in the southwestern corner of Illinois, about 25 minutes from St. Louis, and the hosts introduce it exactly that way: more Missouri than Chicago. Ten acres platted in 1819 became a middle-class commuter town of just over 10,000 people, the sort of place a murder league table notices once and does not return to.

That once is episode 140, and it carries all three of the town's murders on its own. The dates are tightly packed: one case in 1987, then two more in February 1990. Among the victims was a 69-year-old retired janitor, a widower who had moved into a motel room after his wife died. There is no long accumulation here, no decades of separate cases adding up, just a single episode, a single town and a handful of years at the end of the 1980s.

So Troy ranks 196 overall and second in Illinois on the strength of one visit. A ten acre plat within half an hour of St. Louis, and three deaths in three years.