Town file
Florence, Arizona
Florence, Arizona (Pinal County, Arizona) is the town in one episode of Small Town Murder, the comedy true-crime podcast: episode 159, "You Can't Dismember Your Problems" (20 February 2020). Florence, Arizona, lies in south central Arizona, about an hour from Phoenix, in Pinal County.
- Town
- Florence
- County
- Pinal County
- State
- Arizona
- Country
- USA
- Episodes
- 159
- Approximate location
- 33.069, -111.414
Episode 159 / 20 February 2020 / 157 min / full
You Can't Dismember Your Problems
"We're going to Florence, Arizona... it's in south central Arizona... it's down in Pinal County. That's where this is." about 0:06:45
The case: Murder of Maud Morman (January 1984); Kidnapping of Shelly Mickelson (1972). Read the case file.
The figures, as told in 2020
- Population
- 26,066
- Median household income
- $47,000
- Median home value
- $216,000
- Two-bedroom rent
- $1,020 a month
- Cost of living
- about 96
- Religious
- basically 25%
- Property crime
- ▼ less than half
- Violent crime
- ▼ not even half
History, in brief
- Florence was founded in 1866 by Levi Ruggles. about 0:08:20
- Ruggles laid out the town south of the Gila River, on land Native people had farmed for centuries. about 0:08:38
- Mexican settlers began farming there around the 1850s. about 0:09:08
- Florence is the sixth-oldest non-Native American settlement in Arizona. about 0:09:19
- Residents redug prehistoric canals of the Sonoran Desert people to irrigate their fields. about 0:09:46
- Silver was found in 1877 and briefly made Florence a boom town. about 0:10:12
- Florence never got the railroad it wanted. about 0:10:25
- Silver prices dropped in the 1890s and the town emptied out. about 0:10:25
- Eva Duncan was convicted of killing a Tucson rancher named Arthur Mathis and became the first woman executed at the Florence prison and the last person hanged there. about 0:11:51
- Her head was severed during the hanging, after which the state switched to lethal gas. about 0:12:11
- The courthouse clock towers were finished without money for clocks, so hands were painted on them and it is always 11.44 in Florence. about 0:13:16
- Arizona became a state in 1912 and the silver mine closed around the same time. about 0:14:12
- The president of the Florence Industrial Development Authority said, 'Florence doesn't have a labor force, which is a problem.' about 0:14:31
- In 2005 the town tried to soften its 'prison city' image by putting up more prominent signage directing traffic to downtown. about 0:14:48
- Florence has nine different prison facilities, from juvenile detention to death row. about 0:15:16
The reviews read out
1 star
"The town is mostly vacant and looks like a ghost town, but could be a nice historical town if empty buildings were filled with businesses; it needs a strong supermarket, big-name stores, a movie theatre and doctors, which are all far away."about 0:16:56
1 star
"We have nothing around us, have to drive everywhere."about 0:18:29
Nearest Small Town Murder towns
- Apache Junction, Arizona23 miles
- Casa Grande, Arizona23 miles
- Maricopa, Arizona34 miles
- Oro Valley, Arizona52 miles
- Catalina Foothills, Arizona61 miles
- Three Points, Arizona70 miles
Everything here is as told in the episode, on the date it went out; figures and places may have changed since. Endings are covered: open an episode and use the spoiler switch to read them.