The location is Thurman, Iowa, population 167. I looked at a map of that area and it appears that there's not a whole lot there. Iowa has 1/3 the population of New Jersey but over 6x the land. Sounds lonely. If the property where the well was has recently been logged, it sounds like a place where nobody would ever know what was going on there.

The alleged mass murder was a gun and drug smuggler. If you're bringing drugs from another area, women around the drug supply aren't exactly tethered to a community - they're people who live at the fringes.