London’s Daily Mail ran the numbers on the murder rates of crime shows and found that Cabot Cove, Maine, the idyllic setting of Murder, She Wrote, is actually the murder capital of the world.
With only 3500 residents but at least one corpse every week, the town’s murder rate is higher than Honduras, Chile, and El Salvador—and, as the article points out, 90 percent of these killings were uninvestigated by authorities, requiring the novelist played by Angela Lansbury to step in.
The setting of The Midsomer Murders is second to Cabot Cove. Meanwhile, the body counts in crime shows set in bigger cities, the Mail found, suggest a murder rate lower than what is really the case in a place like Los Angeles.
The Maine Tourism Board really needs to step in and do something about portrayals of its state. I hear it’s a nice place to visit—yet a seemingly idyllic town like Cabot Cove is in fact the murder capital of the world, and if we throw in Stephen King novels, it’s also #1 in the nation in telekinetic prom massacres.