Sleepy Cabot Cove named murder capital of the world

Thankfully, Cabot Cove is fictional. It is the setting for Murder, She Wrote, the cosy drama starring Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, a mystery writer turned amateur sleuth.

Research carried out for BBC Radio 4 found it has the world's highest murder rate per head of population, with an average of 5.3 corpses per year turning up in the town.

As the makers of the series put Cabot Cove's population at only 3,560, that equates to an alarming 1,490 murders per million.

Violent

That is around 60pc higher than Honduras, the real-life murder capital of the world where there is a violent death every 74 minutes.

An estimated 2pc of Cabot Cove residents met a grisly end during the show's 12-year run.

Researchers for BBC Radio 4's More Or Less programme found the town to be far deadlier than densely-populated Los Angeles, setting for Columbo, Perry Mason and The Rockford Files.

Cabot Cove was supposedly located in Maine. In reality it was filmed mostly in Montecito, California, and the harbour used in the series was part of the Universal Studios theme park.

The series ran from 1984-1996 and was one of the most successful detective shows in television history. Midway through the run, Lansbury requested that her character be given an apartment in New York and many of her murder cases took place there.

According to Radio 4, British television's murder capital is another sleepy setting: the killing fields of Midsomer. The ITV series had an average of 2.6 murders per episode.

The More Or Less team based their research on the assumption that Midsomer has the same population as Oxfordshire.

Charlotte McDonald, presenter of More Or Less, said: "Even London, the most murderous place in Britain, has a murder rate that is dwarfed by Cabot Cove and Midsomer county."

hnews@herald.ie