Serial killers have always been popular fodder for books and movies, but they are especially popular on television right now: Kevin Bacon is part of the most inept team of FBI agents trying to catch not only a serial killer but his followers on The Following, while Dexter scratches his psychotic itch by only killing the bad guys. Meanwhile, the Criminal Minds team pursues serial killers, complete with lifeless, stilted dialogue, but after eight seasons, even it has yet to encounter TV’s most prolific serial killer: Jessica Fletcher.
Over the course of 12 seasons and more than 250 episodes, the acclaimed mystery author left a trail of corpses in her wake, frequently pulling nieces and nephews into her vortex of murder and mayhem.
Most people would be traumatized by weekly encounters with grisly death, but not Jessica. She took it in stride, whether she encountered it traveling across country to a dear friend’s funeral or in her quiet, quaint hometown in Maine. She was seemingly oblivious to Cabot Cove’s rising policing costs or plunging housing prices courtesy of her handiwork, which also resulted in one of the worst murder rates in America, perhaps the entire world. Nearly 8% of the town’s population was killed over the course a decade, not including visitors.
Poor Sheriff Tupper often thought he was close to finding out who the true killer was until Jessica set him straight as she covered her own tracks, but he must have suspected her involvement in the town’s high body count because he ultimately faked his own retirement and reinvented himself as a priest who solved crime.
It’s doubtful that Jessica was always a blood-thirsty murderer, and it’s even money whether or not she was responsible for the death of her husband Frank. It’s more likely that after the unexpected success of her first mystery novel, Jessica got writer’s block and felt the only way to overcome it was to pull off a clever murder. It was a slippery slope from there.
Jessica probably had help too, in the same way that Red John has minions on The Mentalist. She also had no qualms about setting someone up to take the fall for her cold-hearted killing. During the early days of her rampage, one of her nieces was tricked into a confession. And then there is Jessica’s nephew Grady.
Poor Grady. He helps his aunt Jess get her book published and nearly goes to prison when she commits her first murder. He is fortunate enough to survive her decade-long killing spree and even successfully fights a battle with the Borg centuries later.
But that was just the beginning of Jessica’s reign of terror, and presumably she’s still out there. Even more frightening is that there is a whole generation of people who have no idea who she is. They will be oblivious to the danger they are in simply by staying in the same hotel while she’s on a book tour, or thinking it would be a relaxing afternoon diversion to stop in the unremarkable but charming town of Cabot Cove, Maine.
Only one person can put an end to stop Jessica Fletcher from fueling her muse with murder: Richard Castle.
That’s right, Richard Castle, author of the acclaimed Derek Storm and Nikki Heat novels, is uniquely equipped to understand Jessica’s twisted mind and reveal her true nature.
Why? Because there are two kinds of folks who sit around all day thinking about killing people: mystery writers and serial killers.
Gary Hilson is a Toronto-based freelance writer, editor and content strategist storyteller.