How many murders in Midsomer? Even the fans doing the counting can't agree
Midsomer Murders started on 23 March 1997 with a woman hit over the head with an iron bar. By series 25 it had reached 144 feature-length episodes, which is more than Poirot and Vera combined. Counting the victims has become a hobby in its own right, and no two tallies match.
The most-cited figure comes from the Midsomer Murders fan wiki: more than 388 murders across 136 episodes, 423 deaths in total, and roughly 250 additional attempted murders and suicides. Other counts run lower — around 320 deaths at the 20th anniversary in 2017, 347 by 2019. The show averages about three murders and five deaths per episode.
Why the totals disagree
The counting problems are structural, not sloppy:
- Historical murders — Barnaby's cases routinely uncover killings from decades earlier, occasionally in unknown numbers.
- Non-murder deaths — the 20th anniversary tally logged 11 accidental deaths, 11 suicides, and 7 from natural causes among its total.
- Ambiguous cases — some deaths are never firmly established as murder at all.
- Broadcast order — recent series have premiered on Acorn TV in the US before airing on ITV, so the running total depends on where you're watching.
The long-running fan site midsomermurders.org has flagged the issue for years, noting that "the exact figure is a little confused" because of the historical cases.
The bloodiest stretches
Series 11, which aired across 2008 and 2009, is the highest-scoring run: more than 35 murders and 15 other deaths. The record for a single episode belongs to series 9's "Four Funerals and a Wedding", first shown in September 2006, with 15 murders and 12 other deaths — though most of those happened years before the episode's present-day setting, which is exactly the sort of thing that breaks the arithmetic.
How dangerous would Midsomer be?
Buckinghamshire Live ran the numbers in 2021. Mapping the fictional county onto Berkshire and northern Hampshire, roughly 400 murders works out at 37 per 100,000 residents — which would rank Midsomer the fifth most murderous place in England and Wales, behind Greater Manchester, London, Merseyside, and the West Midlands.
For the record: the first victim was Emily Simpson in "The Killings at Badger's Drift", killed by Katherine Lacey and arranged at the bottom of the stairs to look like a fall.
Series 26 began filming in March 2026 and will take the episode count to 148, so the fans doing the counting have four more films to argue about.