Dispatch Ajax! Podcast

The Harbinger of Death

• Dispatch Ajax! • Season 2 • Episode 78

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Fog curls over jagged granite and the tide keeps its own secrets—Maine feels like a place where myth, memory, and menace overlap. We head straight for that seam, weaving the state’s stark coastline and Wabanaki dawns into a guided tour of folklore, and true crime. Along the way we reckon with names that linger in the record—Mary Cohen, Constance Margaret Fisher, Malcolm Robbins Jr.—and the ways geography, isolation, and community pressure turn ordinary towns into pressure cookers. Then we pivot to the most improbable nexus of all...

SPEAKER_01:

Along the jagged granite coastlines of the uppermost eastern shores of North America lies a realm of mystery and wonder. In its remote corners, the wind whispers secrets through ancient pines and crashing waves echo with untold stories. For centuries, the Algonquin peoples called this land the Wabanaki, or land of first light, for it's here that the dawn first breaks as each day begins anew. Since man first tread this ground, for those who live here, is a quietly whispered understanding that this is a thin place. That is to say, a place where the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest. Though not geographically the center of anything, this mist blanketed land is nevertheless the heart of unspoken folklore and unnamed myths. Man first settled its grounds more than ten millennia ago, not to be visited again a thousand years past, then again centuries hence. Though many speculate, no one really knows the origin of the name, we call it today. But for nearly 400 years, this country of strange dark beauty has poetically been known as Maine. Far from an ordered patchwork of beaches, Maine's jagged coastline is instead a 3,500-mile fractal riot of darkened corners and serrated edges. There are no smooth, clean transitions from land to water, from the shore to nearly 5,000 scattered rocky isles that inhabit nearby waters as if they're mimicking its inland forests. The coast morphs breathtakingly from estuaries and white sandy beaches from the south to gnarled, scowling cliffs down east. When traversing the seemingly unending nooks and crannies of awe-inspiring scapes, the end of the land tends to come abruptly. Forests and fields break suddenly and dramatically into the sea. Thrusting upward and outward from the nation's foremost edge, Maine extends like a torch wielded by the United States of America, though it shares only a single border with another state. It boasts a population in the bottom quarter, yet all other New England states could fit in its borders. Children and families are known to combine twigs, leaves, pieces of shells, and stones to make small homes for woodland fairies who may or may not visit. Many have a pet cemetery. Maine's eerie nature and ancient history have appeared prominently in modern folklore, likely for all of those reasons, whether they be true tales of murder, legends of cryptozoology, or fictional accounts of horror. The question remains: does Maine's nature draw one who participates in such things to it, or does Maine inspire those who live in it? A Penobscot County woman named Mary Cohen, over the course of a decade in the 1880s and 1890s, allegedly fatally poisoned six members of her own family. Though it's possible others existed before her, she was likely Maine's first, certainly deadliest, serial killer. Constance Margaret Fisher was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She killed three of her children in Maine in 1954, and after spending several years in a mental institution, she was released, only to kill three more of her children in 1966. Deemed unfit to stay in trial, she was hospitalized in the Augusta State Hospital, from where she managed to escape in 1973, but died in an accident shortly afterwards. John Jobert IV was executed in Nebraska in 1996. He was convicted of murdering three boys, one in Maine, and two in the state in which he would be murdered. Maine's Malcolm Robbins Jr. was a sex offender, convicted of raping and murdering at least three young boys and one teenager in four different states from 1979 to 1980. He was convicted and sentenced to death in California, where he remained on death row until he died in 2023. Arthur Schockross, also known as the Genesee River Killer, was active in Rochester, New York between 1972 and 1989. Schockross's first known murders took place in his hometown of Watertown, New York, where he killed a young boy and a girl. Under the terms of a plea bargain, he was allowed to plead guilty to one charge of manslaughter for which he served 14 years of a 25-year sentence. Schockross killed most of his victims from 88 to 89 after being granted an early parole, which later led to controversy. A food service worker, he trawled the streets of Rochester in his girlfriend's car looking for prostitutes to kill. He died in November 2008 while serving a sentence of 250 years for his crimes. Richard Steeds. From 1965 to 1966, he killed five people in three states, crimes for which he was tried, but ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity. He spent over a decade in mental hospitals before his eventual release. Arrested for the murder of his neighbor in Maine. For that crime, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Maine's Hattie Livermore Witten poisoned her husband and two daughters in the early 20th century. She was arrested after attending her daughter's funeral. She subsequently hanged herself while in custody and was never put on trial for her crimes. Author Stephen King set many of his novels in Maine, ostensibly for a reason. Stories like Pet Cemetery, Salem's Lot, Carrie Cujo, Bag of Bones, Different Seasons, Dreamcatcher, Dolores Claiborne, It, and many more. They were all set in this mysterious land, not counting novellas and short stories, of course. But the deadliest character to haunt the dark corners of Maine doesn't hail from Derry, Castle Rock, or Hobbs End. The most perilous and darkest corner of a small town in Maine is a quaint little-known community called Cabot Cove. There lives a fiction writer by the name of Jessica Fletcher. In crime fiction and true crime circles, she's a bit of a legend, an Agatha Christie type. A prolific writer of murder mysteries, Fletcher's well known for her ingenious crafting of plot and narrative, though few in her world know that she's also known as a supposed solver of crime. Everywhere she goes, she seemingly solves a murder on demand. Understandably, based on her logical mind, a modern Miss Marple, if you will. Yet one must wonder, everywhere Jessica Fletcher travels, every event she attends, a murder occurs, and there she is to expose the plot. Not to say that Jessica was complicit with any murder at any point. No, I think it's far more existential than that. There were 264 episodes in the 12-season series, a total body count of 286, even though there are debates, if you look online, of exactly how many murders there were. Were they all to take place in Cabot Cove, it gives an annual murder rate of 1,490 per million, more than 50% higher than Honduras, where it's 910 per million. In the last two years alone, a thousand women have been murdered in Honduras, and nearly 90% of them were never investigated. And Cabot Cove was even further ahead of El Salvador, a country which recently celebrated a unique milestone, its first day in three years where no one was murdered. Around five people were murdered in the fictional coastal spot every year, according to BBC Radio 4's, more or less. ITV detective series Midsummer Murders also had an exceptionally high murder rate, on par with Chile and Latvia. Researchers working out the figures assumed the county of Midsummer, where the action was set, would probably have a similar population to the size of Oxfordshire, where it was filmed. Using the above population estimates and the average of nearly 5.3 murders in Cabot Co., we can recalculate a more realistic or accurate murder rate for the fictional town. If we take the high-end estimated population of Provincetown, 60,000 or so, then the 5.3 murders per year is equivalent to 9 murders per 100,000. The 9 murders per 100,000 is in line with the average U.S. murder rate during the show's run in the late 80s and early 90s, a rate of about 29 per 100,000. On the other hand, it doesn't even approach the murder rate of certain areas like Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, or St. Louis, all of which currently have a rate of over 40 per 100,000. Of those episodes, 54 of them were based in Cabot Cove itself, and an additional four or so were included in substantive scenes in Cabot Cove, but were mostly based elsewhere. For example, the season 8 premiere, which starts there but then moves to New York City. So roughly 5 Cabot Cove episodes per season, not including the bookend episodes, where Jessica only introduced and closed out the episodes from her home. By actual calculation, the murder she wrote Body Count hit 286 over 264 episodes in 12 years. There were 64 murders in the tiny town of Cabot Cove alone, living growth, and surely playing havoc with the highway sign listing the village's population. The 286th victim was bludgeoned by a fireplace poker as the series closes shop and retires as the longest-running detective series in TV history. And much like the Mothman of Point Pleasant, Jessica Fletcher will always be known as a portent of things to come. As a warning, a symbol, a harbinger of death.

SPEAKER_00:

I buy it. Makes sense to me. I love it. It's funny because I didn't know where you were going with this, so I was like, ooh, I'm gonna look up stuff in Maine. I found a weird behavior modification program, therapeutic boarding school in Maine called the Elon School, where it had multiple murders, truly torturous conditions, children fight club rings, really messed up stuff. And then I was looking into the Palmyra Maine werewolves, where like this group of wolf creatures were attacking and tormenting this family until dawn one day. But none of those are nearly as deadly as murder she wrote. Is she like a force of nature? Is she like a paranormal entity that has taken on, you know, like like a demon is working through her to bring souls to Hades?

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, it's a good question. I mean, which is cause, which is effect? And it's not like they're like the mockmen where it's unrelated. She actually actively solves the mysteries themselves.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so we have A cause, B, Harbinger, C, rectifier. Interesting. Yeah, I mean but it what would those people be? Is she there because there's so many deaths and so she has to adjudicate justice? Or is she there because she is killing these innocent people and just bringing about more misery? It's kind of like a twofold thing. So one, you get the misery with the death, and you also get the misery of the people around the killer and the killer themselves. That's not that's a twofer, really.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, right, now because the question is she attracted to potential misery or or these types of events because she feeds off of it to how she replenes replenishes her her energy, or is it possible that she, like you said, causes them so that she can feed off of this this sorrow and pain and tragedy? Oh man, it's like Dexter meets her cool poor. And maybe a little supernatural. Not the show, just in general. Or maybe she's set all of these up herself just so that she can solve them. She'd have to trip up eventually. Yeah, you would think so. But I mean, maybe that's where the supernatural element fits in.

SPEAKER_00:

I think supernormal abilities, a connection to the otherworldly makes more sense.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, you're right, because she would eventually make a mistake, or somebody would just kind of you know put two and two together that like Superman and Clark can't eventually somebody's gonna figure out, you know, that it's not just coincidence. Yeah. It just does beg the question which created which. The Batman villain's conundrum, correlation versus causation. I mean, maybe she is a Batman villain. You know what I mean? Perhaps she truly is a fundamental force of the fabric of the universe.

SPEAKER_00:

Truly a baffling conundrum.

SPEAKER_01:

But in any event, it is safe to say that Jessica Fletcher is the harpinger of death. The one, the only. And you think eventually people would just stop inviting her to things, you know? Yeah, don't tell her. Well, we would like to thank you for once again for tuning in to the latest episode in our installment of Halloween, spooky horror, and geeky scary things. I guess. Uh try to put in as many new, interesting ones this year as we could since we didn't have an overarching theme like we normally do. So we just thought we'd do some really fun deep dives. Thank you for liking and subscribing. If you wouldn't mind telling your friends and loved ones about us, please give us five Cabot Coves, I guess, on Apple Podcasts or the Podcatcher of your choice. And Jake, what should they do until next time?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, make sure to tip your murder novelist, your spirits of vengeance, your magician, your undertaker, your hangman, your tall man, your candyman, your pumpkin head, your penhead, or your severed head. Oh, and don't forget your local comic shops and retailers. And until next time, Godspeed. Fair Wizards. Please go away.