Top 10 Most BIZARRE Deaths on Midsomer Murders

Before he was Legolas and Will Turner, Orlando Bloom was Peter Drinkwater in “Midsomer Murders”. He plays a major role during the episode “Judgement Day”. Contrary to his usual roles, Peter was a nefarious ne'er do well. He was a robber and an adulterer, sleeping with more than one woman in his local village. Naturally, the residents of Midsomer solved it in the only way they know how: with murder. One day at his farm, he hears a knock at the door. Peter forgets about the county’s absurdly high murder rate, and answers the door - a rookie mistake. It turned out to be an evil pitchfork, which stabbed him straight in the gut.

Placing someone in a box full of knives, and then locking them in is a classic magician’s trick. Usually, the secret is directing the blades to miss, or putting in a secret compartment to hide. At every show, the audience is guaranteed to wonder what happens if it goes wrong. “Midsomer Murders” answered this question in “The Magician’s Nephew”. Somehow, the blades were coated with a dart frog’s poison, and the blades were also jammed. A rookie mistake, any good magician should check their equipment for frog poison. An occult group was responsible, and we can infer they must have been shoddy at their jobs. Otherwise, they would’ve used real magic to take her out.

A robotic takeover of the Earth is a common concept in sci-fi. It’s a valid fear, especially with the rise of AI. In the episode “Point of Balance”, “Midsomer Murders” showed the dangers of robotics. Character Duncan Corrigan is chased down in a Biorobotics Institute. He decides to try and find safety hiding in a chamber with himself and a giant, robotic arm. Things go south when it stabs him in the face. Later on, it’s revealed that a human was controlling it. It would have been more fun if the robot was sentient, taking the show in a wildly different direction. Maybe in future seasons, we’ll get the Robot Hunter Barnaby arc we all crave.

Gambling can be detrimental to a person in a lot of ways. It can damage both your financial stability and mental health. “The Dagger Club” decided to explore the dangers of gambling. Which danger specifically? Electrocution. Here, Suzie Colebrooke gets a suspicious roulette wheel in the post. Instead of taking a step back, and gambling responsibly, she immediately takes it for a spin. This was the last mistake she ever made. It was an evil scheme, the wheel was rigged, sending a humongous electric shock through her body, killing her instantly. We can all learn a valuable lesson from this, which is to never gamble without sufficient electrical insulation.

There’s quite a lot to unpack with “A Tale of Two Hamlets”’s three murders. Firstly, why is an actor walking into a gazebo considered a promotion? Secondly, why did there need to be two men responsible for the murder? It’s later revealed one man called another, telling him to pull the trigger, a job that could easily be done by one person. Things get even wilder in this episode, when the two criminals electrocute a man with his electric bike, which isn’t at all how electronics work. This episode's final hilariously strange death is when one culprit drowns the other in soup, one of the tastiest ways to die.

Midsomer village Little Worthy is home to a popular tourist attraction, a model village. In the eyes of the average Midsomer resident, this is the perfect spot for a murder. Inspired by Gulliver from “Gulliver’s Travels”, resident Richard Tanner is backstabbed by a bodkin. His corpse is then tied up in the model village, where he’s found by locals. This absurdly bizarre murder goes to show that Midsomer residents murder mainly for fun. Otherwise, why else would they leave the bodies in such strangely creative locations? Why not just bury them in the woods, or something that’s not going to get them caught within a 90-minute episode? Maybe plenty of residents do, and Barnaby only bothers to investigate the silly cases.

You might recognize this victim, Otto Benham, as actor Oliver Ford Davies. He acted in both “Star Wars” and “Game of Thrones”, but none of his characters died as iconically as Otto. Unfortunately for him, someone spiked his wine. They then tied him up to a target, and started launching bottles at him with a catapult. Once again, we have to ask, why do they put in so much effort to get the job done? If you’re already spiking his wine, why not just double down and add lethal poison? The less outlandish a murder plot is, the less room for error, but I suppose it’s less interesting television.

If you’re lactose intolerant, it’s best to look away during this entry. “Schooled In Murder” managed to cast Martine McCutcheon as Debbie Moffet. You might remember her from “Love Actually” and “EastEnders”. She made TV history as Debbie, in a priceless scene where she ended up trapped under a shelf of cheese wheels. The murderer then finishes her off, with a block of cheese to the face. It cuts away before the hit lands, making you question if it was a hard enough cheese to kill her in one hit. A finely aged Parmigiano-Reggiano could do the job, but something like Brie is just going to make a mess.

We have so many questions about this murder. Here, we see Finn Thornberry get knocked off his bike by a wire, and then run over by a tank. Firstly, that wire probably hurt, but was it so brutal he couldn’t walk? Secondly, tanks are notoriously slow and clunky. Finn could have very easily gotten up, walked to the side, and lived to see another day. Instead, he panics and crawls backward. Even if he couldn’t get up, there was so much space to hide under the tank. Finn could have simply moved out of the way of the tracks, and it would have passed over him fine. Alternatively, he could stand up and sit on the tank, making him immune to its tracks.

Taking our top spot, it’s the death of Martin Strickland in “Wild Harvest”. We never explicitly see this murder, but we see the aftermath and learn how it went down. He was found tied to a tree, covered in truffle oil, and killed by a wild boar who mauled him to death. It’s one of the most expensive murders in the show, given truffle oil’s high price. Wild boars love truffles, so the theory makes sense, but cheaper alternatives are available. For example, boars love aniseed, and it’s much less expensive than truffle oil. Maybe the murder was simply a ploy to flaunt their wealth.


Did you know Midsomer has about 32 murders per million inhabitants? Let us know in the comments which one you thought was the strangest!