As we all learned from watching The Rockford Files, small towns are extremely homicidal and conspiratorial. Every week, as Ben Stein [2] noted back in the 1970s, ace detective Jim Rockford would venture forth from Malibu to some backwoods hamlet [3] where all the denizens were covering up some sinister rural plot, only to make it back to the safety of the L.A. city limits [4] by the episode's end, case solved.
Thus, Audacious "Validating Stereotypes Since 2005" Epigone [5] calculates the rate of unsolved murders by state. The top and bottom 10s, with a higher figure indicating a higher percentage of unsolved murders:
| State | Unknown |
| 1. District of Columbia | 56.1% |
| 2. Illinois | 55.4% |
| 3. Maryland | 46.1% |
| 4. New York | 44.0% |
| 5. California | 43.9% |
| 6. Massachusetts | 43.8% |
| 7. Rhode Island | 42.0% |
| 8. New Jersey | 41.8% |
| 9. Michigan | 38.8% |
| 10. Connecticut | 37.1% |
| 41. West Virginia | 12.1% |
| 42. South Carolina | 10.6% |
| 43. Maine | 10.4% |
| 44. Iowa | 9.8% |
| 45. South Dakota | 9.2% |
| 46. Montana | 8.2% |
| 47. Vermont | 5.6% |
| 48. North Dakota | 4.5% |
| 49. Wyoming | 4.5% |
| 50. Idaho | 3.9% |
An accompanying visualization is available here [6]. (Java only)
Oh, wait, it's almost as if TV detective shows reflect the screenwriters' neuroses more than the demographic realities. Maybe there are two different kinds of stereotypes: populist (Bad) and media (Good).