Time for the Prime-Time Crime Wave : The body count will rise in May for the ratings sweeps, just the ticket to calm nerves between the King and Denny trials.

A recent study by the Times Mirror Center for People and the Press found that a vast majority of Americans--including 85% of the 50-plus crowd--believe that entertainment television is too violent.

Wait till they get a stinky whiff of what television has in store for the May ratings sweeps. It’s a time when much of prime time again will resemble Murder Inc., just the ticket to calm nerves between the Rodney G. King federal civil rights trial and the coming trial of those accused of beating Reginald O. Denny during last year’s Los Angeles riots. It starts with a bloody binge that yields not one, not two, not three, but a whopping 11 bodies.

“They were young and in love,” reads the glossy cover of the publicity packet for “Murder in the Heartland,” ABC’s two-part retelling of the 1958 killing spree of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. From the synopsis:

“On Dec. 1, 1957, Starkweather gets his first taste of blood when he murders a teen-aged gas station attendant in the aftermath of an early morning robbery. Nearly two months pass before Starkweather kills again.”

Called “gritty” by ABC, “Murder in the Heartland” airs May 3-4, and should not be confused with last month’s “Bloodlines: Murder in the Family” on NBC.

Meanwhile, the body count continues:

* May 3: “Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story” is NBC’s “true” account of “a beautiful church-going woman from North Carolina who murdered her first husband and a boyfriend with arsenic poisoning, and nearly killed her second husband, a minister, the same way.” Anyone with knowledge of other church-going murderers, please contact NBC, which is always interested in good stories about religion.

* May 4: “The Return of Ironside” on NBC reunites Raymond Burr and the rest of the original cast from the old NBC series in an investigation of the murder of the Denver police chief.

* May 7: “Visions of Murder,” says NBC, is a “psychological thriller about a psychotherapist who is caught in a terrifying web of suspicion and intrigue when one of her patients is found murdered.” Which explains Barbara Eden getting the role. A caution: Do not confuse “Visions of Murder” with last December’s “Through the Eyes of a Killer” on CBS.

* May 9-10: “Stephen King’s the Tommyknockers” on ABC is about a “strange and powerful force” that overwhelms inhabitants of a small town in Maine, turning some into, yes, “evil killers.”

* May 16-17: “Woman on the Run: The Lawrencia Benbenek Story,” an NBC miniseries about the gorgeous former cop and model who served more than 10 years for the murder of her husband’s former wife before being released last December. This story is not the first prime-time docudrama on Benbenek nor, probably, the last.

* May 18-19: “When Love Kills: The Seduction of John Hearn,” which CBS calls a “fact-based miniseries about a highly decorated Vietnam veteran who became a killer for hire.” As, of course, so many do. A caution: Do not confuse “When Love Kills” with last December’s “Love Can Be Murder” on NBC or February’s “Poisoned by Love: The Kern County Murders” on CBS. Anyone with knowledge of similar tales, please contact any of the networks. They welcome good stories about love.

* May 19: “A Case for Murder,” a USA network movie that should not in any way be confused with January’s “Marked for Murder” on NBC.

* May 23: “In the Line of Duty: Ambush in Waco.” As this is written, there’s no guarantee that Branch Davidian sect leader David Koresh and company will have surrendered by the time the NBC movie airs, which is another example of just how belligerent and uncooperative he is. If he were really God or the son of God, would Koresh treat NBC’s movie and its shooting schedule so cavalierly? Doesn’t he know that NBC would prefer an ending to the story it rushed into production minus crucial information about what’s happening inside the sect’s compound? The good news is that regardless of when this case is resolved, there’s every chance that “In the Line of Duty: Ambush in Waco” will be merely the first of several movies about Koresh’s cult and its bloody shootout with authorities.

* May 26: “Terror in the Towers.” Realizing that knowledge can be a crushing burden when frying fast-food television on a griddle, NBC is shrewdly scrambling to get this movie aired before all the facts are known about the Feb. 26 bombing of Manhattan’s World Trade Center. What NBC has going for it are six deaths, thousands of injuries and thousands of people being trapped in a smoke-filled high-rise. In other words, it has a disaster movie: blood, gore, bodies flying, human interest. So who needs the full story?

In fact, who needs any of this?

*

Shockingly, the May schedule has no new movies about Amy Fisher. Not to worry, though, for hot off the presses is “My Story,” at long last the book that tells Amy Fisher’s story, “the story nobody knows.” Nobody, that is, who has spent the last year hermetically sealed inside an ice floe at the North Pole.

A fetching Amy ogles you from the cover of the book, which also includes 16 pages of other photos, “many never before seen,” the most compelling of which show Amy cuddling her dog, Muffin. There are no photos of Amy cuddling Joey Buttafuoco.

But is this book juicy or what? An excerpt: “He traced my body with his hands, trying to make his fingers meet around my waist. Thank God, the Acu-Trim is paying off, I thought.”