After the success of HBO’s The Jinx and Netflix’s Making a Murderer, true-crime documentaries became something of an industry on cable and streaming services. It’s gotten even more intense in the 2020s, as Netflix seems to be dropping another terrifying true story to make you lock your doors every week. From deeper dives into stories you know like the crimes of Ted Bundy or the disappearance of Madeline McCann to cases you’ve probably never heard of, these are the best offerings currently on Netflix about the darker side of humanity. Trigger warnings all over the place in this content, of course, so tread carefully.
Amanda Knox
Year: 2016
Length: 1h 32m
Directors: Rod Blackhurst, Brian McGinn
In 2007, Meredith Kercher was brutally murdered in her Italian apartment, and the rush to justice was quick and unforgiving, leading to the arrest of an American named Amanda Knox, Kercher’s roommate. There have been several TV specials about the Knox case because it’s got a bit of everything — an American girl caught in a foreign nightmare, questionable police behavior, and unjustified conviction. The evidence that supports a theory that someone other than Knox committed the crime is overwhelming, but she spent four years in an Italian prison. This doc includes interviews with Knox herself, her ex-boyfriend, and even the prosecutor who put her away. Smart and detailed, this is really the only piece about the Amanda Knox case that you need to see.
American Murder: The Family Next Door
Year: 2020
Length: 1h 22m
Director: Jenny Popplewell
The murders of Shanann, Bella, and Celeste Watts strikes a strong chord in viewers because of how ordinary this Colorado family seemed to outsiders. The title of Jenny Popplewell’s documentary says it all: They were an outwardly typical family, a group of attractive, seemingly happy people one would never presume would be beset by evil. And make no mistake, Chris Watts is pure evil — a man who murdered his wife and children to stay with his mistress. What makes American Murder chilling is how much of it is conveyed through the false public face of the Wattses on social media and even in home videos in which they looked happy. It’s a reminder of how little people actually share of themselves in the public eye, and how digital technology has impacted public perception and even crime-solving after a murder is committed.
American Nightmare
Year: 2024
Length: 3 episodes
Directors: Bernadette Higgins, Felicity Morris
If you don’t know this story, strap in for an infuriating ride. In March 2015, Aaron Quinn called the Vallejo police with a stunning story. He claimed that someone dressed in a wet suit had invaded the home he shared with girlfriend Denise Huskins in the middle of the night and kidnapped Denise. Aaron’s story seemed almost impossible, and eyebrows were raised when Denise was somehow returned without a ransom request. In the wake of Gone Girl, the Vallejo police and the public presumed that someone was lying. They weren’t. A study of misogyny and how important it is to actually believe women until absolutely proven otherwise, this is a powerful piece of work from the team behind the hit The Tinder Swindler.
Catching Killers
Year: 2021
Length: 3 seasons, 12 episodes
Directors: Various
This docuseries focuses on the men and women who capture the evil people of this world more than the criminals themselves. In fact, all of the interview segments are with the detectives who apprehended some of the most infamous serial killers of all time. It creates an interesting angle on famous cases to hear how these people were caught instead of just the crimes they committed and victims they brutalized. The second season profiled the detectives who caught BTK, The Phoenix Serial Killer, and The Toronto Village Killer.
The Confession Killer
Year: 2019
Length: 5 episodes
Directors: Robert Kenner, Taki Oldham
Almost every true-crime series is about solving crimes; this one unsolves dozens of them. The story of Henry Lee Lucas is one of the most depressing in the history of crime-solving because it not only offered false justice to hundreds of people but likely allowed criminals to continue murdering people because they got away with it. The quick version is that Henry Lee Lucas, the inspiration for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, falsely confessed to dozens of crimes. At one point, he had been tied to the murders of over 600 people, many of them with his buddy Otis Toole. Cases were quickly closed around the country by overzealous officers just eager to pin them on Lucas. No one bothered to wonder if he was lying.
Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes
Year: 2019
Length: 4 episodes
Director: Joe Berlinger
There are a lot of true-crime docs about trying to get into the mind of a maniac. Most of them (especially the ones involving Piers Morgan) are horrible, but this one by Joe Berlinger is an exception. Netflix actually released this just before Berlinger’s other film about Bundy, the Zac Efron vehicle Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. This is the better project, a four-part miniseries culled from hours of interviews with Bundy himself. The series got a little criticism for giving a monster like Bundy a platform again, but it does offer the most comprehensive look at this case, the failures of the legal system to hold him, and how Bundy looked at his own crimes in 1980 when he was on death row. What’s somewhat fascinating is how much you won’t really understand Bundy, suggesting perhaps there are some monsters out there that we can never quite fully comprehend.
Crime Scene
Year: 2021
Length: 3 seasons, 10 episodes
Director: Joe Berlinger
Joe Berlinger also has an anthology crime series on Netflix that has a unique angle: It profiles places as much as the people who made history there. The first season centered on the Hotel Cecil, a famous Los Angeles landmark that made headlines after the mysterious case of Elisa Lam broke around the world. The second season went across the country to New York’s Times Square long before it was cleaned up, and a serial killer who preyed on the sex workers there. The third explored an area known as the Texas Killing Fields, a 30-mile stretch of highway where bodies have been known to be dumped. Crime Scene can be a bit sensational but the idea that a place can influence true crime history makes for an interesting approach.
The Devil Next Door
Year: 2019
Length: 5 episodes
Directors: Yossi Bloch, Daniel Sivan
Do you like Amazon’s Hunters? How about a story that could have inspired it? In 1977 (the same year that the Amazon show takes place, by the way), an Ohio man named John Demjanjuk was accused of being Ivan the Terrible, one of the most vicious and awful guards at Treblinka during the Holocaust. After years of denials, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel, where he stood trial. The case remains controversial to this day — just recently photos surfaced again from Sobibor that reportedly featured Demjanjuk — and this detailed documentary offers both sides of the story. There’s a great deal of evidence suggesting that Demjanjuk was an SS Guard but probably not Ivan the Terrible. The archival footage here is riveting, especially the testimony of Holocaust survivors staring down their greatest enemy. It’s powerful stuff.
The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann
Year: 2019
Length: 8 episodes
Director: Chris Smith
The great Chris Smith (American Movie) directed this eight-part Netflix series about one of the most fascinating disappearances in history. In May 2007, 3-year-old Madeleine McCann traveled with her family to a resort in Portugal. One night, while her parents were at dinner not far away, she was taken from their room, and the ensuing investigation and media fury was like nothing anyone had seen before. Smith gets into the case in more detail than any other project in history, ultimately revealing how shoddy police work and a rush to justice to accuse McCann’s parents likely allowed the criminals to get away. McCann’s case is a lot like that of JonBenet Ramsey in that it feels like we will never truly know what happened or find a theory that makes all the pieces fit. This is the most exhaustive look we’ve had yet at this story that continues to fascinate true-crime fans.
Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer
Year: 2019
Length: 3 episodes
Director: Mark Lewis
This one truly snuck up on people, having dropped on Netflix this past December without much fanfare and becoming something of a phenomenon for true-crime fans. One of the reasons for that is that it details how internet sleuths impacted the case in question: the story of Luka Magnotta, who posted a video of himself graphically murdering two kittens. The internet went crazy trying to track him down, and arguably pushed him to commit more crimes, including eventually killing a student named Jun Lin. The series arguably doesn’t explore enough how much the pressure from the internet impacted Magnotta’s decisions to commit more crimes to get more attention, but it does offer a window into how the web is making sleuths out of ordinary citizens.
Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist
Year: 2018
Length: 4 episodes
Directors: Barbara Schroeder, Trey Borzillieri
In 2003, Brian Wells committed a bank robbery in Erie, Pennsylvania, and he did so with a bomb strapped to his neck. It was one of the most confusing cases in history, especially after the bomb went off, killing Wells. Was it just a strange robbery gone wrong? Reportedly inspired by the brilliant Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, director Trey Borzillieri started digging into the case himself and made a film about his own cinematic investigation, which led him into the bizarre web of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, one of Wells’ co-conspirators, who reportedly told the man that the bomb was fake. She was eventually sentenced to life in prison, but this description only scratches the surface of how truly strange this case remains.
Exhibit A
Year: 2019
Length: 4 episodes
Director: Kelly Loudenberg
This 2019 series from Kelly Loudenberg is unique for this list in that it doesn’t examine a specific case as much as how modern techniques of crime solving can still be imperfect. You’ve probably heard of things like blood spatter and touch DNA on shows like NCIS or Dateline NBC, but Exhibit A deconstructs how these things can be misread and manipulated. One of the best episodes even confronts how surveillance footage that appears to show something to one person can be interpreted very differently by someone else. It’s a fascinating series and we only hope they make more of it.
Forensic Files
Year: 1996-2011
Length: 14 seasons, 406 episodes
Director: Various
This is the true Godfather of true-crime television, a show that everyone with cable or satellite know still airs in constant rotation on Headline News. (They’re even bringing it back in 2020!) There are literally hundreds of episodes of this show that aired from 1996 to 2011, and the ones available on Netflix are separated into “collections” instead of seasons. One of the reasons they’re so addictive is that they’re bite-sized compared to most true-crime docs, typically running only 22 minutes long and detailing how forensic science puts the bad guy away over and over and over again. Even in such a small runtime, Forensic Files illuminates how such small details can be the undoing for a criminal who thinks he’s got it all figured out. It’s almost comforting to watch a bunch of these and realize how hard it is to get away with murder.
The Innocence Files
Year: 2020
Length: 9 episodes
Director: Various
An all-star team of documentarians collaborated on this 9-part series, including Liz Garbus, Roger Ross Williams, and Alex Gibney. The result is one of the most comprehensive, infuriating, and enlightening looks at the system flaws in our judicial system in history. Deserving comparison with Errol Morris’ game-changing The Thin Blue Line, this project dissects issues with justice from three angles — evidence, eyewitnesses, and prosecution — through the experience of The Innocence Project, a group of heroes devoted to getting the wrongly convicted from behind bars. Each episode is more than just a standard true crime chapter – some run the length of a feature film on their own – and the cumulative impact is something that anyone going into any aspect of justice from people applying to law school to those who want to be police officers should be required to watch.
Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich
Year: 2020
Length: 4 episodes
Director: Lisa Bryant
So much true crime on Netflix centers, and almost elevates, the criminal himself, but this 4-part series does its best to highlight survivors over the predator in its title. The crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are still making headlines as new revelations seem to come out every few months, but this is a great starting point for those looking to learn about one of the vilest men that ever existed, a man who used his wealth and privilege to prey on young women, hiding behind his power to keep perpetrating his crimes. Again, the smart angle here is how much the show centers survivors and their powerful stories instead of just the details of a monster.
The Keepers
Year: 2017
Length: 7 episodes
Director: Ryan White
Someone killed a nun named Sister Catherine Cesnik in November of 1969 in a Baltimore suburb. She was only 26 years old, and her case shattered the neighborhood, especially her students at Archbishop Keough High School. Brian Knappenberger digs into this story in one of the best true-crime docuseries ever made, uncovering not just the story of Cesnik’s impact but the possibility that she was killed to cover up sexual abuse by a priest at the school. It’s just rivetingly assembled, coming together like an incredible thriller, but it’s all true. It may not have enough answers or conclusions for all viewers, but it really paints a picture of a community in crisis and offers plenty of theories on what happened to poor Sister Cathy, turning death into a way to shine a light on further injustice.
Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez
Year: 2020
Length: 3 episodes
Director: Geno McDermott
In 2013, Aaron Hernandez, while on the roster of the New England Patriots, decided to kill Odin Lloyd. The investigation into that crime revealed that he may have committed a double murder just a few years earlier in Boston. Geno McDermott’s three-part series examines the details of both crimes while also offering theories as to why Hernandez committed them, including the impact of the death of his failure, possible brain damage from playing football, and even the suggestion of closeted homosexuality. It doesn’t come to any concrete conclusions, and we’ll never know why Hernandez did what he did, but this is an impactful deep dive into a very public story of a famous athlete whose demons had more control over his life than anything on the football field.
Lover Stalker Killer
Year: 2024
Length: 1h 30m
Director: Sam Hobkinson
This early-2024 hit is another one that’s gonna make your jaw hit the floor if you don’t know the details behind a story that’s been widely covered on shows like Dateline and dozens of podcasts. Why has Dave Kroupa’s nightmare in the online-dating world been catnip to true-crime aficionados? It’s legitimately nuts. It started when Kroupa joined the site Plenty of Fish in 2012, meeting a woman named Liz Golyar. They dated but weren’t exclusive when Dave met another woman named Cari Farver. When Liz and Dave started receiving stalker texts from Cari, they called the authorities, and the rest unraveled like a hit paperback mystery with an impossible twist.
Making a Murderer
Year: 2015
Length: 2 seasons, 20 episodes
Directors: Laura Ricciardi, Moira Demos
The preponderance of true-crime documentaries on Netflix can really be traced back to the massive success of this late 2015 series by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos. It’s the story of Steven Avery, a man who spent almost two decades behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit … and then possibly committed a murder. Could he have been falsely accused twice? Or could he be guilty of the second crime? Questions still swirl around this case that ignited something in the public interest so much that Netflix even created a follow-up series in 2018 to detail further developments in the case. It’s not just an essential true-crime show on Netflix, it’s a building block for how the streaming service became one of the biggest entertainment forces in the world.
Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan
Year: 2021
Length: 4 episodes
Directors: Olivier Megaton
In 1977, Billy Milligan was accused of multiple violent rapes near the campus of Ohio State University. When he was finally caught, the community breathed a sigh of relief, but Milligan’s story was really only beginning with his capture. He claimed to have no memory of the attacks, telling people that he had multiple personalities living inside him. He would become a controversial figure, appearing on talk shows and news segments as doctors argued over the veracity of his claims. Was it all an elaborate fraud or was there a violent personality living in Billy Milligan that he couldn’t control?
Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal
Year: 2023
Length: 2 seasons, 6 episodes
Directors: Jenner Furst, Julia Willoughby Nason
There have been so many TV specials and docs on the Murdaugh murders that it’s tempting to leave this off the list simply because of overexposure, but you should know this story if you don’t. It’s another that’s too crazy to believe, the tale of a rich family that falls apart at the seams with betrayal and murder. It starts with the death of Mallory Beach in 2019 in a boating accident that led to the cover-up of the fact that rich kid Paul Murdaugh was drunk-driving the boat. Two years later, Paul was murdered, along with his mother, by his father Alex, who would be found guilty of the crimes in 2023. Yeah, it’s crazy. And that’s really just the quick recap. This series is a bit superficial, but it gives viewers the important details if they want to dig further into one of the most infamous recent murder cases.
The Pharmacist
Year: 2020
Length: 4 episodes
Directors: Jenner Furst, Julia Willoughby Nason
In 1999, Dan Schneider, a pharmacist in New Orleans, suffered the horrible devastation of the death of a child when his son was shot. Investigating the case on his own, he learned that his son was feeding an addiction, and he even helped bring his killer to justice. But that’s really just where this story began. Schneider decided he needed to do more and started staking out and investigating a doctor who was basically making addicts with her OxyContin prescriptions. Schneider’s story is one of redemption, turning his son’s death into a fight to make sure fewer sons die on this pharmacist’s watch. He is a movingly open interview subject, the kind of guy you can’t help but like and root for as he tries find some sense of closure and justice.
Sophie: A Murder in West Cork
Year: 2021
Length: 3 episodes
Directors: John Dower
Netflix has been pumping out true crime docuseries through 2021 with almost weekly regularity, but few have compared to the best in the history of the streaming service. The best of the bunch is this June 2021 Irish production about the brutal murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in a remote Irish village in 1996. Over three episodes, the producers detail the unexpected death of the French TV producer along with several of the main suspects, including one in particular who was eventually convicted of the crime in Paris. Said suspect is a fascinating figure, a man who walks through a cloud of suspicion as he actively fights back against his accusers, including suing newspapers for libel and the Gardai for wrongful arrest.
The Staircase
Year: 2004–2018
Length: 13 episodes
Directors: Jean-Xavier de Lestrade
It was picked up and added to by Netflix, but this is actually a 2004 French miniseries that many true-crime fans point to as one of the essentials in the subgenre anywhere. It’s a riveting case, the death of Kathleen Peterson, whose husband Michael was convicted of murdering her, despite his protestations that she fell down the stairs. It happened in December 2001 and instantly became a major case with authorities believing that Peterson had bludgeoned his wife and then staged the scene to look like an accident. The reason The Staircase is so powerful is that its exhaustive, spending time with Peterson through every phase of the trial, and yet you will still leave it uncertain of what exactly happened that fateful night on the staircase.
Time: The Kalief Browder Story
Year: 2017
Length: 6 episodes
Directors: Jenner Furst
Originally broadcast on Spike and BET, this is the story of the horror of Rikers Island, a hell on Earth where young men are turned into criminals whether they like it or not. People accused of crimes like high-school student Kalief Browder who can’t afford bail have to sit there and wait for trial. In Rikers, gang warfare rules, and Browder refused to pledge allegiance to a gang, leaving him open to regular beatings. He was at Rikers, even though he was completely innocent, for three years, two of them in solitary confinement. Browder’s story should be one that makes every single American angry, and yet Rikers continues to destroy people like Kalief Browder, who committed suicide in 2015, forever destroyed by a corrupt, broken system.
The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez
Year: 2020
Length: 6 episodes
Directors: Brian Knappenberger
Be fully warned that this is the most unflinching documentary on this list, a study of absolute horrible inhumanity committed against a child. Gabriel Fernandez’s mother and boyfriend abused him so badly that they eventually killed him. In precise detail, Brian Knappenberger examines the case and the trial against these monsters, going as far as to point fingers at the system that allowed this to happen. Los Angeles prosecutors even charged four social workers with a crime, and Knappenberger’s film reveals how the safety nets in place to save people like Gabriel are torn and tattered. Again, it’s got details and even photographs that you will literally never forget, but it’s a powerful way to ask people what we can do to make sure what happened to Gabriel never happens again.
Unsolved Mysteries
Year: 2020
Length: 3 seasons in Netflix’s reboot
Directors: Various
It’s back! One of the most influential and essential programs in the history of true crime television has returned to Netflix in a slightly different form but with one essential ingredient intact: You can help solve a crime or explain the unexplainable. Instead of the multi-story format employed by the original series, the new Unsolved Mysteries focuses on one case per episode, including the story of a man whose suicide looks mighty suspicious, a woman who disappeared from in front of her salon, and a small town in which everyone tells the same story of an alien encounter. There’s no host in this new version either, but it’s tight, well-made television that has people talking on social media, and potentially turning into armchair crime solvers yet again.
Who Killed Jill Dando?
Year: 2023
Length: 3 episodes
Director: Marcus Plowright
U.K. readers probably know this story by heart, but it may be less familiar to U.S. true-crime fans, especially given it happened a quarter-century ago. Jill Dando was a huge BBC star, named the Personality of the Year in 1997, two years before she would be murdered outside her home in London. Despite someone being tried and convicted before being acquitted on appeal, the case is technically still unsolved, a murder mystery with a number of unusual details and clues that don’t add up. How did someone know she would be on the step of a house she didn’t often visit at that time? Was it meant for someone else? Or did Jill Dando have a stalker? This is a well-done piece about a case that time may have forgotten.
Who Killed Little Gregory?
Year: 2019
Length: 5 episodes
Director: Gilles Marchand
In 1984, in a small town in France, a 4-year-old named Grégory Villemin was abducted from his yard, his hands & feet were tied, and he was thrown in a river. The case dominated headlines for years in France, becoming that country’s most infamous unsolved murder. And it remains unsolved to this day. This French mini-series includes a lot of archival material and modern-day interviews to tell the story of the murder, the media circus, and the investigation that followed. This one has more twists and turns than your average thriller, and leaves viewers with solid suspects but no answer to its titular question.
Wild Wild Country
Year: 2018
Length: 6 episodes
Directors: Maclain Way Chapman Way
In 1981, a man named the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh started a commune in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, resulting in not just local controversy but an eventual criminal investigation. One of Netflix’s most famous docuseries, this is one of those experiences where every episode reveals a new unforgettable character or event, none more memorable than Ma Anand Sheela, the Bhagwan’s assistant and true force behind the Rajneeshpuram community. It’s a story that got a lot of press when it happened, but had been relatively forgotten in the decades since, turned into an incredible phenomenon yet again, even being parodied on Saturday Night Live and Documentary Now! You really can’t miss this one if you have any interest in Netflix documentaries at all.
