True crime documentaries keep proving themselves to be wildly popular, with streaming platforms churning out a new crop of gruesome and fascinating stories every single week. As of June 2024, nearly half of women and adults aged 45 to 64 consume true crime content on TV, with roughly 41 percent of all adults watching this kind of programming. Whether it’s a cold case finally cracked or the dark underbelly of a seemingly perfect life, there’s something magnetic about the genre. Let’s be real, we’re all a little obsessed with trying to make sense of the unthinkable.
Unknown Number: The High School Catfish
This documentary about a teenage couple relentlessly bullied through anonymous text messages became a phenomenon in 2025, with TikTok users filming their families and friends watching the twist that comes about halfway through. For more than a year, the teens received dozens of texts a day ranging from the personal to the sexually explicit to the downright threatening, but the reality behind the harassment was infinitely more twisted. Directed by Skye Borgman, the jaw-dropping series about a Michigan mom who got caught cyberbullying her own daughter captivated audiences who couldn’t believe that Kendra Licari went on camera to tell her side of the disturbing story.
The Perfect Neighbor
Netflix’s award-winning documentary The Perfect Neighbor broke the true crime mold with its use of law enforcement body cam footage offered without commentary, chronicling the events leading up to the 2023 killing of Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old mother of four who was fatally shot by her neighbor Susan Lorincz. Director Geeta Gandbhir interrogates the realities of the controversial yet widely common Stand Your Ground laws, zooming in on a tight-knit community in Florida experiencing relentless harassment by a neighbor whose hostility escalates into a fatal crime. The film honors Ajike Owens and her family and was given the Directing Award for US Documentary when it made its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Amy Bradley Is Missing
When 23-year-old Amy Bradley went missing from a cruise in 1998, her family was baffled; she’d gone on the boat with her parents and her brother, and all four of them were in their room when she mysteriously vanished. Had she fallen overboard? Was she trafficked? While the documentary doesn’t offer resolution, it’s a fascinating look inside the dangers of being on the water where international law rules, and the devastating effect unanswered questions can have on a family.
A Deadly American Marriage
In 2006, Mags Fitzpatrick, a mother of two young children in Limerick, Ireland, died of an asthma attack; after her death, Jason Corbett, her widower, hired an au pair, Molly Martens, and when Martens and Corbett fell in love and moved to North Carolina, Jason’s family was skeptical. Within a couple of years, he would be dead, shot by Martens’ ex-FBI father, Tom, in what the two claimed was self defense; Molly and Tom were initially convicted of the crime, but the case was overturned, with Tom pleading no contest to manslaughter to avoid another trial. A Deadly American Marriage leans into this ambiguity, presenting all sides of the crime, trying to get to the heart of whether it was self-defense or murder.
The Mortician
Director Joshua Rofé’s series is a sobering trek through the crimes and callousness of David Sconce, whose bizarre candidness offers a lens into the mind of a truly terrifying individual who is part Mafia boss, part Scrooge McDuck, and entirely devoid of remorse for profiting off the vulnerability of his clients. During the 1980s, Sconce cremated thousands of people a year, most of them together, which is not protocol to say the least. The series leaves its audience with a new fear they might end up in the hands of someone as cold blooded as Sconce.
Gone Girls
Liz Garbus made her first film about the Long Island Serial Killer back in 2020, and after Rex Heuermann was arrested in 2023 in connection with those murders, Garbus knew she had to go back to the story. Her three-part docuseries traces how the disappearance of Shanon Gilbert, a sex worker who went missing near Gilgo Beach in Long Island in 2010, uncovered a dumping ground and led to a 13-year search for a serial killer. Internet sleuths had long suspected members of local law enforcement to have been involved in the crime, and while that was never substantiated, it did lead to some high-profile scandals and resignations; the third episode examines how renewed interest in the case eventually brought authorities to Heuermann.
My Father, the BTK Killer
It’s every daughter’s nightmare: Dennis Rader’s daughter Kerri Rawson learned in 2005 that her father was the BTK Killer; he committed 10 gruesome murders between 1974 and 1991, earning the moniker BTK (bind, torture, kill) because of his gruesome methods. The documentary recounts Rader’s crimes through the eyes of his daughter, as she confronts the possibility of additional victims, faces the continued impact on her community, and reckons with childhood memories that may hold hidden traumas.
American Murder: Laci Peterson
Laci Peterson became a fixture of American news broadcasts in 2002, when the eight-months pregnant woman went missing on Christmas Eve; Netflix’s American Murder: Laci Peterson traces the moment Laci was reported missing in Modesto, California, the statewide search that ensued, and the discovery of her body and her fetus on a San Francisco Bay shoreline. It’s a chilling retelling that concludes with a tear-jerking speech from Laci’s mother Sharon Rocha and the death penalty for Scott.
Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey
For nearly three decades, the narrative was that JonBenét Ramsey’s family had killed their little girl, even though they were never charged; just a few years ago, the family sued CBS for airing a documentary that accused her older brother, Burke, of committing the crime. This three-part series instead focuses on alleged ineptitude of the Boulder Police Department, like possible contamination at the crime scene in the hours after her disappearance, incorporating new interviews with her father, John Bennett Ramsey, and archival interviews with her mother Patsy, who died of ovarian cancer in 2006. It’s a powerful piece that lets the family reclaim their story, and approaches the crime with the care that sets the new wave of true crime apart from its more exploitative counterparts of the 1990s.
Predators
David Osit’s documentary Predators casts an eye back to NBC’s early aughts reality TV hit To Catch A Predator, where child predators were lured to a film set, interviewed, and eventually arrested; by examining the series’s legacy, Osit asks viewers to consider their relationship to the contemporary true crime boom and how we can avoid being complicit in the pain that lesser entries into the genre can bring upon real people.
The Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini
Hulu’s Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini differs from other missing person procedurals in that Sherri Papini doubles as the captive and the culprit. When Sherri Papini went missing in 2016, the case captivated the nation. Sherri Papini’s kidnapping and eventual return are probed in depth in this riveting docu-series; as authorities dig into Sherri Papini’s kidnapping, they come away with more questions than answers.
