The 50 best true-crime documentaries you can stream right now

Cult murders, lottery heists, deadly dating apps, killer clowns: We’re in the midst of a true-crime wave, and television is the culprit. From HBO Max to A&E, true-crime programming is more prevalent than illegal weed dispensaries. So, like the authorities — at least the honest ones — we’re stepping in to help.

Here, selected by yours truly and compiled from Times coverage, are 50 of the best true-crime documentary films and TV series you can stream right now. The choices run the gamut in terms of subject matter and tone, tackling all matter of narratives: following the gumshoe detectives of “The First 48,” exposing miscarriages of justice in “Who Killed Malcolm X?,” chronicling crimes so bizarre it’s hard to believe they qualify as true in “Sasquatch.”

The filmmakers behind these productions have solved crimes, freed the wrongly accused, exposed the guilty and given voice to victims and survivors. And yes, they’ve also unraveled the twisted tales of heinous murders, heartless scams and wanton corruption for the sake of entertainment. Critics of the genre argue that true crime is exploitative and voyeuristic, and there’s no doubt that’s part of its allure. True-crime buffs often point to the thrill of playing armchair detective (see “Don’t F— With Cats”) and the satisfaction of solving a real-life puzzle. I’d like to believe the form has become so popular because perps and their wrongdoings are exposed in the majority of the programming, and accountability is in short supply elsewhere these days.

Like any list, of course, this one comes with limitations: I’ve excluded programming from networks dedicated to the genre, such as Investigation Discovery and Oxygen, which feature so much content they deserve their own guide. How else to do justice to national treasures such as “Snapped” and “Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda”? I’ve also sought to strike a balance among many tones and subjects, so the reasons for including the titles vary as much as their production values. Some are bar-setting films from master documentarians, others are necessary works from filmmakers who uncovered incredible stories. Some were simply too juicy to pass up.

And you may be surprised by a few of the big titles that didn’t make the list, like “Making a Murderer” and “The Staircase.” I could write lengthy essays on my issues with both docuseries, but I’ll spare you. In short, I left them out because I found problematic the artistic license both series used to make their point. Go ahead. Arrest me.

To my fellow true-crime aficionados: I’ve undoubtedly overlooked your favorites or promoted others that have no business on this list! I get it. But once you’ve stopped fuming, I hope you’ll discover titles that are new to you, or give another shot to one you previously dismissed. Sleuth away. —Lorraine Ali

Curated by Lorraine Ali
Compiled by Ed Stockly

50. Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal

A blond couple with their arms around a young man and woman

2023 | TV-MA | 1 Season | Documentary series
Netflix: Included
Created by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason

The Murdaughs. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? The prominent Hampton County, S.C., family once renowned for their wealth and power are now at the center of so much death that multiple documentaries are required just to keep up. Netflix’s series is perhaps the best of the bunch when it comes to organizing the mayhem into a cohesive, crisp narrative, and there’s a lot to catalog: the 2014 murder of a student with ties to the family. The 2018 death of the Murdaughs’ longtime housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, and the dubious life insurance scam around her demise. The 2019 death of Mallory Beach during a reckless boating collision. And the 2021 double homicide of Alex Murdaugh’s son Paul and his wife, Margaret. “Fyre Fraud” filmmakers Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason chronicle the downfall of the family dynasty and now-disgraced former attorney Alex Murdaugh over three episodes using interviews with former friends, lovers, law-enforcement officials, attorneys and journalists to show how the Murdaugh clan’s stunning abuse of power and privilege spiraled into a national obsession. Alex was sentenced to life for the murders of his wife and son, but with so many dubious deaths in his wake, this story isn’t over — not by a long shot. Expect a second season. —Lorraine Ali

49. Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story

A man claps at a microphone next to Prince Charles and Princess Diana in a black-and-white photograph.

2022 | TV-MA | 1 Season | Documentary series
Netflix: Included
Created by Rowan Deacon

Generations of British children grew up watching Jimmy Savile as the jovial host of the kids show “Jim’ll Fix It” and the effervescent emcee of “Top of the Pops.” The affable DJ and philanthropist was renowned for his bizarre hairdos, quirky demeanor and ability to charm everyone from Muhammad Ali to the royals. But after his 2011 death, a U.K. investigation found that Savile sexually abused at least 500 victims throughout his career from 1955 to the mid-2000s. He preyed upon children in BBC’s broadcasting studios, at children’s hospitals and inside schools. The majority of Savile’s alleged victims were between ages 13 and 15, but some were as young as 2 years old. The late entertainer’s decades-long abuse of the young people he purported to be helping is chronicled in this two-part documentary, and though the film could use some reorganizing, it tells the fascinating tale of a predator who hid in plain sight. The film shows how many in the U.K. media and entertainment worlds knew something was wrong but chose to ignore his troubling behavior. After all, Savile was a “national treasure.” Prepare to be enraged. —Lorraine Ali

48. Dr. Death: The Undoctored Story

Three people in scrubs in an operating room

2021 | TV-14 | 1 Season | Documentary series
Peacock: Included
Created by Sara Mast

In the hands of neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch, surgical tools were deadly weapons. The bad doctor (now serving a life sentence) injured, maimed or killed 33 of the 38 patients who trusted him with their routine spinal surgeries in the Dallas area over a two-year period in the early 2010s. “Dr. Death: The Undoctored Story” chronicles an erratic history, from his beginnings as a manipulative, below-par medical student to a rampant drug abuser to an egomaniac whose impunity and incompetence in the operating theater injured or killed his patients and stunned his colleagues. Scarier yet, the healthcare system knew about his fatal spree but still allowed him to practice. Surgeons and nurses interviewed in the film recall in jaw-dropping detail how they continually blew the whistle on Duntsch as he continued to find employment at hospitals across the state. A serial killer with a scalpel or simply an inept doctor with a license to kill? Watch this series and decide for yourself. (Read more) —Lorraine Ali

47. Truth and Lies: Jonestown, Paradise Lost

A black-and-white photograph of a journalist and photographer in front of a small plane.

2018 | TV-PG | Documentary special
Hulu: Included

Created by Monica DelaRosa and David Sloan

The largest mass murder and suicide in modern history is recounted in this documentary. Over 900 members of the Peoples Temple church, many of them American, died on the cult’s remote jungle compound outside Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978 after they’d consumed a deadly cyanide-laced drink on the orders of their paranoid leader, Jim Jones. The special traces the origins of the eccentric pastor, from his church’s racially integrated beginnings in Indianapolis through its exodus from San Francisco to Guyana to avoid increased media attention and investigations.

The doc utilizes seldom-seen, raw footage, audiotapes and recently declassified FBI documents to paint the picture of a cult where grueling manual labor, abuse and starvation were everyday realities. But it’s the interviews with those who survived the horror, and the posthumous diaries and letters from those who died, that capture the downward spiral of the delusional Jones. He ordered the massacre after U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown out of concern for the well-being of Jones’ followers. As Ryan was preparing to leave, he and four others (including U.S. journalists and defectors) were shot to death on the airstrip by Temple gunmen. The murders prompted Jones to command his flock to drink the poison punch. “There’s no way we can survive” he told the anguished, crying crowd. “Truth and Lies: Jonestown, Paradise Lost” is a must-watch for anyone who wishes to understand why 909 souls — many of them children — perished on the command of one demented man. —Lorraine Ali

46. Crime Stories: India Detectives

2021 | TV-MA | 1 Season | Documentary series
Netflix: Included
Created by N Amit and Jack Rampling

The frenetic bustle of Bangalore is the backdrop for this four-episode docuseries about crime-solving in the city of 11 million. Each episode follows a different precinct of Indian detectives from the moment a victim reports a crime to the capture of the suspects. Extortion, kidnapping and murder are among the offenses chronicled here, but it’s the distinctive setting of the series that makes it a fascinating watch. The investigations take viewers around Bangalore, from crowded slums where sex workers are found killed to the comfortable flats of tech workers in a region known as India’s Silicon Valley, a setting where nothing bad should ever happen — but does. It’s a unique window into the lives of Bengaluru’s police force, and an unexpectedly moving look at the people they’re charged with protecting. Brace yourself: A&E’s “Interrogation Raw” has nothing on the inquisition scenes here. —Lorraine Ali

45. Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall

A woman with glasses looks at blueprints.

2022 | TV-MA | 1 Season | Documentary series
HBO Max: Included
Created by Erin Lee Carr

An eccentric entrepreneur, an intrepid journalist, a submarine, a murder. Swedish reporter Kim Wall disappeared in 2017 on assignment, covering what should have been a tame human interest story about a celebrity inventor and his latest contraption. She was was last seen interviewing media darling Peter Madsen aboard his self-made submarine in Danish waters, a trip from which only one of them returned. This two-part documentary chronicles the bizarre events around Wall’s demise, from her experience reporting in hot zones around the globe to the hubris of a wealthy predator who assumed he’d charm his way out of a homicide conviction. Police, prosecutors and Navy scientists are among the cadre who waded through Madsen‘s multiple lies in search of the real story. As details about Wall’s last moments emerge, the truth is far more horrific and barbaric than anyone imagined. —Lorraine Ali

44. Helter Skelter: An American Myth

Charles Manson in handcuffs flanked by police officers

More than half a century later, memories of the Manson Family still resemble a fever dream. It’s no wonder storytellers can’t help but reexplore the rise and fall of Charlie Manson, a diminutive ex-con, pimp and aspiring musician who amassed a following of mostly young women, plied them with LSD, sex and antiestablishment jargon, then convinced them to kill in the name of a race war. They lived on a commune. They mingled with, and murdered, celebrities. And it all happened behind the deceptive cloak of peace and love.

Compelling and comprehensive documentaries on that anomalous period in American crime are hard to come by, and while “Helter Skelter: An American Myth” isn’t perfect, it does do an excellent job of capturing the cultural confusion that ensued when a band of hippies crept into the homes of the LaBiancas and Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate to murder them in the most gruesome of ways. The six-part production follows the history of the “Family,” from its flower-power beginnings to its barbaric killing spree in the summer of 1969. Full of illuminating archival footage of Manson, his followers and the environs that shaped their unlikely ascent, the series’ hourlong episodes feature exclusive interviews with former cult members, survivors of the victims, and the men and women involved in investigating a chilling crime spree that’s now part of L.A.’s dark history. (Read more) —Lorraine Ali

43. How to Fix a Drug Scandal

A lab technician holds a small bag containing white powder in "How to Fix a Drug Scandal” on Netflix.

2020 | TV-MA | 1 Season | Documentary series
Netflix: Included
Created by Erin Lee Carr

This four-part series can be frustrating to watch due to its over-the-top re-creations and clunky attempts at artful camera work, but the subject at its heart is worth your time. Erin Lee Carr focuses on Sonja Farak, a chemist at a drug lab in Amherst, Mass., that was one of the state’s two main testing facilities. Her role was to test evidence gathered from drug-related cases. Her lab work and her testimony on the stand secured thousands of convictions. But she also happened to be stealing and partaking in the controlled substances she was meant to be testing, including methamphetamines and LSD. But there’s more. Across the state, a chemist at the Hinton Lab was caught forging tens of thousands of tests, and that was just the beginning of the malfeasance uncovered by authorities when they investigated Annie Dookhan. She wasn’t getting high on evidence, but she was consistently misidentifying samples, and claimed to have tested substances that she’d never in fact examined. She even falsified evidence in order to impress her bosses and move up the chain.

Together the women compromised more than 47,000 criminal cases, affecting the lives of thousands. Dookhan’s arrest resulted in an avalanche of appeals, and numerous faulty convictions were overturned, but the state attorney general’s office went to great lengths to downplay Farak as a liability, burying proof of her drug addiction, lying to district attorneys and misleading judges for five years while keeping defendants from appealing their convictions. —Lorraine Ali

42. West of Memphis

A young man sits in a courtroom with an attorney, with two men in the background.

2012 | Rated R | Documentary
Apple TV+: Rent/Buy | Prime Video: Rent/Buy
Directed by Amy Berg

Satanic panic plagued the Bible Belt the 1980s and 1990s, when devil worship was thought to be behind seemingly every inexplicable, heinous crime. It was against this paranoid backdrop that the teens later known as the West Memphis Three were wrongfully convicted for the 1993 murder of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark. The crime was particularly gruesome: The bodies of the boys were found naked and hogtied in a drainage ditch, and one of the young victims’ genitals had been mutilated. The unthinkable levels of cruelty and violence were assumed to be the work of a demonic cult — villains who dressed in black and listened to heavy metal, as local teens Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols did at the time. The trio were arrested and convicted of the murders despite a stunning lack of evidence and coerced confessions. Filmmaker Amy Berg chronicles this gross miscarriage of justice through interviews with those deeply involved in the case, including family members, witnesses and the West Memphis Three themselves. Berg rightly argues that the teens were railroaded, and DNA evidence years later appeared to implicate the stepfather of one of the deceased. After 18 years in prison and celebrity campaigns to free the men (Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp and Natalie Maines were among those calling for their release), the West Memphis Three were released in 2011. Produced by Echols, his wife, Lorri Davis, and filmmaker Peter Jackson, “West of Memphis” is a searing indictment of the criminal justice system that shines a light on the dangers of institutional classism. (Read more) —Lorraine Ali

41. Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan

A close-up photo of a man with shaggy hair and a mustache

2021 | TV-14 | 1 Season | Documentary series
Netflix: Included
Created by Olivier Megaton

In 1978, Billy Milligan became the first person in U.S. history to cite multiple personality disorder in an insanity defense. But were his multiple personalities really controlling his actions, or were they simply the pretext of a dangerous, narcissistic sociopath? Netflix’s four-part investigative series revisits those questions, and the crimes of the rapist who terrorized Ohio State University before his arrest and made subsequent claims that he had no memory of the assaults. French film director Olivier Megaton (“Taken 2” and “Taken 3”) applies a cinematic lens to the docuseries format as he follows the Milligan family, friends, doctors and law enforcement who are still trying to understand Milligan’s state of mind at the time of his alleged crimes and at trial.

A litany of psychiatrists diagnosed Milligan, who was in his 20s when he was accused, with “multiple personality disorder” (known now as dissociative identity disorder). They determined he had as many as 24 distinct “multiples,” which led a jury to find Milligan innocent by reason of insanity. The landmark verdict rocked the criminal justice system, and its repercussions are still being debated today. (Read more) —Lorraine Ali

40. Catching Killers

A balding man in a beige suit rolls his eyes.

2021 | TV-MA | 2 Seasons | Documentary series
Netflix: Included
Created by Simon Dekker

Homicide detectives recount in vivid detail the extreme measures they took to track and capture the globe’s most notorious serial killers in Netflix’s docuseries “Catching Killers.” The Green River Killer, Aileen Wuornos, BTK and the Happy Face Killer are among the subjects covered in this two-season, eight-episode collection of captivating stories told by the investigators at the forefront of solving the cases. There’s no narration or outside talking heads here, just compelling sit-down interviews with the women and men who worked on some of the country’s most notorious crimes, poring over hundreds of clues, risking their lives and suffering emotionally after witnessing gruesome scenes and interrogating sociopaths, sadists and cannibals. Their frank and humanizing testimonials, paired with archival police and news footage from the cases, illustrate the momentous effort that went into cracking some of the most egregious serial homicides in modern memory. (Read more) —Lorraine Ali

39. The Vow

A seated woman wears glasses and an orange scarf.

“The Vow” follows disaffected members of NXIVM as they extricate themselves from the alleged cult and speak out against its leader, Keith Raniere. You might be wondering how seemingly intelligent people got involved in such a dubious operation. Weren’t they freaked out by the color-coded sashes that members wore to denote their rank? What about the outlandish claims about Raniere’s supposed intelligence or the midnight volleyball games he insisted on playing? Was anything really worth moving to the suburbs of Albany, N.Y., where the group was based?

Sarah Edmondson and Mark Vicente, two of the primary subjects of “The Vow,” say they never planned to join a cult. They were well-meaning spiritual seekers who found a sense of purpose through the group’s “Executive Success Program” — or ESP — personal development seminars supposedly designed to help people overcome their “limiting beliefs.” As recounted in “The Vow,” Edmondson and Vicente worked their way up the organization’s internal hierarchy — known as “the stripe path” — and became enthusiastic boosters of its mission, recruiting Hollywood actors and other artists to join NXIVM and helping it expand across North America.

Their decision to become whistleblowers, chronicled by “The Vow” directors Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, helped lead to Raniere’s 2020 conviction on charges including sex trafficking. Other high-profile NXIVM members, including Seagram’s heiress Clare Bronfman and “Smallville” actor Allison Mack, also have faced legal action. (Read more) —Meredith Blake

38. Cocaine Cowboys

A black-and-white still from the documentary movie "Cocaine Cowboys."

2006 | TV-MA | Documentary
Hulu: Included
Directed by Billy Corben

Before the cowboys came to town, Miami was a quiet place that featured, someone says, “a lot of old people sitting around in beach chairs waiting to die.” Then Colombia’s Medellín Cartel, “the world’s largest cocaine-smuggling organization,” discovered the place, more and more Americans got the drug habit, and lots of numbers in Miami skyrocketed. Those included the millions of dollars placed in local banks and the murder count, which went from 104 in 1976 to 621 in 1981.

“Cocaine Cowboys” tells this story with an all-sleaze-all-the-time attitude. The story is told largely by a trio of men who were there. Jon Roberts claims to have overseen the shipping of more than $2 billion worth of cocaine from Colombia, pilot Mickey Munday says he personally flew in some 10 tons, and Jorge “Rivi” Ayala is currently in prison for murder. These gentlemen are all capable storytellers, albeit invariably self-serving ones. While the filmmakers clearly got a contact high from hearing all these war stories, most civilians will find a little of this goes a long way. (Read more) —Kenneth Turan

37. John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise

A black-and-white mug shot of a man with a mustache

2021 | TV-14 | 1 Season | Documentary series
Peacock: Included
Created by Rod Blackhurst

John Wayne Gacy seemed like a stand-up guy to his friends and neighbors. He performed as a clown in parades and at the bedsides of sick children. He was a former Jaycee who founded a construction company where he generously hired young men with little experience. He was jovial and had a great sense of humor. But when 26 bodies were discovered under the floorboards of his Chicago home in 1978, it was clear they’d all been hoodwinked by the middle-aged guy next door. This six-part docuseries reveals how one of the country’s more prolific serial killers hid in plain sight as he preyed upon young men throughout the 1960s and 1970s. “Devil in Disguise” features interviews with Gacy’s sister and never-before-seen footage from his meeting with FBI profiler Robert Ressler, providing clues into how a monster convinced everyone he was a harmless jester. Warning: There’s clown art. —Lorraine Ali

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