15 Best New True Crime Documentaries

For more than a decade — at least since Sarah Koenig re-traced that route to the Best Buy on the first season of “Serial” — the entertainment landscape has been swamped by more true crime offerings than ever before. There are countless podcasts, movies, and television shows that center around all manner of criminals, murderers, rapists, fraudsters, bombers, and many more. We’ve had some breakthroughs and genuine artistic triumphs in the last decade; if you’re interested, you can head over to our list of the twenty best true crime documentaries ever made, some of which are relatively recent. Many, however, are pretty bad, made quickly and aiming just to shock rather than inform or provoke.

If you’re a true crime fan who tries to stay up to date on the best of the best, it can be overwhelming to figure out what’s worth your time. There are movies and television shows that revisit recent history and stories from decades past, documentaries that grapple with the justice system as-is, and others that advocate for change. Some are entertaining and others are horrific, but either way, below you’ll find the 15 best new true crime documentaries that are worth streaming next.

The American criminal justice system is slow. It’s so slow, in fact, that we can now make entire multi-part true crime shows about a case that hasn’t been closed at the time of writing. That’s the case with “A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read,” a 2025 docuseries about the attempt to hold Karen Read responsible for the death of her boyfriend, John O’Keefe. He was found in the snow after a night of heavy drinking, and prosecutors allege that Read hit him with her car and left him for dead.

Except … the case is significantly more complex than that. In the ID docuseries, Read herself narrates the events of that night and the ensuing investigation. She’s quite the character, and the show allows us to see why people find her an unreliable narrator before peeling back the curtain on what seems to be rampant corruption at the heart of the case. After all, O’Keefe was a Boston cop, and so were many of the people at the house near where he died. There are plenty of twists but no answers here; instead, this is a great primer so you can follow the case in the news.

At this point in the true crime genre boom, we still sometimes expect that a documentary will reveal something shocking, finally answering the question of who is responsible for a crime, even if the justice system isn’t able to reach that conclusion. “A Deadly American Marriage,” a Netflix documentary about the murder of Jason Corbett, is notable because of how strongly it resists the impulse to decide what it thinks happened.

Instead, the film manages to get both sides of the story on record. First, there’s Molly Corbett, who allegedly killed her husband by severely beating him with a cinderblock. She claims it was self-defense, and that he would’ve killed her instead. On the other side, there are interviews with her estranged stepchildren, kids who claimed that their father was abusive and then later recanted their stories. To them now, Molly is evil. The doc invites us to investigate our own preconceived notions, asking us to think about why we believe the people we choose to believe.

The true crime genre often involves not just the recounting of an incident, but the investigation of who is responsible for that incident in an attempt to bring them to justice. “American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden” does just that, providing a look not only at 9/11 and its causes, but the intelligence operation that followed. The result is a riveting three-part Netflix series that relies heavily on talking-head interviews from people who were intimately involved, from the member of Seal Team Six who shot Bin Laden to Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA. You think you know this story, but hearing it from the mouths of decision-makers brings an immediacy to it that’s well worth a watch.

Plus, like the best true crime, this installment of the streamer’s “American Manhunt” franchise is more complicated than it seems on the surface. Was America’s obsession with tracking down this one man a distraction from more complex forms of “justice?” What freedoms did we willfully throw away in an attempt to even this particular score?

During the height of the pandemic, the Internet became fixated on the case of a mommy blogger named Myka Stauffer. She turned her family into content, extensively filming videos of them going about their lives in addition to taking viewers along on her journey to adopt a child in need from China. Her fans noticed, however, that their new son was being featured less and less, until he vanished from their videos altogether. And hey … if you stop a particular video at a particular time … are his hands bound with duct tape?

Director Rachel Mason’s Max docuseries pulls off a neat trick. At first, you think you’re watching a true crime show about a family who did something horrible to their child. By the end, however, “An Update On Our Family” becomes a searing look at the burgeoning “web sleuth” community, a group of people who think they’ll be able to solve crimes by posing the right questions to the right echo-chamber Facebook groups. This is actually a story about social shaming, a far more complex issue than internet crime fanatics often admit.

We tend to expect that true crime will feature someone being brought to justice, someone being made to answer for their crimes. Sometimes, though, there’s no tidy resolution, which can make a documentary all the more provocative. After all, the true crime genre can be activism. Think about “Making a Murderer,” and how it openly pushed for a deeper look at an evidently corrupt police force.

The disturbing “Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing” tells the story of Piper Rockelle, a teenage girl with a massive YouTube following. The doc posits that Tiffany Smith, her mother, is the puppetmaster behind her account, and it suggests that Smith may be knowingly opening her daughter and friends up to massive amounts of dangerous attention from men online. This is an ethically thorny docuseries — after all, it makes easily accessible on Netflix much of the content that it views as problematic — but in doing so, it’s a docuseries that wants to make you angry so that something will change. The kids are not all right.

Netflix’s “Cold Case” franchise is occasionally pretty rocky. “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?” spends a lot of time on detours in the case that don’t amount to much, revisiting evidence that has long since been discredited. (“Casting JonBenet,” on the other hand, is one of Netflix’s best original true crime documentaries.) On “Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders,” though, you’re likely to encounter a lot of evidence you’ve never seen before.

The show is about the rash of poisonings that struck Chicago in 1982, when an as-yet-unidentified person managed to slip cyanide into bottles of Tylenol on store shelves. Multiple people died, and the story goes that the investigation never turned up a viable suspect. Except … what if it did, and they were just never brought to justice? This show is a relatively quick watch, and it’s nothing revolutionary, but not everything has to be. This is an engrossing series that suggests not all cold cases are unable to be solved.

Family vloggers have been around for about a decade, but you’ll notice that there are multiple new documentaries that deal with people putting their children online. We’re only just now beginning to grapple with the ethics of what this does to kids who grow up on the internet, their lives on full display. Spoilers: Nothing good!

The Hulu show “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke” is about one particular mommy vlogger who loved to show off her ostensibly perfect family life online. When the cameras were off, however, Franke was a totally different person. With access to a startling trove of footage that never made it online, the doc constructs Franke’s home life as a reign of terror that traumatized her children, especially as she begins to fall under the sway of a charismatic cult leader. I’m usually resistant to true crime that talks about people being “evil,” but in this case, Franke is the one who came to believe something sinister was in their home. She may have been more correct than she knew.

As true crime has continued to proliferate across streaming services, the documentaries that often break through are the ones that deal with a miscarriage of justice. In the case of Rex Heuermann, the Gilgo Beach serial killer who slaughtered numerous sex workers on Long Island, we still don’t know how he will be brought to account.

Netflix’s “Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer,” however, makes the case that the miscarriage of justice has already happened. There were plenty of warning signs that should have led authorities right to Heuermann’s door, as the series lays out in stunning detail. There were plenty of people who had seen, heard, and documented clear evidence pointing to Heuermann … but because the victims were sex workers, they weren’t listened to. This is a sobering watch that makes us realize true justice would be if these people were still alive. All that’s left now is picking up the pieces.

This is the second documentary from Rachel Mason on this list, and that’s because she’s an empathetic, insightful filmmaker. Whereas “An Update On Our Family” investigated mommy vloggers, Mason here turns her lens on the killing of her friend, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

She died when Alec Baldwin pulled the trigger of what he thought was a prop gun on the set of “Rust,” and in the ensuing years, various parties have sought to place and avoid blame. The true crime genre is often accused of focusing too much on perpetrators rather than victims, and “Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna” attempts to correct the record by instead centering the story of the artist who died. This is a tragedy, the film argues, and in the rush to place blame — often for partisan, online echo-chamber reasons — we forgot to focus on the real person who lost her life. It’s a poignant, stirring film.

For the last few years, National Geographic has released a number of excellent docuseries that unpack pivotal moments in American history by zeroing in on one eventful day. “9/11: One Day in America” and “JFK: One Day in America” are both comprehensive, methodical looks at those dark chapters in our past, and “Oklahoma City Bombing: One Day in America” might just be the strongest of the bunch.

9/11 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy took a very long time to untangle; depending on who you ask, both might still be unresolved. In the case of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, however, they caught the perpetrator that very day. That allows the docuseries to deliver on both the crime and its investigation, providing a satisfactory narrative arc.

The trick of the franchise is that these days, of course, they aren’t isolated events at all. The bombing in Oklahoma City still resonates, still speaks to something elemental and frightening about our society today, and the show does an excellent job of driving that home.

In 2016, Sherri Papini vanished while jogging near her home. She showed up several days later beaten, branded, and speaking of two Mexican women who had held her captive. Eventually, however, authorities announced that Papini had faked the whole thing. She still maintains that she was kidnapped, insisting that her ex-boyfriend is the one who brutalized her; he maintains his innocence.

One way to assess true crime is to look at its use of re-enactments. In the days of “Dateline” and “20/20,” re-enactments were sordid and melodramatic. Filmmakers like Errol Morris — the father of the true crime documentary — attempt to do something more interesting and artistic, and something like “The Jinx” opts for evocative re-enactment imagery that seems based on emotion rather than fact. The ID documentary “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” does something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: They got Papini herself to act out her own re-enactment footage. In doing so, the series raises vital questions about the use of re-enactments — their emotional impact, their evidentiary value, and their storytelling significance. Papini is a known fabulist, and it’s both riveting and thought-provoking to watch her retrace her own steps in an attempt to control the narrative once more.

Between 2011 and 2016, Showtime aired a reality show called “Gigolos.” It chronicled the shenanigans of a group of male escorts in Las Vegas, following their friendships and business deals as they entertained tourists and provided certain services too hot for television. It was a fizzy, sexy reality show, more “Skinemax” than Bravo. 

In 2025, Paramount+ released “Sin City Gigolo: A Murder in Las Vegas.” The show is a sequel series of sorts to the Showtime original, except we’ve shifted genres. We’re firmly in true crime territory now, because one of the gigolos from the original show went on to brutally murder someone. And, as the show strongly suggests, some of the other quirky characters from “Gigolos” may just have helped him cover it up. If you’ve never seen the original show, don’t worry; this update does a great job filling you in on all the pre-existing relationships.

True crime often gets accused of being sordid, and this series leans right into that; it’s the most well-done sordid story you can imagine, the platonic ideal of a trashy true crime show that aims to shock and titillate. It’s easy to moralize about true crime, but if you ask me, there’s room for this kind of thing too.

There’s a thriving subgenre of true crime that zeroes in on the kind of internet-related media-circus story that went viral in the early 2010s before falling off most people’s radar. That subgenre includes Amazon Prime Video’s “Spy High,” a show that looks into the webcam-spying situation at the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania. In 2010, the school issued laptops to its students, neglecting to mention that they could remotely access the cameras. Which, apparently, they did. Repeatedly. In the kids’ bedrooms at home, including while they were sleeping and changing.

“Spy High” fills in the gaps of the story you might half-remember. The media furor may seem quaint now, but back then, the idea of the surveillance state extending to your local school district was a surprise to people. The story quickly faded, however, and that sort of invasion of privacy became rapidly normalized. Left in its wake were students like Blake Robbins, the first kid to come forward and accuse his school in court. His life was forever changed by what happened to him — by both his rebellion against authority and his brush with media infamy — and “Spy High” attempts to sift through the wreckage.

In 2022, Netflix aired “Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99,” a solid documentary about the institutional failures that led to that disaster of a music festival. In 2025, it re-launched the brand with a series of eight more films, all of which aim to put a human face on stories you might’ve only read about online. The first of the new docs is “Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy,” a film that looks at the tragic crowd crush at a Travis Scott concert that killed multiple people in 2022.

This is also one of those true crime documentaries that functions like activism. The doc looks into all of the clear warning signs that led to the deadly event, advocating for change and for people to be held responsible. Crime isn’t always intentional, after all; it can instead be institutional and neglectful. As the deeply uncomfortable footage shows, the people who were there went through something unspeakably horrific. What might justice look like in this case, especially for the victims who are no longer with us?

There have been plenty of true crime documentaries about the Zodiac Killer. David Fincher’s “Zodiac” is a modern masterpiece, and in the 1970s, there was even a movie about the Zodiac Killer purely in an attempt to lure him into a trap. It failed, obviously, because decades after he took the lives of multiple people in the San Francisco area … decades after he sent mysterious ciphers to local papers and police, taunting them for being unable to capture him … his identity is still unknown.

If you watch the Netflix docuseries “This Is The Zodiac Speaking,” however, you might come away thinking you know his identity after all. The show features interviews with people close to one of the case’s main suspects, and the name will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the Fincher film, providing a fascinating true crime counterpoint to that chilling scene where Jake Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith feels trapped in the basement. “This Is The Zodiac Speaking” brings to light what sure feels like new, convincing evidence; depending on who you ask, the man in this film might really be the Zodiac speaking. It’s a must-watch for any true crime obsessive.