By True crime is the phenomenon which, ironically enough, simply will not die. After the water cooler-dominating Making A Murderer, the entire world discovered an insatiable appetite for stories of people who'd been unfairly locked up, of justice coming for the guilty who hadn't, and extended sequences of people in beige offices comparing blood splatter patterns.
But obviously you don't want to get incarcerated in the never-ending scroll, paralysed by choice and unable to strike the fatal blow on any one unsuspecting victim/true crime series. So, here are the eight best ones true crime documentaries that you can watch on Netflix right now.
Evil Genius
Real Crime: Supermarket Heist
This one's slightly lighter. The crime: a campaign of attempted letterbombs and demands for a ransom paid out in Tesco Clubcards. The location: Bournemouth, a sleepy seaside town with the third-oldest average age in the UK. Who could possibly run a campaign of terror like this? The ransom demand letters are signed by the mysterious 'Sally', who isn't quite what she seems.
The Confession Killer
A man confesses to being a serial killer. Big news. But a man confessing to killing more than 200 people? That's huge – and hugely suspicious – news. Henry Lee Lucas said he was responsible for hundreds of unsolved murders in 1983, and the task of untangling the web of lies and brutality took a long time. Plot twists ahoy.
The Staircase
Kathleen Paterson is dead. She fell down the stairs of her home in Forest Hills, North Carolina. Her husband, Michael, is the prime suspect. Simple set up, but the intricacies and intrigues of the case pile up and up and up. There's the blow poke. The Powerpoint meltdown. The owl theory. The first tranche of 10 were released in 2004, and Netflix followed up with three new episodes in 2018. Once you start, you will hoover them all up in one weekend.
Icarus
Not every true crime thriller is a dig into a small town murder or robbery. Some go big. Icarus goes big, but starts small. Bryan Fogel investigates doping in sport by teaming up with Grigory Rodchenkov, director of Russia's anti-doping lab, and taking performance enhancing drugs to prove that the current checks aren't working. Then Grigory tells him that he's sat on information about a doping scandal that ended in Russia being banned from all international competition for four years at the end of 2019. Explosive stuff, which earned Icarus the 2018 Oscar for Best Documentary.
The Confession Tapes
This anthology series takes a different case each episode and digs into how apparently conclusive confessions from people accused of murder of varying descriptions – deliberately driving a car off the edge of a pier, for instance, or setting fire to a house – could actually have been coerced out of them, and what really happened. One even accuses a detective of hypnosis. It's harrowing stuff, but gripping.
Making A Murderer
Obviously. This was the one that took true crime binging to the masses, and the one that every true crime doc since has ached to follow. Steven Avery of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, was convicted of the assault and attempted murder of Penny Beertnsen in 1985. After 18 years in jail, he was exonerated – but then he was put on trial for the murder of Teresa Halbach. Accusations of evidence tampering, intimidation and incompetent counsel abound. Just don't bother with the criminally dull second series.
Wild Wild Country
The saga of an Indian commune which moved to Oregon in the Eighties is fascinating enough as a piece of otherwise entirely forgotten recent American history, but then the hold which spiritual guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had over his followers induced them to get involved in an extensive rap sheet of crimes. Wild Wild Country took flak for missing out accusations of sexual assault and a plan to start a worldwide AIDS epidemic – which you'd think you'd probably include really, on balance – but there's so much intrigue already stuffed in here you'd need twice as many episodes to do it justice.
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