From stories of serial killers to YouTubers gone bad, our picks for the true-crime documentaries and series that grabbed our attention this year
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been a full decade since Making a Murderer set off the modern true-crime boom. These days, streamers flock to series and films that delve into the more terrifying realities of our existence — from stalkers to cults to serial killers to deaths at the hands of those we thought we could trust. Some of the work is clearly just capitalizing on the craze, trying to profit off of the salacious nature of stories that have captured a nation. A select few, however, are able to take a step back and tell us something not only about the people involved in these crimes, but also what they say about us as humans in the digital age.
Here, in chronological order, nine picks for documentary movies and shows that did just that this year, moving past the shock value to tell the stories of the real people affected by the crimes at their center.
Photos in Illustration
Netflix, 2; Washington County Attorney’s Office/AP; Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images
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‘The Fall of Diddy’
Image Credit: Vince Bucci/Getty Images
Sean Combs has been a mainstay in the music industry for more than three decades — from his start at Uptown Records to his launch of Bad Boy Records and expansion of his empire into fashion, alcohol, and reality TV, he was perched at the the top of the A-list. But since sexual abuse allegations began to surface in 2023, his kingdom has crumbled. Though he was once famous for his lavish annual White Party, where celebrities sipped Champagne in monochromatic outfits at his Hamptons estate, he’s now best known for his “freak-offs,” unhinged orgies that involved employees, girlfriends, sex workers, and a whole lot of baby oil. Produced in partnership with Rolling Stone Films, The Fall of Diddy gets into his backstory and his downfall, offering interviews with those involved in his operation, his alleged victims, and the journalists covering the story from start to finish.
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‘American Murder: Gabby Petito’
Image Credit: Netflix
In the summer of 2021, Gabby Petito, 22, and her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, packed their belongings into a converted van and took off from Florida to explore the national parks — inspired by other “van life” influencers, they wanted to see what it would be like to live on the road. When, in early September, Petito’s mother hadn’t heard from her in a few days, she filed a missing persons report. What followed was a case that gripped the country. A portrait of Laundrie as an abusive partner began to emerge, and both sets of Petito’s parents — her mother and father had both remarried, and the four co-parented — staged multiple press conferences begging for help. On Sept. 19, Petito’s body was found. A month later, Laundrie’s remains were also discovered; he was dead of an apparent suicide. Netflix’s American Murder: Gabby Petito manages to tell the entire story while also bringing Petito to life as more than just the girl on the missing poster.
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‘Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke’
Image Credit: Disney
Ruby Franke had been a controversial figure for a while. A YouTube mommy vlogger, Franke had showcased her parenting style on her channel, 8 Passengers, for years, sparking discourse in parenting communities over her disciplinarian approach to raising her kids. But when one of her children appeared at her neighbor’s house in 2023, emaciated and showing signs of abuse, the reality of the situation was blown open for the whole world to see. Franke and her business partner, a life coach named Jodi Hildebrandt, were arrested and accused of starving, locking up, and otherwise abusing their kids. (Both women pleaded guilty to felony child abuse in 2023.) In Devil in the Family, interviews with Franke’s ex-husband Kevin and her two older children, Sheri and Chad, take viewers behind the scenes of the famous YouTube family, showing the dark realities of a couple pushing their children to be creators, the slide into abuse, and the accusations of “spiritual warfare” that helped tear the family apart.
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‘Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer’
Liz Garbus made her first film about the Long Island Serial Killer back in 2020, a dramatized look at the women searching for their lost loved ones, called Lost Girls. 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 Gone Girls 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. It’s a twisted tale: 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, as covered in the first two episodes. The third examines how renewed interest in the case eventually brought authorities to Heuermann. It also offers chilling interviews with the friends and loved ones of victims — some of whom had evidence that could have brought him into custody a full decade before he was caught.
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‘A Deadly American Marriage’
Image Credit: Brendan O’Callaghan/Netflix
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 to help care for the kids, and took on Molly Martens, a 25-year-old from Knoxville, Tennessee. When Martens and Corbett fell in love and moved to North Carolina, Jason’s family was skeptical. It was a good instinct. Within a couple of years, he would be dead, shot by Martens’ ex-FBI father, Tom, in what the two claimed was self defense. What unfolded is difficult to parse — 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.
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‘Amy Bradley is Missing’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
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 over the side of the boat? Had she died at the hands of a man she met in the ship’s disco? Had she been trafficked and was she secretly living in Curaçao? 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.
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‘Trophy Wife’
Image Credit: Hulu
On an early fall morning in 2016, a shot rang out over a Zambian national park. Moments later, Larry Rudolph, a Pitsburgh dentist on safari with his wife, Bianca, shouted that she had committed suicide. He claimed she’d pushed her hunting rifle against her face and pulled the trigger. In reality, he had killed her. In this three-part series, based on Matt Sullivan’s 2022 Rolling Stone story “Did This Trump-Loving, Leopard-Hunting Dentist Kill His Wife?” Sullivan and a team of producers take viewers through Rudolph’s life — from a scrappy young dentist, to a powerful force within the local industry, to his tenure as a philandering president of the Safari Club, to his eventual trial and conviction for Bianca’s murder. It’s a twisted tale that explores both the lucrative industry of suburban dentistry and the wild world of big-game hunting. The best part? Interviews with Daniel Foote, the U.S. ambassador to Zambia, possibly the most eccentric diplomat in the country — or at least in a true-crime docuseries.
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‘Unknown Number: The High School Catfish’
Image Credit: Netflix
The premise of Unknown Number: The High School Catfish is a little different than many of the documentaries on this list. Instead of dealing with murder, Unknown Number tells the story of two high school kids, Lauryn Licari and Owen McKenny, who were the subject of a 20-month harassment campaign. For more than a year, they received dozens of texts a day from an unknown number, missives that ranged from the personal to the sexually explicit to the downright threatening. At first they thought it was a jealous classmate, trying to break them up, but the reality was infinitely more twisted. We won’t spoil it here, but suffice to say, it’s probably the biggest twist in a documentary this year.
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‘The Perfect Neighbor’
Image Credit: Netflix
It’s not often that a Sundance darling becomes a streaming true-crime hit, but in the case of The Perfect Neighbor, that distinction is well deserved. For the film, director Geeta Gandbhir took a different tack than most Netflix shows, telling the story of the death of Ajike “AJ” Owens, a 36-year-old mother of four in Florida, through found footage and audio — including 911 calls, police body cams, and neighbors filming with their cell phones. It’s not just a portrait of what happens when tragedy strikes a neighborhood, but an exploration of Stand Your Ground laws: Owens, a Black woman, was killed by her white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, who said she felt threatened by Owens’ presence after a series of arguments. Lorincz would eventually be found guilty of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to 25 years in prison — there’s courtroom footage of that, too — but the tension in the film is palpable.
