Best True Crime Documentaries of 2025, Ranked

For all the panic that the Tylenol scare of the 1980s set off, and the sweeping changes in over-the-counter medication regulations it inspired, this documentary from co-directors Yotam Guendelman and Ari Pines lacks the punch to deliver the message. At its core, the sheer randomness of the deaths from cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules was and remains an incomprehensible horror. It’s scary knowing the basic act of treating a headache or a sore limb could be the fatal mistake that drops you into someone’s game to inflict suffering and fear just for the hell of it. But what’s missing in this series is a clear vision for the story it wanted to tell, perhaps because the murders are still unsolved. Did it want to probe the collective realization that we are more vulnerable than we care to admit? Or was it interested in bringing forth alternate theories about Johnson & Johnson’s potential involvement in the crimes? Unfortunately, while still a gripping crime, the series leans more to the latter and therefore loses a bit of its bite. 

The “House of Horrors” in Gloucester, England is one of the most famous nightmares of the 20th century. Fred West killed, sexually assaulted and dismembered at least a dozen women and young girls over 20 years from 1967-1987, most of them with the assistance of his wife Rose. The sheer scale of their crimes, most buried in the garden in their backyard, makes them a classic case for the true-crime treatment. However, there is way more to this story than director Daniel Dewsbury clues the audience in on. Despite the first two episodes being named for its killers, the series doesn’t examine their backgrounds, how Fred groomed a much-younger Rose into their relationship and the lasting trauma of this two-decade tragedy. The victims deserve their time in the modern-day true crime conversation, but this is an introductory case study at best.

A woman who learns she was, as a 2-year-old, accused of killing her baby brother goes on a dogged personal quest for answers about her parents’ real involvement in the crime. While not the most refined doc this year, Tracyraquel Berns is an interesting enough figure whose life is boiled down to the twists and turns of a death that has haunted her entire life — even before she was told it had been laid on her shoulders. It’s an intriguing setup, but it also falls into the trap of stretching a story to its limits to fill an episodic order, versus telling a full story that actually needs four episodes.

In 2010, a Philadelphia high school student was accused by his principal of selling drugs — the supposed proof of which was a photo taken of him in his bedroom on a school-issued laptop. The scandal of how a school invaded a minor’s privacy spirals into a criminal investigation that uncovered more than 50,000 photos taken of students in their homes without their knowledge. The most chilling thing about this documentary is the fact that this happened 15 years ago. Imagine what our computers are doing to us today without us even knowing about it.

Male serial killers are the ones who usually get immortalized in films, TV series and documentaries about their depravities. But America is still working through how it feels about female killers. Aileen Wuornos is probably the first of them to come to mind for most, and her story has already nabbed Charlize Theron an Oscar for “Monster” (and Sarah Paulson is gearing up to play her as well for Ryan Murphy’s “Monster” Season 4). But no one speaks to this Florida serial killer’s life and legacy better than the woman herself. In interviews granted in 1997 before her execution, Wuornos reckoned with her own demons, regrets and image in the final days of her life. It’s a stirring reflection on someone’s own understanding of themselves, the totality of their life and what could have been.

A key component to most true-crime sagas is the inevitable recollections of those closest to the perpetrators who never saw it coming. The family and friends blindsided by the double life led by their loved ones. But few can claim to be closer to generational evil more than Kerri Rawson, the daughter of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer. By shifting the focus of the documentary to Rawson, director Skye Borgman manages to track the ripple effects of BTK’s crimes, especially the permanent wounds left on a daughter picking up the pieces of her life after so much death.

According to a Pennsylvania medical examiner, schoolteacher Ellen Greenberg died by suicide after stabbing herself 20 times in the back and neck in 2011. Her parents don’t buy it, and for those who watched this series from director Nancy Schwartzman and producers Dakota and Elle Fanning, it’s not hard to see why. Too often, the true crime that warrants attention from documentarians involves a miscarriage of justice or a botched investigation, and this four-episode series lays out why all the above could be at play in Greenberg’s death. Unfortunately for those hoping this thoughtful, meticulously researched series might move the needle on her death determination, the city of Philadelphia upheld the suicide ruling a few weeks after the episodes hit Hulu. But her parents have vowed to keep fighting.

Two devout Christian couples in Florida are shattered in 2000 when one of the men goes missing while hunting and is feared eaten by alligators, as is one’s lot in life in Florida. But that isn’t the crazy part. His wife almost immediately seeks his life insurance and shacks up with his best friend, who abandons his own wife in the process. Years later, the odd woman out leads an investigation in growing suspicions the gruesome twosome may have been involved in the husband’s death. While simply told, calling this is a wild ride would be an understatement as its protagonist takes viewers on a revenge trip for the ages and mines from it a rarity in the true-crime space: a happy ending where bad people get (some semblance of) what they deserve.

Everyone had seen the video: a terrified Gabby Petitio being questioned about a domestic violence incident by police on the side of a desert highway, just days before she went missing in 2021. The tragedy of 22-year-old Gabby’s murder, at the hands of her fiancé Brian Laundrie, is deeply felt in this three-episode series from director Michael Gasparro and Julia Willoughby Nason. But even more viscerally, the expanded episodic runway makes viewers sit with the uncomfortable raw footage of Gabby and Brian’s increasingly volatile on-camera interactions while trying to be YouTube vloggers. The resulting format is a show within a show: First, there’s the documentary telling Gabby’s story through her family and friends; and second, there’s a frozen-in-time archive of a romantic partnership warped by micro and macroaggressions that fostered an environment of control, hostility and ultimately a murder-suicide carried out over the course of weeks.

Nothing digs a documentary into your marrow more than a lack of answers, and “Amy Bradley Is Missing” is steeped in unanswered questions. In 1998, a young woman disappeared without a trace from her family’s cabin on the Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas cruise ship and has not been seen since. Whether you think Amy Bradley was the victim of human trafficking, or she fell overboard, or she is living a new life she brokered for herself, directors Phil Lott and Ari Mark give you all the facts and let you decide. Better yet, they let each subsequent theory cast enough doubt on the last to leave the viewer questioning everything, while also wanting more.

The power of memory — as a tool and as a weapon — is at the center of director Margaret Brown’s compelling three-episode look at the 1991 murder of four teenage girls in an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop in Austin, Texas. Working with unused footage from a young filmmaker overwhelmed by the scope of the case, Brown retraces the steps of ostracized investigators, sits down with the still-searching families and talks to some of the suspects who the public never fully exonerated. The engaging A24 production is more of a mood piece than a traditional doc, peeling back the ways this quadruple homicide lingers over Austin like a sinister cloud to this day. Unfortunately for viewers, it is only half the story. Less than a month after the doc dropped on HBO, DNA evidence linked the case to a deceased serial killer — leaving new questions that aren’t interrogated in the doc and may never be answered for those left behind. Season 2, perhaps?

“I don’t put any value in anybody after they are gone and dead, as they shouldn’t in me when I’m gone and dead.” That’s an acceptable stance for the average person to have, but it’s not the kind of opinion you want to hear from the man in charge of your loved one’s cremation. And yet, that is how freely David Sconce talks about his time as a mortician during the 1980s when, among other injustices, he cremated thousands of people a year –– most of them together, which is not protocol to say the least. Director Joshua Rofé’s series is a sobering trek through the crimes and callousness of Sconce, whose bizarring candidness offers a lens into the mind of a truly terrifying individual who is part Mafia boss, part Scrooge McDuck jumping into his mountain of coins and entirely devoid of remorse for profiting off the vulnerability of his clients. Everybody dies, and this series leaves its audience with a new fear they might end up in the hands of someone as cold blooded as Sconce.

While 2025 doesn’t offer as many new entries into the subgenre of cult documentaries as years past, the closest audiences got was Hulu’s reckoning with Ruby Franke and the poisonous nature of fame, fortune and the illusion of perfection. As a YouTube mom-fluencer, Franke projected the image of an infallible Mormon family of eight to her thousands of followers, offering parenting advice and an inside look at their home life. Years later, she had cast half that family out of her house and pleaded guilty, along with her live-in spiritual counselor Jodi Hildebrandt, to half a dozen counts of child abuse for imprisoning and torturing two of her children whom she believed were possessed. (Hildebrandt herself is now the subject of the Netflix docuseries “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story,” set for a Dec. 30 release.) Franke is an infuriating figure to spend any degree of time with, but director Olly Lambert manages to wring from her story an important lesson for the age of influencers — never trust the life someone shows you online.

Followers of the Idaho college murder case were rocked this summer when news broke that Bryan Kohberger, the man accused of brutally killing four University of Idaho students in 2022, had taken a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. The news came mere days before co-directors Liz Garbus and Matthew Galkin’s four-part series on the case was set to drop on Prime Video, leaving the filmmakers scrambling to add a new coda to their work. Nevertheless, the series was exactly what watchers of the case had waited for: intimate interviews with victims’ families, the friends who were closest to them and those who became collateral damage of the toxic social-media sleuths that sought to solve the case by any means necessary. While sensationalized, the moments with the families are gut-wrenching yet hopeful for the future, which is a delicate balance to walk when every breath is singed with sorrow.

Largely told through cell-phone video and calls from men serving life sentences inside the Alabama prison system, this film from directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman will render you speechless with what it reveals about the cruelty so casually inflicted upon the state’s incarcerated citizens. Beaten, bloodied and even killed, the documentary asks audiences to muster empathy and understanding for why even those charged with the most heinous of crimes should still be treated according to the law. Jarecki (who directed “The Jinx”) and Kaufman make the case that insidious behavior like this, enacted against those with no recourse to defend or protect themselves, is an evil that can spread if not cut out –– something the Alabama government doesn’t seem interested in doing.

The documentary about a teenage couple who is relentlessly bullied through anonymous text messages immediately became a phenomenon when it premiered in August. The 2025 version of word of mouth — TikTok users filming their families and friends watching the twist that comes about halfway through — made the film from director Skye Borgman (who also helmed “My Father, the BTK Killer”) a spectacle that everyone was talking about. But it is also a well-crafted (albeit deceptive at times) cautionary tale about how those closest to us are in the best position to hurt us. While no one gets murdered in this one, the scars left behind by the perpetrator (who is heavily featured in the film) are laid bare in a way that sickens as much as it shocks.

First premiering at Sundance in January, this film pieced together from body camera and interrogation room footage chronicles the story of a predominately Black Florida neighborhood put on edge by a white woman who repeatedly calls the police for nonsensical threats while antagonizing the children playing in a nearby lot. The frustrating, foreboding sense of dread that hangs over each false cry for help ratchets up the tension until someone is dead and a community is forever changed. By stripping away the traditional hallmarks of a documentary (the talking heads, the endless news segments, etc.) and simply showing the increasing concern, anger and ultimately heartbreak from the neighbors, director Geeta Gandbhir trims away any agenda or bias to simply show the facts about a case that should have never happened. Gandbhir understands that sometimes the best way to tell a story is to let it speak for itself, and this one speaks volumes about the systemic failures of the laws meant to protect citizens. It lands as a searing indictment of America today, where communities quietly live their lives until they are devastatingly interrupted by the will of one.

Director/producer Liz Garbus spent nearly a decade pouring over the facts in the case of the Gilgo Beach murders, first for 2020’s narrative film “Lost Girls” and then for this year’s “Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer” docuseries. Her investment in this story –– particularly the victims and their families –– comes through loud and clear in this disheartening look at how willing communities are to look past hateful violence simply because of someone’s profession or circumstance. The victim-forward series centers the more than a dozen women, many of them sex workers, who were killed and disposed of on or near Long Island between 1993 and 2011. Within that, she also charts the fraught 30-year investigation that only recently led to the arrest of Rex Heuermann, who is charged with killing seven of the victims. Despite the revelation, Garbus never veers far from her intent to chronicle the lives lost and the supportive community built on the shared pain of those left behind. That’s what the killer thought he had stolen from his victims, but their stories only grow louder and more prescient with Garbus’ staggering work.