20 chilling true-crime documentaries on Netflix to watch right now

Release date: 2020

Danny Schneider was an aimless ‘good kid’ when he was shot in the driver’s seat of his SUV while stopped in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans to purchase crack in 1999. The documentary’s seemingly ironic title refers to Danny’s father, Dan Schneider, a pharmacist who had no reason to believe his son was an addict with ties to dangerous drug culture. It was his search for his son’s killer that opened his eyes to Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid epidemic. This four-part documentary is a compelling ‘little guy against the world’ story, in which one man’s personal tragedy morphs into a crusade against the wealthy executives who helped turn Big Pharma into its own cottage industry for drug addiction.

Release date: 2021

Mark Hoffman was a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints who presented church leaders with fantastical documents that threatened to ‘change everything’ pertaining to the Mormon Church. As this true-crime documentary reveals, however, those documents turned out to be forged – and to prevent the truth from coming out, Hoffman built a bomb that killed one of his accusers. Then he built another that killed someone ostensibly unrelated to Hoffman’s initial crime. Then he turned up at the hospital, alleging that he had been injured by the detonation of an explosive. This story of the genesis of the three bombings, their impact, and Hoffman’s eventual apprehension and trial is both complex and riveting.

Release date: 2021

This true-crime documentary traces the exploits of serial killer, rapist and kidnapper Richard Ramirez during the mid-1980s in Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley, and the members of law enforcement who worked tirelessly to apprehend him.

This thrilling case was particularly challenging to crack because Ramirez’s criminal behaviour was seemingly random, lacking an obvious pattern. Told through archival footage, photos and interviews, Night Stalker‘s narrative depicts the maddening efforts of one newbie detective, Gil Carillo, to convince his more experienced partner (Frank Salerno), other members of law enforcement and the media, that a seemingly unrelated series of violent crimes were all committed by one person. The four-part documentary series is an emotionally satisfying narrative.

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Release date: 2020

The Watts family was, to all outward appearances, a happy, normal family – as evidenced in their numerous social media posts. That is, until 2018, when pregnant Shanann and her two young daughters went missing. Chris, the handsome and charming husband and father, quickly became the prime suspect. He participated in the investigation at first, only to be arrested and later convicted of the triple murder. Made with the cooperation of Shanann’s family, this emotional documentary is told with first-hand footage, illustrating how easily a curated online social media presence is able to hide a darker reality of abuse, manipulation and murder.

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Release date: 2020

Trial by Media explores six different crimes that were inextricably intertwined with their treatment by the media from start to finish. You’re probably already familiar with most, if not all, of the cases, which itself speaks to the effects of the considerable media attention. These include the murder of a young man following his appearance on The Jenny Jones Show, the shooting by police officers of Amadou Diallo, and the corruption trial of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who took it upon himself to amp up the media coverage and appeared on Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice.

Trial by Media arms the viewer with a lot of information and raises a lot of questions in the process, many of which are left to viewers to adjudicate themselves. That’s one of the reasons that some reviewers have concluded that the stories here would have been better told in a single chapter.

Release date: 2015 and 2018

After spending 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Steven Avery tried to put his life back together. But not two years later, he was arrested and later convicted of the murder of 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach. The first season of Making a Murderer delves into that case, along with the hypothesis that it was the justice system that had turned Avery into a murderer. Its second season, released three years later, focuses on Avery’s initially successful appeal in Halbach’s murder and how the US Supreme Court ultimately upheld his conviction and denied a review.

Making a Murderer was certainly not the first true-crime documentary to hit it big on Netflix, but it is arguably the mother in the Age of the True-Crime Documentary on Netflix, having been picked up by the streamer after a series of rejections by the major networks. The mere existence of its second season is evidence of not only the success of the first but also the fact that Avery’s fate may still be a function of the flaws in the justice system that he and the producers of this documentary were aiming to expose in the first place.

Release date: 2020

Jeffrey Epstein was a Gatsby-like figure with powerful friends and associates and a private island in the US Virgin Islands on which he entertained them. As it was revealed in 2019, following Epstein’s arrest by federal authorities, the island was low-key known as Paedophile Island, and Epstein’s network of friends and associates were starting to look less like golfing buddies and more like co-conspirators.

Epstein died under suspicious circumstances in a jail cell in August 2019. But by that time, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich was already in the works as a documentary and had been for nine months, albeit with great stealth, thanks to the cooperation of its producers and participants. Much of the story is told by people who survived the abuses perpetrated by Epstein. Although Epstein can’t tell his side of the story, the main thrust of the four-part docuseries is less about whether Epstein did wrong than it is about how money and power helped these wrongs to continue unchecked.

Release date: 2016

Meredith Kercher was a 21-year-old British college student studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, when someone slit her throat and left her to bleed out in the house she was sharing with two Italian roommates and a 20-year-old American named Amanda Knox. Knox was the one who found Kercher’s body and called the police. It quickly became apparent to law enforcement that Knox and her boyfriend, Raffael Sollecito, were responsible. Except they weren’t. After being convicted twice, Knox and her boyfriend were acquitted, and in a separate trial, a man named Rudy Guede, whose DNA had been found at the crime scene, was eventually convicted.

After multiple trials and intensive media coverage, most of the story has been told over and over again. What the Amanda Knox true-crime documentary on Netflix delivers is not a reiteration of all of that so much as a disturbing look at the way the “media and Italian law enforcement fed into each other” to construct a “bizarre – and very likely false – story behind Kercher’s murder,” reports Rolling Stone.

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Release date: 2020

Netflix’s four-part documentary series The Ripper chronicles the biggest manhunt in British history, which focuses on the Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered 13 female sex workers in Northern England between 1975 and 1980. The Ripper name was an invention of journalists who noticed similarities between these murders – and their terrifying impact on society – and those of the previous century’s murders by the never-apprehended, never-identified Jack the Ripper. The highly evocative Ripper will appeal to all true-crime buffs but especially those who gravitate toward historical mysteries because of its focus on the Ripper’s crimes during the 1970s, an era of radical change.

Release date: 2021

This Netflix true-crime documentary recalls the biggest and most notoriously unsolved art heist in history: the 1990 theft of millions of dollars worth of artwork – by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet, Degas and other historical art world luminaries – from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Although the crime itself bears the clear signs of an inside job, This is a Robbery makes a strong case for it being an enormously complicated multiplayer production sponsored by organised crime.

Read on for the strangest unsolved mysteries of the art world.