True-crime documentaries are always a sure-fire hit on any streaming platform. 2025 saw the release of some doozies—beyond the usual SEO suspects, such as Chaos: The Manson Murders, American Murder: Gabby Petito, and The Fall of Diddy—that proved to us the true crime genre is moving in a direction that values education over exploitation.
If you only stuck to watching those optimized titles, chances are you missed the best true-crime documentaries of 2025. Top picks include Andrew Jarecki’s The Alabama Solution, HBO Max’s The Mortician, and Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor. Here are seven of 2025’s best true-crime docs and where to watch them.
7
One Night in Idaho: The College Murders
More than a mere whodunnit
In November 2022, four University of Idaho students were brutally killed in an off-campus house. While a suspect was quickly apprehended, filmmakers Liz Garbus and Matthew Galkin began documenting the ongoing investigation in One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, with permission from the victims’ families.
However, nearly a week prior to the documentary’s release, the suspect took a plea deal, leaving the filmmakers scrambling to add a new coda to their work. Nevertheless, its intimate interviews with victims’ families, friends, and those who became collateral damage to the toxic social-media sleuths that sought to solve the case their own way were exactly what viewers craved.
Stream it on Prime Video.
6
Zodiac Killer Project
Narrative tricks almost wasted
Zodiac Killer Project isn’t a documentary about the famed Zodiac Killer of the late 60s. Instead, it’s a fascinating, hilarious, and self-aware autopsy of a documentary that almost was.
Filmmaker Chris Shackleton devoted years of his life to telling the story of late California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty, who alleged in his 2012 memoir that a group of seven law enforcement officials had uncovered and fought to protect the Zodiac Killer’s true identity. Unfortunately, Lafferty’s estate denied Shackleton the rights, so the filmmaker instead uses his documentary film to engage a professional failure head-on, without ego, and deconstruct the true crime genre entirely. You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of your own relationship to the genre at large.
Rent it on Prime Video.
5
Unknown Number: The High School Catfish
A heart-stopping revelation
If you’ve seen Abducted in Plain Sight or its jaw-dropping dramatization A Friend of the Family, you’re going to want to see Unknown Number: The High School Catfish. Director and producer Skye Borgman is attached to all three, taking viewers on astounding, in-depth investigative and experiential journeys.
At the height of the pandemic in the small town of Beal City, Michigan, Lauryn Licari, 13, starts getting dozens of harassing and disturbingly intimate messages from an unknown number. So does her boyfriend, Owen, and the messages, which often veer sexual in nature and display a terrifying level of familiarity with Lauryn’s life. This documentary’s heart-stopping details come in its revelation of whom the person is behind it all.
Stream it on Netflix.
4
Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer
A compelling, never-ending mystery
Much like with The Jinx, the project of filmmaker Liz Garbus (One Night in Idaho) went from dramatizing a long, unsolved crime to exposing audiences to the true story while also joining the contemporary movement to provide justice for victims’ families.
In 2020, Garbus directed the Netflix film Lost Girls, based on the Gilgo Beach serial killings, which was a stark example of gross institutional corruption and police malpractice. It focused on the families of the “Gilgo Four,” who were all sex workers when they were killed. In 2022, a new task force was formed to find the killer after Lost Girls destigmatized the victims’ profession and explored it as part of the reason authorities were so sluggish to act. In 2023, a suspect was arrested, and then in 2025, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer premiered, continuing the search for justice as new victims emerge.
Stream it on Netflix.
3
The Perfect Neighbor
Appearances can be deceiving
One of the absolute best and most viscerally horrifying documentaries of 2025, The Perfect Neighbor is a Netflix must-watch for everyone. It’s extremely unique in that it tells the story of the death of a young mother of four entirely through found footage and audio, including 911 calls, police body cams, and neighbors filming with their cell phones. It is eye-popping.
Director Geeta Gandbhir gives us a clear vision of what true-crime docs and adaptations could be. In 2023, 58-year-old Susan Lorincz, a white woman, shot and killed 35-year-old Ajike Owens in her own Florida neighborhood, in front of one of her four young kids. Lorincz claimed self-defense, invoking the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Body cam footage reconstructs a timeline of harassment, paranoia, structural violence, and systemic failure, as well as the weaponizing of hysteria against minority communities. It’s a difficult, maddening watch, but it’s also unflinching in its education and presentation of an undeniable reality.
Stream it on Netflix.
2
The Mortician
The Jinx but so much worse
The Mortician involves no abduction, no murder, no ransom notes, and no bloody crime scenes. Instead, the horror here lies in one man’s uniquely disturbing greed, corruption, and professional ruthlessness.
From Sasquatch director Joshua Rofé and executive producer Jonah Hill, The Mortician profiles the cold-blooded and calculating David Sconce, a lethally detached businessman devoid of remorse, who ultimately brought down his family’s funeral home in a gruesome scandal in the 1980s. Through a series of interviews, Sconce eagerly recounts all the nasty details of his time cremating human remains, introducing an inhumane level of efficiency into his system by attempting to cremate dozens—and, at times, hundreds—of bodies at once.
Stream it on HBO Max.
1
The Alabama Solution
A shocking prison twist
Director Andrew Jarecki returned 10 years after hit serial killer show The Jinx to do something arguably even more daring and point the camera at the very people fueling the true crime genre. Filmed over 6 years, The Alabama Solution was originally intended to observe a religious ceremony at Alabama’s Easterling Correctional Facility during what was supposed to be an innocuous, one-and-done visit.
Instead, it turned into a media storm of exposed horrific truths, where the heroes of this story are the prisoners who’ve spent years fighting for their lives in one of the country’s deadliest prisons. Inmates risked their safety to inform filmmakers about their experiences within prison walls. Through guerrilla camera work and FaceTime interviews on smuggled cell phones, Jarecki’s subsequent investigation reveals a shocking pattern of systemic abuse, dangerous mismanagement, and institutional corruption so calcified, it’s nearly impenetrable.
Stream it on HBO Max.
In January 2026, The Alabama Solution was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 98th Academy Awards. Less than a week later, the 3 inmates who risked their lives to contribute to the film were placed in solitary confinement.
While I couldn’t cover them all, other notable 2025 true-crime documentaries are Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story, Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, and My Father, The BTK Killer on Netflix; The Yogurt Shop Murders on HBO Max; Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke on Hulu; Spy High on Prime Video; and Predators on Paramount+.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
