It’s hard to pinpoint why so many of us love true crime podcasts, but we do. Some of the best true crime podcasts are those that elevate the genre rather than drag it into the gutter; vigorous journalism, careful storytelling and subjects that push the societal needle forward. Or sometimes, in a few cases, actually alter the trajectory of the real world (Serial’s Adnan Syed was famously released from prison in 2022 after having his conviction overturned, likely in no small part due to the attention gleaned from the podcast).
But in an ocean of post-Serial copycats, it’s become quite hard to spot top-tier investigations and high-calibre production in among the deluge of mediocre or overly salacious iterations currently on offer. Luckily, we’ve got you covered. Whether you’re already an obsessive or just wading into the world of cold cases and red herrings, here are British Vogue’s picks for the best true crime podcasts to listen to now.
The Best True Crime Podcasts To Listen To Now, According To Vogue
When we think of “cults”, we often think of the 1960s and 1970s: the Manson family, Jim Jones’s the Peoples Temple, Children of God. NXIVM, however, was founded in 1998 by Keith Raniere, who essentially led a sex-trafficking cult under the guise of it being a “self-improvement program” up until 2021 when those involved were finally arrested. There have been documentaries on the cult, though none of them involving Allison Mack, formerly an actor in Smallville, who spent three years in prison on racketeering charges. This gripping podcast from Uncover hears from Mack, who shares how she got sucked into NXIVM and how she’s faring after her prison sentence.
Okay, so, this isn’t technically a “true crime” podcast seeing as no one has been formerly charged with any crime, but it’ll appeal to anyone who loves a good, jaw-dropping investigation. In The Walkers: The Real Salt Path, the Observer journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou makes a compelling case for the idea that so much in best-selling memoir The Real Salt Path may not be the “unflinchingly honest” account it claims to be. She raises plenty of pertinent questions, such as: did the author’s husband really cure an incurable degenerative disease through walking? Did they really even complete the entire walk? Much to consider.
A phone number gets posted across the streets of New York City in the early ’80s, into which strangers can spill their secrets via voicemail. Messages poured in, and for 15 years, what started as a social experiment, took on a life of its own. Known as Mr Apology, Allan Bridge found himself tapping into the dark side of the human psyche – including someone who claims to be a serial killer. The eerie recordings are uncovered by Bridge’s second wife, Marissa, who takes listeners on an unsettling journey throughout The Apology Line, slowly unpacking what it means to be the keeper of secrets and the toll it took.
Imagine someone ringing you up out of the blue to tell you that they’d found your name and address on the dark web – and not only that, but it was on a murder-for-hire website, in which someone you know had paid to have you killed. That’s essentially the premise of Wondery’s Kill List podcast, in which tech journalist Carl Mille tries to track down as many people as possible who appear on the list, alongside a number of frustratingly slow police investigations (these names appear across the globe, from California to Barcelona and the UK). As chilling as it is incredibly engaging, this 2024 podcast will have you thinking about it long after you’ve stopped listening.
It’s the late 1990s and Seattle’s Garfield High School is the place to be for creative, charismatic types. “Garfield was extraverted,” says journalist and former student Isolde Raftery, host of the investigative podcast The Adults In The Room. “We had the best jazz band in the nation, an award-winning student newspaper, a one-of-a-kind wilderness programme.” But with a liberal, free-thinking approach comes blurred boundaries, and soon, the sexual assault allegations pile up. Well-researched and meticulously made, Adults In The Room takes a closer look at why sexual abuse has historically been allowed to run rampant in so many American high schools.
I found Scam Factory, another Wondery podcast, really quite terrifying. While plenty of us have received scammy messages on our phones (maybe you’ve received the “hi, mum” WhatsApp scam that was going around not so long ago), most of us don’t really think about them beyond feeling briefly irritated. But the horrifying truth is that the person behind the message might in fact be trapped inside a “scam factory”, in which they’re forced to scam others against their will and unable to leave. Hosted by reporter Denise Chan, Scam Factory is a chilling, suffocating listen that’ll make you see everything differently.
In the Dark returned in 2025 with another excellently-produced and tightly-researched series – this time on the 1985 White House Farm murders in Essex, UK, in which three generations of one family were shot inside a farm house. The award-winning investigative podcast first made waves with its 2016 debut, when journalist Madeleine Baran and a team of reporters revisited the 1989 abduction of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling. For season two, Baran and team focused on the case of Curtis Flowers, a man who was tried six times for the same crime in Mississippi, while season three was about the Haditha massacre, in which a group of US Marines killed 25 unarmed Iraqi civilians. All seasons are worth spending time with, if you haven’t already done so.
DNA: ID – delivered in the clear, calm tones of host, writer and researcher Jessica Bettencourt – is a true crime podcast for real true crime nerds. Each episode (sometimes broken up into two or three parts) follows a murder that went unsolved for decades, only to be cracked open in more recent years thanks to leaps in technology and genealogy. It’s an incredibly informative, thorough and eye-opening listen, and will have you marvelling at the ways in which one tiny hair strand or skin cell from the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s can eventually lead to the capture of someone who thought they’d gotten away with murder.
The cosiest true crime podcast there ever was – though don’t mistake cosy for unengaging. Vox Media’s widely-beloved Criminal, hosted by a silken-voiced Phoebe Judge, covers some of the most compelling stories ever committed to podcast form. Stand-out episodes include but are not limited to: the story of the first ever house ruled as “legally haunted”, the 48-year-old woman who committed a series of near-perfect bank robberies in Texas in the early 1990s and a deep dive into the founding of America’s Witness Protection Programme.
When 15-year-old school girl Sharmeena Begum left Bethnal Green in East London to join ISIS in Syria in 2014, I remember being quite shocked – not least because I was also living in Bethnal Green aged 15 just a few years beforehand, so found myself able to visualise, but not necessarily understand, the whole thing. Why would a teenage girl leave her home like that with very little warning? And is it fair that her British citizenship be revoked, and remain revoked, over a decade after a decision she made as a child? This award-winning BBC Sounds podcast dives into all of that and more, with journalist Josh Baker travelling to Syria to speak with Begum herself.
If you prefer light-hearted over harrowing, then Wondery’s weekly Scamfluencers – hosted by the very likeable duo Scaachi Koul and Sarah Hagi – could be for you. Don’t mistake light-hearted for boring, though – this episodic podcast will have you gripped at each turn. From deep dives into the various Real Housewives who’ve ended up behind bars (the fact there are multiple is actually quite wild), to the story behind the British Post Office scandal and the various Anna Delvey-type socialites who’ve scammed their way to the top, if there’s a scam, Scamfluencers have probably covered it.
Journalist – and regular British Vogue contributor – Sirin Kale first broke the story of serial cyberstalker Matthew Hardy for The Guardian back in 2022, the same year he was handed the biggest sentence for cyberstalking in British history. Hardy ruined the lives of his victims – who include at least 62 women – and Kale speaks to many of them, as well as Hardy’s family. The podcast has since been turned into a Netflix show, but we recommend starting with the OG first.
Kaitlyn is a young woman in crisis, pregnant after experiencing sexual assault and reaching out to dozens of birth workers to help her through a series of unrelenting disasters. As it happens, though, nothing – and I mean nothing – is as it seems. I spent the vast majority of my time listening to this BBC podcast, from the people behind the equally wild Love, Janessa, in abject horror, with my jaw on the floor. Well-produced and carefully told throughout, Kaityln’s Baby is a reminder that scammers exist in the most unexpected places, and their driving force isn’t always monetary gain.
It’s the summer of 1985, and we’re in the woods of New Hampshire – specifically, Bear Brook State Park. In the midst of an innocent game of hide and seek, three boys come across a barrel, which they decide to kick and knock over without looking inside. Fifteen years later, a second barrel is found just 300 feet away from the first. The barrels’ contents lead to the discovery of four slain bodies: a woman and three young girls. Who are these victims? What happened, and why? New Hampshire Public Radio host Jason Moon delves into a decades-long cold case – ultimately uncovering a serial murderer.
If catfishing is ubiquitous in 2025, back in the late Aughts, when Sweet Bobby begins, it was a lesser-known phenomenon (so much so that it didn’t even have a name). In 2009, a vibrant local radio presenter, Kirat, met a man, Bobby, online – a man she believed to be a distant family friend. Over the course of nine years, Kirat and Bobby became a couple, despite having never met in person. That is, until the truth comes out, and it becomes painfully apparent that Bobby is not who he says he is.
Tortoise Media has released all manner of investigative podcasts to pore over, but Dangerous Memories – about a “lifestyle guru” and “therapist”, Anne Craig, who allegedly manipulated a group of young, privileged Londoners into severing ties with their family and believing false memories – is one of its stand-outs. It’s worth pointing out that no charges have been brought against Craig – so it’s not strictly “true crime” – but anyone who loves the slow-unfurling, storytelling element of the genre will hoover this one up.
Ever since Havana-born artist Ana Mendieta fell to her death from the window of her 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment in 1985, activists and fans have insisted that her husband, Carl Andre, was to blame. This six-episode podcast from Pushkin Industries is hosted by art historian Helen Molesworth, who provides context not only for Mendieta’s death but for the extraordinary life she lived (and the body of artistic work she left behind).
The Clearing offers an unexpected spin on the conventional true crime podcast formula, with its central voice being not just an investigative reporter, Josh Dean, but also the daughter of the culprit, April Balascio, who tipped off police in 2009 after suspecting that her father was responsible for a spate of murders in the early 1980s. Charting both her father’s devastating crimes and the trauma he inflicted on his own family, besides the families of his victims, The Clearing is sensitive rather than sensationalist as it deals with this thorny subject, marking it out as a rarity in the world of true crime reporting
On Valentine’s Day in 2017, two teens, Liberty German, 14, and Abigail Williams, 13, were found murdered near a hiking trail in Delphi, Indiana, after going missing the day before. When police released a short audio clip believed to belong to the male suspect, it included only three words: “down the hill”. But the eerie voice, yet to be identified, was enough to make my hair stand on end. Here, Down The Hill – hosted by Andrew Iden and Barbara MacDonald – breaks down the tragic story that continues to haunt Indiana today.
While the shocking story of Elizabeth Holmes’s rise and fall as the founder of disgraced medical tech company Theranos has been retold across a number of platforms, few have captured her toxic mix of ambition and hubris as powerfully as the ABC News podcast The Dropout. (It even served as the basis for the Emmy-nominated show starring Amanda Seyfried.) An added bonus? The podcast’s host, Rebecca Jarvis, released a follow-up miniseries charting the developments around Holmes’s trial last year in California, which proved to be just as riveting as any John Grisham courtroom drama.
Another podcast that proved so riveting it was quickly adapted into a TV series, Dr Death charts the horrifying career of Christopher Duntsch, the now-imprisoned neurosurgeon who performed a series of disastrous operations on patients around the Dallas-Fort Worth area over several years, leaving 33 injured and many others maimed or paralysed. Not only does the show offer insight into Duntsch’s sociopathy as he continued to cause harm, but it also highlights the dangers and dysfunctions within the American medical system. A warning: some of the details of Duntsch’s malpractice veer into grisly territory, so it’s not a podcast for the squeamish or faint of heart.
The 1997 disappearance of Marion Barter, the former wife of Australian soccer great Johnny Warren, is the subject of this podcast. The bizarre circumstances of Barter’s disappearance (she was last seen getting on a plane for an overseas holiday) are closely reviewed, but the human resonance of the still-unexplained loss of a mother, teacher and friend is deeply felt in every episode.
Hosted by sisters Yvette Gentile and Rasha Pecoraro, Root of Evil takes a look back at one of the most infamous cases in the history of American crime: the Black Dahlia murder. But Gentile and Pecoraro’s interest in the case runs deeper than most. The great-granddaughters of one of the prime suspects, George Hodel, now believe that Hodel was indeed culpable, but alongside their investigations into the murder, they also look back at the effect the case had on their family, making this as much a tale of intergenerational trauma as it is a deep dive into the infamous murder of Elizabeth Short.
A bizarre tale led by the charismatic host Joe Nocera, a New York Times journalist who decided to dive into the case after his psychotherapist neighbour, Ike Herschkopf, mysteriously disappeared, The Shrink Next Door looks at how therapy can go very, very wrong. Talking to a number of Herschkopf’s previous patients – among them Marty Markowitz, who vividly describes the way his therapy sessions spun out of control as Herschkopf began inserting himself into Markowitz’s life – the podcast’s many twist and turns make it as compelling as it is horrifying.
Native Tennessean Erica Kelley uncovers true crime stories of the Deep South in a series that almost feels like you’re sitting on a back porch somewhere, hearing the latest local gossip. Kelley’s southern twang adds to the ambiance, bringing small-town crimes to light while also laying bare “how southern fried the justice system can be”.
This 2021 podcast follows the classic format of examining a specific cold case with painstaking detail. Here, it’s the unsolved murder of 24-year-old Arpana Jinaga, who was found strangled in her Washington State apartment in 2008 after a Halloween party in her building. Journalists Matthew Shaer and Eric Benson take listeners back to the night in question and through a trial, poring over the issues embedded in the case – from the misuse of DNA to the broken relationship between race and policing.
The tiny city of Canadian, Texas, is the backdrop for this narrative podcast – hosted by renowned crime journalist Skip Hollandsworth of the award-winning Texas Monthly magazine – about the 2016 disappearance of a popular high-school senior. When Brown’s remains are found two years later, everyone in the Panhandle community is a suspect (as the true-crime cliché goes), including members of Brown’s own family.
This podcast tells the story of French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier, who was found dead near her holiday home in 1996. First recorded by Jennifer Forde and Sam Bungey in 2021 but still every bit as spine-tinglingly chilling today, West Cork takes the listener inside a tight-knit community in which suspicion is slowly beginning to attach itself to everyone. Many of the podcast’s guests have never spoken publicly before, including members of Toscan du Plantier’s family and locals still shaken by the circumstances surrounding her death.
This devastating podcast from NPR, which looks back to the 1965 murder of Reverend James Reeb – a white pastor involved in the civil rights movement – in Selma, Alabama is a powerful window into the secrets and unspoken truths of race relations in the American South. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting, White Lies is a masterful work of audio journalism broaching subject matter that still feels depressingly relevant in the age of Black Lives Matter.
Hosted by journalist Chris Lambert, Your Own Backyard is a compelling, multi-part documentary podcast that investigates the 1996 disappearance of Cal Poly student Kristin Smart. YOB debuted in 2019, and Lambert’s extensive yet respectful storytelling helped reignite interest in the case after more than 25 years, eventually aiding in the conviction of Paul Flores – the man found guilty of murdering Smart. The 10-episode series takes listeners back to where it all started (in San Luis Obispo, California), and later brings them to court, where Lambert thoroughly recaps trial events.
