15 True Crime Documentaries You Can Stream On Netflix Right Now

True crime has taken over the world. Documentaries as a whole are the fastest-growing segment of the streaming market, and true crime is where most of that interest derives. It's not exactly new. "Dateline" has been spinning yarns about shocking suburban murders for decades. But the technology is finally here for so many more upstart filmmakers to nab Netflix-approved cameras and dive into these stories.

It's still odd so many people find it soothing to flip on a film about a horrifying real-life crime right before bed — but not inexplicable. For one thing, procedurals like "Forensic Files" have always had a somatic quality: The familiar music, that familiar deep-voiced narrator, and the comforting rhythms of procedural competency as police solve the crime.

Modern true crime documentaries, however, don't really work like that. Netflix nabbed the two biggest hits in the genre with "Tiger King" and "Making a Murderer." Both end in ambiguity, and the anxious wait for Season 2. Audiences will curse a true crime cliffhanger, but we keep coming back anyway. A well-told true crime tale is like watching your best friends fight at a party. It's awful, but at least it's not happening to you. And there's definitely a tantalizing psychological riddle there as you puzzle through everyone's anti-social motivations. These are 15 great true crime documentaries you can stream on Netflix right now.

"Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives." from 2022 tells the absolutely bonkers story of the glamorous Pure Food & Wine restaurateur Sarma Melngailis. She's the toast of New York with her raw foods eatery until she meets a strange suitor online calling himself "Mr. Fox." Turns out he's basically the Tinder Swindler, and she utterly destroys her life as she falls deeper and deeper into this shady man's truly obvious confidence scam.

The difference between a good documentary and a bad one is often whether or not there's footage from the time the story takes place. "Bad Vegan" doesn't have the goods in this regard, but it does an excellent job with talking-head interviews and recreations with the real players that don't feel awkwardly staged. Where it really has some documents, though, are the contemporaneous recordings of phone calls between Sarma and Mr. Fox. It's some of the most insidious gaslighting you'll ever hear.

"Bad Vegan" has the goods in another way, too. Sarma is no pure victim. She clearly falls into Mr. Fox's insipid psychological honeypot, filled with silly supernatural promises, but she also becomes an active accomplice. She's even caught on camera downplaying her responsibility. "Bad Vegan" may have a genuinely unreliable narrator at its center. It's a story so strange you can't help but think something big is missing, and that's the real hook of this expertly crafted series.

"The Staircase" is another stunner from the team that created "Making a Murderer." This series similarly mesmerizes as it reveals in drips and drabs the twisty facts of an oddly motiveless killing that shatters an upscale suburban family. The doc centers on crime writer Michael Peterson, whose wife is found dead at the foot of the couple's staircase in a pool of her own blood. No one else is home, so, open-and-shut case, right? Not quite. Peterson is the enigmatic center of this documentary. He comes off as forthright and gentle, but the more we learn about the couple's marriage, and Peterson's past, the more sinister things seem.

And yet, as this documentary turns into a riveting courtroom drama, experts seriously muddy the pool of evidence. By the end your head is spinning so much you might give credence to a bold defense theory about, no joke, a rogue owl. The perpetrator-centric point of view of this film and "Making a Murderer" is so completely at odds with what was found by an endless series of appellate courts; it's important to watch "The Staircase" with an equally critical eye. But the skill of the documentary craft may find you helplessly entertaining "reasonable" doubts anyway.

"Icarus" is one of the most spectacularly fortuitous documentaries ever made. Filmmaker and amateur cyclist Bryan Fogel initially set out to see if a Lance Armstrong-style doping regimen could push him into elite territory. To run this experiment on himself, he enlists the expertise of the chemist who headed the Russian anti-doping program, a larger-than-life character named Grigory Rodchenkov. But suddenly, Grigory begins blowing the whistle about his role in orchestrating Olympic drug cheating, on orders from Vladimir Putin himself. Yes, according to Grigory, the Russian anti-doping program is nothing more than an organized front for drug cheats.

The documentary is riveting as it morphs from a gimmick film like "Super Size Me" into an international conspiracy thriller that ended up on front pages everywhere. When a colleague of Grigory dies suspiciously, the specter of Putin's political dissidents being poisoned raises this film's stakes again.

Fogel might have caught the luckiest break of any living documentarian, but he deserves endless praise for the pivot. When his story takes a darker turn, he quickly gets out of the way and captures lightning in a bottle. The only flaw here is the title, which worked better for Fogel's original premise. Icarus flew too close to the sun; Grigory is more like Prometheus. He mastered a trick of the (sporting) gods, and then shared his secret with the world.

"Long Shot" is sort of like Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up" in real life, but with some answers. It's also the kind of case of mistaken identity that nightmares are made of. In 2003, a young man named Juan Catalan took in a ballgame at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles — or so he said. When he next shows up at the machine shop where he works, he's arrested for the brutal murder of 16-year-old Martha Puebla. It turns out the two knew each other. Martha had earlier testified in an unrelated case against Juan's brother, and soon an eyewitness to the crime picked Juan out of a lineup.

Juan maintains his innocence and enlists the help of defense attorney Todd Melnik to help confirm his baseball alibi. It turns out an episode of Larry David's long-running show "Curb Your Enthusiasm" was shooting at Dodger Stadium that day. If Juan can be found on the footage, he'll be cleared. This is not a feature at 40 minutes; it's more like an unfunny but uplifting episode of "Curb," and Larry David does indeed make an appearance. If you need a succinct reminder of the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, this oddly uplifting true crime tale is a home run.

"Making a Murderer" might be the king of twisty true crime documentaries. But it also came under fire for creating a one-sided and possibly misleading portrayal of a convicted killer. This nonetheless brilliant slow-burn documentary follows the story of a Wisconsin man, Steven Avery, who is exonerated by DNA evidence after over two decades behind bars on a wrongful rape conviction. But the vindication is short-lived. When a young photographer goes missing from Avery's property, both he and his intellectually disabled nephew are credibly accused of the crime.

"Making a Murderer" is definitely a criminal justice reform-oriented docuseries. It depicts police as criminally biased against Avery and eager to get him back for their own shoddy work. It also presents unmistakable evidence of rights violations as detectives coerce a confession from a handicapped teen who genuinely thinks if he parrots police prompts and admits to a murder he can quickly get back to school. Season 2 of this groundbreaking doc shed some doubt on the first season's zeal to clear Avery's name, but the show's title was always ambiguous. Did the police make a murderer by framing him, or actually create a killer by stealing his life with a corrupt conviction? Or maybe neither? Whatever the truth, the original season is a true crime tour-de-force.

"Wild Wild Country" from 2018 is a six-part documentary about the inevitable corruption of a covertly capitalist cult. But it's also the story of one woman so ensconced in the management of a shady institution she loses her soul — not to mystical mind traps, but to her own twisted ambitions.

"Osho" was a famed Indian spiritualist, meditation teacher, and all-around guru who brought his red-clad followers to the United States in the 1980s. As more and more seekers flocked to him, the organization began building a utopian commune in the rural Oregon countryside. But as this strange group's numbers and wealth grew, so did the corruption, culminating in a deadly clash with locals and a bitter battle against the government.

For the purposes of "Wild Wild Country," Osho is a mere charismatic figurehead, driving around in a fleet of Rolls-Royce cars and wearing Rolex watches. And like so many false prophets, this supposedly transcendent guru justifies his earthly greed with spiritual obscurantism. It's not surprising stuff if you know the true crime cult genre. But Osho's chief of staff, Sheela, is the actual center of this doc. She's not a true believer, exactly. It's more like she loves Osho maternally, but loves the power of the bureaucracy she's built around this man's spiritual grift even more. Sheela becomes insidiously institutionalized, at her own capable hands, and is willing to do anything to prop up the evil edifice she has built.

"Evil Genius: The True Story of America's Most Diabolical Bank Heist" from 2018 tells the true crime story behind the most bizarre robbery in American history. In 2003, a pizza delivery man named Brian Douglas Wells walked into a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a bomb strapped to his neck. He was carrying a "cane gun" and elaborate instructions for a scavenger hunt to disarm the device.

Wells dies horrifically. Police say he was involved; his family says he was the victim of a duo of "Evil Genius" former lovers at the center of this twisted tale. It turns out a man named William Rothstein constructed the device and the elaborate plot. He's a self-styled "fractured intellectual," a tinkerer with a devious mind and an anti-social personality reminiscent of The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

It's Rothstein's sometimes-girlfriend Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong at the center of the series, though. If William is the engineer, Marjorie is the master of hacking the human mind. She's got a string of degrees and an even longer trail of mysteriously dead exes. She's also deeply mentally ill. When the police arrive at her door, she's got a dead body in her freezer and a wild tale to tell. This docuseries is really about the minds of two preternaturally clever psychopaths. It's impossible to get straight answers out of subjects like this, but that's an answer, too. Evil geniuses do live among us. They're mostly too small-minded to plot a world takeover, but their craven intellectual vanity gives them plenty of license to kill.