The best true crime podcasts to binge now

Whether you’re doing the washing up or going for a run, listening to a true crime podcast makes the time fly thrillingly by. From elaborate hoaxes to grisly murders, these real-life investigations are every bit as gripping as a movie or TV show. Here are some of the best.

Wisecrack

When American producer Jodi Tovay dodged a downpour by buying a ticket to a stand-up show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017, she didn’t know the act would send her “down a rabbit hole” and lead to a six-part true-crime podcast, said Chris Bennion in The Telegraph. Large swathes of the live show in question are aired in the first episode: British comedian Edd Hedges weaves jokes about his childhood into a tale of how his former school bully committed a double murder before trying to break into his home. It is billed as a true story but, as Tovay scratches at the script, some of the details don’t add up. She is an “excellent storyteller” and it’s an “absorbing but often difficult listen”. Like Netflix’s “Baby Reindeer”, “this is an Edinburgh show that brings up the moral quandary of turning real-life crimes into comedy-club entertainment”. Tovay, unknowingly, “paints a bleak picture of true-crime podcasting too”. Overall, it is a “superb” podcast, but “one that will remind you not to believe everything you hear”.

The Kill List

Imagine being called up “out of the blue” to discover your name had been found on a “murder-for-hire website” and someone in your life had “paid to have you killed”, said Vogue. That’s the premise of this unsettling podcast. With the police being "frustratingly slow” to investigate, tech journalist Carl Mille attempts to track down people from across the world whose names appear on the list, before it’s too late. “As chilling as it is incredibly engaging”, it’s the type of podcast that will “have you thinking about it long after you stop listening”.

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Shadow World: The Grave Robbers

“How delightful that dogged, bloody-minded investigative journalism has made Sue Mitchell a star reporter in her 60s,” said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. She is the wonderfully “no-nonsense” journalist behind such podcasts as “Girl Taken” (2020), “Million Dollar Lover” (2023), and last year's award-winning “To Catch a Scorpion” (about cross-Channel people-smugglers). Her latest is “Shadow World: The Grave Robbers”, in which she tracks down a gang of Hungarian alleged fraudsters who appear to have been forging wills and exploiting loopholes in the probate system to claim the estates of people who died intestate, or without a recent will – and so rob the rightful heirs of the property. The series only launched in early July, yet it has already had an impact: after the first episode was broadcast, the Ministry of Justice took the Bona Vacantia – a register of unclaimed estates in England and Wales – offline, to make it harder for criminals to hunt down targets. It’s a “corker of a series”.

Pipeline: Left to Die

The second episode of this “unmissable electric shock of a show” from the Daily Mail’s investigative journalist Isabelle Stanley is “one of the tensest things I’ve ever heard”, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. Stanley tells the story of four divers who died in February 2022 off the coast of Trinidad after they were “sucked with enormous force into the pipe they were mending”. A fifth man who escaped “describes how he was smashed along the pipe like a ball”. There’s also a GoPro recording of the disaster. “Every terrifying detail all true, all lived” will burn itself “unforgettably into your brain”. Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, “has promised to bring about justice and she surely must”.

Sea of Lies

This “expertly produced” podcast from CBC’s “Uncover” series tells the story of Canadian con man Albert Walker, brought to justice by the discovery of a dead man’s Rolex watch, said The New Yorker. It begins off the coast of Devon in 1996, when a father and son “make a grisly discovery in the net of their trawler”. Presenter Sam Mullins “patiently unspools a head-spinning mystery of keen detective work, false identities, embezzlement schemes and murder”. It “makes for a vivid parable about the creative treachery of some financial crime” and how important “guarding against it” is. Mullins promises that the story will “blow your mind”. And it will.

Heists, Scams and Lies

Daily Mail crime correspondent George Odling and senior reporter Andy Jehring have spent five years investigating the £25 million jewellery robbery at Formula One heiress Tamara Ecclestone's London home in 2019, and it shows, said The Independent. This is a podcast that “puts listeners in the room” with those directly involved in the case, and features exclusive interviews with Jay Rutland, Ecclestone’s husband, the police chiefs who led the investigation, and “even acquaintances of the thieves themselves”. Whether you’re new to the story or a “true crime fanatic” who already has thorough knowledge of the case that was one of the Met’s “most iconic sting operations”, “Heists, Scams and Lies” is sure to steal your attention.

Snitch City

The Boston Globe’s investigative team is known for its exposés of institutional corruption – such as the cover-up of abuses in the Catholic Church depicted in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight”, said Sturges in the Financial Times. The newspaper’s “gripping” podcast, “Snitch City”, about police informants in New Bedford, Massachusetts, is very much in that tradition. Reporter Dugan Arnett spent two years penetrating crime networks in New Bedford, a city where police are locked in a fierce battle with drug gangs, and he has a rare talent for getting people to talk. What emerges is a “remarkable piece of reporting” – a multilayered story of police “drunk on power, informants hung out to dry and officials closing ranks to protect their own”. The tension lies “not in exposing the bad guys, but in seeing what the so-called good guys do to get results – and the extraordinary damage left in their wake”.

The Golden Toilet Heist

“I waive my usual moral objection to true-crime podcasts for ‘The Golden Toilet Heist’, a splendidly light-hearted caper from the BBC’s ‘Crime Next Door’ series,” said James Marriott in The Times. The case is well known: in 2019, thieves broke into Blenheim Palace and stole a solid gold toilet worth £5 million from an art exhibition. While not quite a victimless crime, it is “hard to summon much grief over it”. And there is something “irreducibly British” about the tale – “like Agatha Christie or Richard Osman via Salvador Dalí”. It is a story “so absurd that it has the pleasing effect of making everyone involved sound rather mad”. Presenter Clodagh Stenson brings verve, humour and a welcome dose of “whimsy” to the proceedings.

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