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.

Coining It

On Lewis Goodall’s regular podcasting gig, “The News Agents”, I sometimes find him (and his co-hosts) a bit “bombastic”, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. But he’s incisive, thorough, and (unlike many podcast presenters) he does the necessary legwork. Now he has a “fabulously entertaining” new podcast, “Coining It”, on which he does a “sterling job making sense of what, by any standards, is a brilliantly nutty tale”. It’s about a man named James Parker who, in 2017 – while ill, and living on benefits in Blackpool – stumbled across a glitch in a bitcoin trading site. He managed to purloin cryptocurrency worth £24.5 million, and spent the money with reckless abandon, moving into a flashy hotel, buying cars for new friends, and giving homeless people wads of cash. This is a “romp of a series that somehow keeps you on everyone’s side all at once, whether Parker, his greedy new compadres, his loyal old friends or the police who chase him down”.

The Pitcairn Trials

Luke Jones delves into the “grimly disturbing” sexual abuse scandal that erupted in the 1990s on Pitcairn Island, a tiny British territory in the South Pacific inhabited by just a few dozen people, most of whom are descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. Jones handles the story with the “utmost care and sensitivity”, examining the islanders’ lives, their decades-long fight for justice and the eventual inquiry led by British police officers. Much of the series makes for “tough listening”, but, as the legal process picks up pace, it’s also “gripping and illuminating”. This is not just a “knotty police investigation”; Jones paints a “compelling portrait of a uniquely strange society created in a uniquely strange land”. It’s well worth a listen.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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”.

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 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.

Have you missed the biggest news of the week? Or the stories that will shape our lives in years to come, when the passing hype of the day's headlines have faded from memory. That's what we explore on The Week's own award-winning podcast, "The Week Unwrapped", which seeks out under-reported stories with unexpected consequences. Listen on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you find podcasts