The best true crime podcasts: from Snitch City to The Lab Detective

Whether it’s an elaborate scam or grisly murder, true crime cases make for a gripping podcast subject. Here are some of the very best series to listen to on your next commute, from a deep dive into the clandestine world of police informants to the inside story of Blenheim Palace’s gold toilet heist.

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”.

The Lab Detective

This powerful podcast from Tortoise, is about an Australian miscarriage of justice that could scarcely be more sad or enraging, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. Over the course of a decade, a woman in New South Wales, Kathleen Folbigg, endured the unfathomable loss of four successive infant children. The youngest was just 19 days old when he died; the oldest 18 months. All had died in their sleep, she said. But in 2001, aged 33, Folbigg was arrested, charged, and ultimately convicted of the murder of three of her children, and the manslaughter of the fourth. Deemed “Australia’s worst female serial killer”, she was sentenced to 25 years in prison. But in 2023 her convictions were quashed: research by Professor Carola Vinuesa, a specialist in genetics, had shown that Folbigg and her children carried a genetic mutation that can cause infant death. Rachel Sylvester tells the story with great empathy, and “there’s an unexpected thread of optimism”, too, as she explores how genomics are helping to right legal wrongs.

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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”.

Unicorn Girl

Two years after her hit podcast “Scamanda”, broadcaster Charlie Webster is back with another case of a female scammer. Candace Rivera appears to have the “perfect life”, running a global non-profit organisation that tackles human trafficking but, one summer, the illusion “shattered, to the horror of her many friends”, said Kayla Cobb at The Wrap. “Much like ‘Scamanda’”, about a woman who faked having cancer, “‘Unicorn Girl’ isn’t just about telling a wild true crime story”. It “dives into Rivera’s circle of friends” and “mirrors the confusion, doubt, anger and hurt they felt dealing with this master manipulator”.

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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