True crime podcasts have grown far beyond just stories about murder and missing persons. The genre now covers everything from wrongful convictions and forensic breakthroughs to investigative reporting, survivor accounts, and cases that exposed failures in the justice system. It's unsurprising that true crime has become one of the most popular podcast categories, with 42% of Americans aged 13+ having listened to a true crime podcast. The podcasts in this list are some of the strongest examples of how varied the genre has become.
1. Serial: Investigative storytelling
Serial premiered in October 2014 as a spinoff of This American Life. Season 1 ran twelve episodes and re-examined the 1999 murder of Baltimore student Hae Min Lee and the conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, who was sentenced to life plus 30 years in 2000. Host Sarah Koenig created the season focusing on a key witness whose account kept shifting between police interviews, and on Asia McClain, a classmate who wrote letters saying she'd been with Syed in the library at the exact time prosecutors said he was committing murder.
Serial became the fastest podcast ever to reach five million downloads on iTunes, and The New York Times bought Serial Productions in 2020. But the case didn't end where the show does: Syed's conviction was vacated in 2022, reinstated in 2023 on a procedural technicality, and in March 2025 a judge reduced his sentence to time served. He's free, but the conviction stands.
2. Crime Junkie: Weekly case files
Ashley Flowers was volunteering with Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana when she was asked to reach younger audiences, which became a 20-minute local radio segment called Murder Monday. In December 2017 she turned it into Crime Junkie with childhood friend Brit Prawat, who was born on the same day as Flowers and introduced to her by their mothers as infants. Flowers researches each case and tells it to Prawat, who comes into the recording knowing nothing about it. New episodes come out every Monday and run under an hour.
The show has passed a billion downloads and was Apple Podcasts' number one show overall in both 2022 and 2023, numbers that put it among the most downloaded crime podcasts anywhere. Flowers also hosts a spinoff called The Deck, built around the actual cold case playing cards that police departments print with victims' faces and hand out in prisons. Fun fact: She named her production company Audiochuck after her dog, Charlie (Chuck).
3. Casefile: Anonymous narration
Casefile launched in January 2016, recorded by an anonymous Australian man in a spare room while he was recovering from an injury. The first episode covered the Wanda Beach murders, the unsolved 1965 killing of two teenage girls near Sydney. Episodes run 60 to 120 minutes and go out weekly or fortnightly, with a research team now writing alongside him.
The show has passed 300 episodes, expanding from Australian cases into the US, UK, Europe, and Asia. His multi-part series on the Golden State Killer is a good starting point for anyone looking for a thoroughly researched serial killer podcast.
4. In the Dark: Investigative journalism
In the Dark launched in September 2016 from APM Reports, hosted by Madeleine Baran. Season one investigated the 1989 abduction of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in Minnesota, a case that had gone unsolved for 27 years. Days before the season was set to air, the case broke: Danny Heinrich confessed. Baran rebuilt the episodes around a harder question, which was how police had missed him for so long when he'd been an early suspect.
Season two covered Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Mississippi tried six times for the same 1996 murders by the same prosecutor. Reporters built a database on jury selection covering 6,700 jurors across 225 trials and found Black jurors were struck at more than four times the rate of white jurors. The prosecution's only piece of direct evidence, a jailhouse informant's account of a confession, turned out to be a lie the informant traded for a lighter sentence of his own. The Supreme Court overturned Flowers' conviction in 2019, and charges were dropped in 2020. Among investigative journalism podcasts, In the Dark is a shining example.
5. Your Own Backyard: Cold case reporting
Chris Lambert, a musician with no journalism background, launched Your Own Backyard in September 2019 to investigate the 1996 disappearance of Kristin Smart, a 19-year-old Cal Poly student. Lambert was eight years old when Smart vanished and grew up seeing her face on roadside billboards. He spent a year calling people who had never been formally interviewed before releasing the first episode with the blessing of Smart's family.
Paul Flores, the classmate who last saw Smart alive, was arrested in 2021 and convicted of her murder in 2022. The San Luis Obispo County sheriff publicly credited information from the podcast with helping build the case. It's a frequently cited example of what cold case podcasts can accomplish when one person won't let a file go.
6. Bear Brook: Forensic breakthroughs
Bear Brook, hosted by Jason Moon of New Hampshire Public Radio, released its first season in 2018. It covers four unidentified murder victims found in barrels near Allenstown, New Hampshire, 15 years apart, and the forensic genetic genealogy techniques used to identify them.
Three of the four victims were named in 2019. The fourth wasn't identified until September 2025, forty years after the first barrel was found. Fun fact: The breakthrough was helped in part by volunteer researcher Becky Heath, who was listening to the podcast in her car when a detail reminded her of an old genealogy message board post that helped identify three of the victims.
7. My Favorite Murder: Comedy and crime
Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark met at a mutual friend's Halloween party in 2014 and started recording My Favorite Murder in January 2016. Kilgariff was a stand-up comedian and had been the original head writer on Ellen DeGeneres' talk show. Hardstark previously hosted Unique Sweets on the Cooking Channel. Each week they take turns telling each other a case they've researched. Episodes run 60 to 120 minutes.
My Favorite Murder features long personal tangents by the hosts, which many listeners enjoy, but might not be for everyone. They don't do original reporting into the cases they cover, something they've been upfront about themselves. Fun fact: They founded the Exactly Right podcast network in 2018, which now carries more than a dozen shows, and their 2019 memoir, Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered, went straight to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
8. Root of Evil: Family confessions
Root of Evil launched in February 2019 as an eight-part series produced by Cadence13 and TNT. It's hosted by sisters Rasha Pecoraro and Yvette Gentile, the great-granddaughters of Dr. George Hodel, a suspect in the unsolved 1947 Black Dahlia murder. The sisters began digging through their late mother Fauna's belongings after she died in 2017, using old family recordings and interviews with relatives who had avoided the subject for decades.
The series also covers Hodel's 1949 incest trial, of which he was acquitted, and a 1950 wiretap in which he was recorded musing that nobody could prove it even if he had killed the Black Dahlia. This is an unusual and fascinating historical true crime podcast because the hosts are related to the prime suspect.
9. The Teacher's Pet: Reporter-led pursuit
Lyn Dawson, a Sydney nurse and mother of two, disappeared in January 1982. Her husband Chris, a rugby league player turned PE teacher, told everyone she had left to join a religious group, and days later his 16-year-old student moved into the house. Two coronial inquests recommended charges over the next 36 years with no arrest, until Hedley Thomas of The Australian started calling Lyn's old friends and colleagues in 2018. New episodes went out weekly as Thomas built the case in public.
The podcast topped charts in Australia, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand, and Dawson was arrested three months after it launched. He was convicted of murder in 2022 and sentenced to 24 years. Thomas won a Gold Walkley, Australian journalism's top honor, for the reporting. Fun fact: Before the trial, the podcast was pulled from Australian platforms over fears it would prejudice the jury, and wasn't made available there again until after the verdict.
10. Dr. Death: Medical malpractice
Dr. Death launched in September 2018, hosted by Dallas health journalist Laura Beil for Wondery. Season one runs six episodes of about 40 minutes and covers Christopher Duntsch, a neurosurgeon who operated on 38 patients between 2011 and 2013, leaving 33 injured and two dead. Beil had followed newspaper coverage of the case since 2013 before Wondery approached her to report the season.
Duntsch was sentenced to life in prison in 2017, a rare outcome for a licensed doctor. Fun fact: Peacock adapted the season into a TV series in 2021 starring Joshua Jackson, and Beil has since hosted four more seasons of Dr. Death covering other medical cases.
11. Believed: Survivor testimony
Believed launched in October 2018, hosted by Michigan Radio reporters Kate Wells and Lindsey Smith. The nine-part series investigates how Larry Nassar abused hundreds of girls and women over two decades as a doctor for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University. Wells had covered the story since allegations first surfaced in 2016. It was the first podcast from an NPR member station that NPR distributed nationally.
The series won a Peabody Award in 2019 and runs episodes of around 40 minutes each. Fun fact: One of those survivors, Brianne Randall-Gay, had reported Nassar to police in 2004, but he talked his way out of the complaint using a PowerPoint presentation. She later worked with the same police department to help build the abuse-awareness training it previously lacked.
The true crime genre has thousands of podcasts, but the best ones stand apart through strong reporting, compelling storytelling, and cases that stay with you long after the final episode. Whether you prefer investigations, cold cases, or courtroom battles, these shows offer some of the most gripping listens in the genre.