The best true crime podcasts to binge now
Electrifying investigations from Blood Memory to Wisecrack
True crime consistently tops the charts of podcast genres – and always makes for a gripping listen. Here’s our pick of some of the best listens, from an unnerving stalker to an online cult run by kids.
The Overturn
I’m no conspiracy theorist, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. But listening to “The Overturn” – an outstanding new podcast about miscarriages of justice in the UK – can “make you feel as though every institution is designed to preserve the power of the powerful at the expense of the little person”. Produced by The Justice Gap magazine, and presented by Marnie Duke, each episode explores a criminal case involving an apparently unsafe conviction. We hear about evidence tampering (“suddenly discovered murder weapons that weren’t there days earlier, or vital DNA evidence lost”); a man convicted of a murder that took place when he was already in prison; and a policeman seemingly fitted up by his colleagues. Nor is it easy to trust the system, when the Criminal Cases Review Commission re-examines only 1.5% of the 1,500 cases submitted to it each year. This is a sobering listen, and a compelling one.
Intrigue: Ransom Man
Jenny Kleeman is the Orwell Prize-winning journalist behind the outstanding Radio 4 series “The Gift”, which explored the “Pandora’s box-like impact on some lives” of home DNA tests, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. Her new series, “Intrigue: Ransom Man”, is about a catastrophic data hack at a Finnish psychotherapy service, Vastaamo. The hacker accessed thousands of highly sensitive patient records, then tried to blackmail the firm and its clients by threatening to post them online. But before contacting them, he had in fact already released these files – which contained therapists’ notes on everything from child abuse and suicide attempts to secret affairs – onto the dark web. The case became a national scandal; and when the hacker was eventually identified as a known cybercriminal named Julius Kivimäki, some 21,000 people were registered as plaintiffs in the criminal case against him – the largest in Finland’s history. The series is more wide-ranging than “The Gift”, and lacks some of its urgency. But it’s a fascinating tale, deftly told.
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Blood Memory
Nick van der Kolk, the creator of “Love + Radio”, is an American audio “genius” who usually makes one-off documentaries about intriguing individuals, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer – tales of blackmail, voyeurism, and any number of other personal crises. To mark the 20th anniversary of “Love + Radio”, though, he has made something much longer and more in-depth. “Blood Memory”, a ten-part epic based on six years of interviews, is about a double murderer who betrayed his prison gang. The subject is Michael Lynne Thompson, and the first voice we hear is his: calm, sonorous and seductive. He describes his brutal upbringing, his youth as part of the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood, and the horrifically violent confrontations he faced when he turned on the gang. “Thompson is compelling”, but is he telling the truth? This outstanding series “makes you wonder, and waver”. It’s utterly gripping.
Stalked
“It all started with a selfie,” said Megan Kenyon in The New Statesman. Working as an intern at a jewellery start-up, 23-year-old graduate Hannah Mossman Moore was at London Fashion Week looking for a “cash-rich foreign buyer”. She was introduced to a man from Hong Kong, and they exchanged contact details and took a selfie together. Afterwards, she was “stalked by a barrage of faceless creeps”, receiving daily emails, texts and messages from “anonymous tormentors” who somehow “knew details of her private life, her family, her job and her location”. Mossman Moore’s stepmother – and co-host – is the journalist Carole Cadwalladr. In this “thrilling yet deeply worrying” 10-part series, they are “fearless in their pursuit” of the stalker’s true identity, highlighting along the way the “shocking lack of care being taken to safeguard victims of stalking”.
Codename Badger
In 1955 a young army major, Robbie Mills, died while disembarking from a submarine docked at Torbay, Devon. The army told his widow, Josephine, that Mills had been drinking and had fallen into the water from the gangplank, an “account Josephine didn’t believe”, said Yolanthe Fawehinmi in The Irish News. She “felt vindicated” when she later received a visit from a stranger claiming to be her husband’s best friend, and saying that his death was no accident. The story “shaped the childhood” of her daughter, Nicky Hibbin, who shared it with journalist Eugene Henderson. In a six-part series, he investigates a tale of “espionage, deception, and a mystery that has endured for seven decades”, with fellow journalist Andy Clark.
Inside 764
“Think ‘Adolescence’, but in real life”, said BuzzFeed’s Benjamin Dzialdowski of this investigation into 764, an extreme Satanist group that’s “the most dangerous online cult you’ve never heard of” and “it’s run by kids”. The cult is ranked as “one of the most serious ongoing threats to minors” by Interpol and the US Department of Justice. Featuring interviews with “experts, victims and law enforcement”, as well as in-depth research, “Inside 764” is an “eye-opening and particularly unnerving listen”.
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Camp Swamp Road
This “hard-hitting four-parter” focuses on America’s “stand-your-ground self-defence laws”, said Alexi Duggins in The Guardian. It begins with a 911 call from a driver in South Carolina reporting an incident of road rage. The caller, Weldon Boyd, went on to kill the man he was reporting, Scott Spivey. Police found that the killing was self-defence, but Spicey’s sister is certain that “there was more to what happened”. “Understated yet excellent journalism” from The Wall Street Journal’s Valerie Bauerlein underpins this miniseries.
Coining It
I sometimes find Lewis Goodall a bit “bombastic” on his regular podcasting gig, “The News Agents”, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. But he’s incisive, thorough, and (unlike many podcast presenters) he does the necessary legwork. On this “fabulously entertaining” new podcast, 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
Pitcairn Island is 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. A “grimly disturbing” sexual abuse scandal erupted there in the 1990s, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. Journalist Luke 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.
Wisecrack
When US 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 she would end up “down a rabbit hole” that led 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” and told your name has been found on a “murder-for-hire website” and someone in your life has “paid to have you killed”, said Clarissa Schmidt in 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”.
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 Sarah Larson in 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.
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