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.
Stalked
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.
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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”.
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”.
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 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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