The Best True Crime TV Shows

True crime documentaries take the audience to places in the human psyche that are hard to understand.

They confront the darkness of the human mind and true crime shows take us on a tense and extreme rollercoaster of emotions. What drives people to commit such heinous crimes and why are people so captivated by the ongoing battle of good vs evil?

If you’re looking for true crime documentaries, full episodes are the only way to go and you can find them exclusively on discovery+.

Please note that this article contains themes which some of our audience may find distressing.

What better place to start than with the names we all recognise. The best true crime TV shows have the ability to shock us to our very core and these perpetrators of evil did just that.

You can get inside the mind of one of America’s most notorious serial killers in Jeffrey Dahmer: Mind of A Monster and discover the shocking story of David Berkowitz, the man who terrorised New York in the mid-1970s in Son of Sam: The Hunt For A Killer. Did he work alone or was he part of a Satanic cult? Watch now to find out.

Discover more about the Atlanta Child Murders, explore the horiffic crimes of one of America’s most prolific serial killers in the 93 Victims of Samuel Little, and delve into the headspace of perhaps the most famous of them all in Ted Bundy: Mind of a Monster.

It’s not just men who kill, some of the most shocking true crime documentary shows are about women.

While she was in prison, America’s first female serial killer wrote her life story which is re-told in a series of candid and shocking interviews by her best friend in Aileen Wournos: Mind of A Monster. In An American Murder Mystery: Jodi Arias, watch the tale of the staggeringly brutal murder of Travis Alexander by his ex-girlfriend. It was a case that shocked America.

Host Susan Lucci looks at love gone wrong in Deadly Affairs and former FBI criminal profiler Candice DeLong explores how deception, jealousy and revenge lead to Deadly Women in one of the best crime documentaries on TV.

If you want to watch the most compelling true crime documentaries, full episodes are the only way to do it. Fact is most certainly stranger than fiction…

In Evil-In-Law, watch how far obsessive in-laws will go to get what they want, while Evil Stepmothers uncovers the real-life stories of some of the world’s most twisted and sinister criminals.

Britain’s Deadliest Kids investigates the UK’s most notorious children, and Deadliest Mums & Dads looks at the most heinous crimes imaginable – parents who kill their children. These are some of the most fascinating true crime series on TV.

Too often, crimes are committed that are so hard to understand that they make headline news on the world’s front pages and often spawn captivating true crime documentaries.

How did one of Britain’s most popular TV hosts get away with his vile crimes for so long? Body language experts and forensic psychologists examine his TV appearances to try and uncover the truth in Faking It: Jimmy Savile.

Watch the shocking true crime documentary Harvey Weinstein for a case study in the abuse of power and perhaps the most infamous case of recent years is discussed in forensic detail in Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?

Go back to the 90s for one of the most famous cases in recent history with OJ & Nicole: An American Tragedy and watch the associates of Robert Sylvester Kelly shed light on what really happened in R Kelly: His Friends Speak.

True crime TV shows are visceral, fascinating, gruesome and often downright frightening but they compel us to watch and the best place to find the most incredible and shocking true crime series on TV is at discovery+ now.