Credit: Netflix

Netflix has enough true-crime documentaries to see us through to our pension, but come on, we would be kidding if we said everyone was worth the precious little hours you get after work. It’s true, some Netflix documentaries spend hours going round the houses before getting to something you could have picked up from a newspaper article, and you have to agree that it leaves you annoyed.

Then you get something like Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, where the sheer audacity behind what happened leaves you gobsmacked, while American Murder: Gabby Petito is a much harder watch because knowing how many warning signs were there and still it happened leaves you in a state of ridicule.

And that is where true crime can lose the plot a bit. These were real people with lives long before their names became Netflix thumbnails, so turning every death into some whodunnit for viewers to play along with can feel sad sometimes.

So we have picked four recent documentaries that have more on their minds than keeping you guessing until the credits. Better still, none of them takes half your bloody week to get to the point.

Four new true-crime documentaries to finish within a weekend:

The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

We’ve all had that one neighbour who is a massive pain in the ass when it comes to little things, but this true-crime doc takes it up a notch with a neighbour who keeps ringing the police because children are playing outside. The Perfect Neighbor shows just how deadly such disputes can become. The documentary examines the 2023 killing of Ajike “AJ” Owens, a Black mother of four who was shot through a locked front door by her white neighbour, Susan Lorincz, in Ocala, Florida.

The two had been involved in a long-running dispute over children playing near Lorincz’s property, and the number of times the police were called to deal with the situation is enough to make your blood boil.
Rather than relying on endless interviews, director Gandbhir uses police bodycam footage to show the issues that escalated the whole situation before Owens’ death. The documentary also raises questions about racial prejudice and Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws.

A Deadly American Marriage (2025)

Jason Corbett was an Irish widower who moved to North Carolina with his two children after marrying Molly Martens, the American au pair who had worked for his family, and then, on August 2nd, 2015, Jason was beaten to death inside their home by Molly and her father, Thomas Martens, who had worked for the FBI. Molly and Thomas said Jason had attacked her and that they acted in self-defence, but Jason’s children gave an account of their father that did not sit with that version of events. So from the start, you have one household and two stories that are miles apart.

And people, this true-crime documentary does not make that any easier, because Molly speaks for herself, while Jason’s children and relatives give their side, with the allegations of abuse and the court case sitting between them. The presence of so many various testimonies is what makes this case so complicated. In the end, you are left with a family ripped apart and a case where the same marriage is remembered in two very different ways.

Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer (2025)

Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer is a rough watch from the off, because Liz Garbus takes you back to the 2010 disappearance of Shannan Gilbert, whose search led police to human remains along Ocean Parkway and exposed a case that had been festering for years. Many of the victims were young women involved in sex work, while their families kept pushing for answers as the investigation became bogged down in failure and controversy.

Across three episodes of this true-crime documentary, Garbus goes through the police misconduct that hampered the case before reaching the evidence that led to Rex Heuermann’s arrest in 2023. But the real sting is not some big whodunnit reveal… It is seeing how hard the families had to fight to keep these women from becoming just some case numbers. Garbus gives them space to put their daughters and sisters back at the centre of the story.

Amy Bradley Is Missing (2025)

Amy Bradley disappearing from a cruise ship full of passengers sounds like an awfully good title for a thriller until you remember her family has been living with it since 1998. She was 23 and on holiday aboard Royal Caribbean’s ‘Rhapsody of the Seas’ when she vanished before the ship reached Curaçao, with her father having seen her on the cabin balcony that morning. Then he went back to check on her, and she was gone. Just like that. Searches of the ship turned up nothing, and the FBI investigation never produced a clear answer either, which is where the whole case becomes pure madness.

The three-part documentary goes through reported sightings that kept alive the idea Amy may have been abducted rather than fallen overboard, but none has settled what happened. And that is the sad part for her family, because hope is not that easy to give up on, and neither is the uncertainty. Nearly three decades on, they are still stuck without an answer.