TIGER King has had us all gripped since it premiered on Netflix earlier this month, but there’s no need to feel bereft after bingeing.
That’s because the streaming service has a whole host of equally gripping, disturbing and outrageous true crime dramas for you to sink your teeth into. Here are some of our favourites.
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Don’t F*** With Cats<
This three-part series reveals the sick and twisted crimes of Canadian killer Luka Magnotta, who started off filming himself torturing animals before posting them online.
In 2010 he posted his first video which saw him killing two kittens, before later footage showed another kitten being eaten alive by a Burmese python.
The internet was up in arms at his behaviour and the documentary follows the real life people who started a manhunt to find him.
But things took a more sinister turn when Luka moved on to murdering humans, killing Chinese student Jun Lin after they met on a gay dating site.
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Abducted in Plain Sight
This series is the gripping story of how a young girl was kidnapped twice by a neighbour.
Jan Broberg was kidnapped twice by neighbour Robert B Berchtold as a young girl – once aged 12 and again aged 14.
The community in Idaho in which she lived the early 1970s were completely under the 40-year-old paedophile’s spell.
Berchtold lured both Bob and Mary Ann Broberg, who were members of the Church of the Latter Day Sain, into separate sexual encounters, playing on their vulnerability and guilt to achieve his sick aims.
Berchtold was a friend of the family and had been molesting Jan for months and convinced her aliens wanted her to have a child with him before abducting her.
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The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez
The harrowing documentary reveals how eight-year-old Gabriel was bound, gagged and made to sleep inside a tiny cabinet before he was murdered by his evil mother and her partner.
The little boy was repeatedly beaten and tortured by his mum and Isauro in 2013 because they thought he was gay, including being put inside cabinet they nicknamed the “the box”.
The series doesn’t shy away from detailing what poor Gabriel went through during his short life, and it has left many viewers struggling to watch it.
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Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes
Ted Bundy, who died in an electric chair in Florida on January 24, 1989, confessed to killing 30 women in the 1970s.
The documentary is based on the work of journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth and uses hours of audio interviews they conducted with the killer while he was on death row in 1980.
It also includes present-day interviews and archive footage.
This unique series focuses on a man whose personality, good looks and social graces defied the serial-killer stereotype, allowing him to hide in plain sight as he committed the brutal sex-crime slayings of more than 30 women before being caught in 1978.
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Making a Murderer
If you haven’t seen this true crime drama series, what have you been doing? Originally released on Netflix in 2015 and immediately had viewers gripped. A second season followed in 2018.
The series explores the complex case of Steven Avery, who was previously exonerated after spending nearly twenty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
But he was then arrested and sentenced two years later for the murder of Teresa Halbach, another crime he insists he didn’t commit.
Some of the questions that have arisen include whether Avery and Dassey received a fair trial, and whether the police conducted a thorough investigation at the time.
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Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez
This the captivating Netflix documentary about how one of the NFL’s most promising players became a convicted murderer.
The three-part series chronicles the player’s high-profile murder trial, conviction and prison suicide.
It also explores his troubled childhood when he was sexually abused by a male babysitter and how he lived in fear of his homophobic father.
The former NFL star was serving a life sentence without parole for the 2013 killing of semi-professional footballer Odin Lloyd when he committed suicide in his prison cell.
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Evil Genius
The four-part series focuses on the death/murder of Brian Wells in 2003.
The pizza delivery man robbed a bank with a bomb strapped to his chest and neck, but evidence later emerged that he may have been forced to commit the crime and wear the device.
Despite the subject matter of the series, viewers were still horrified to see footage of Brian blow up within the first 10 minutes of episode one.
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How to Fix a Drug Scandal
The docuseries is based on the shocking real life crime committed by Sonja Farak, who was a lab tester for the Amherst lab, in the US state of Massachusetts.
Woven into the series is the true life story of Annie Dookhan, whose actions caused thousands of drug convictions to be cast into doubt.
The lab tester and Sonja Farak’s crimes resulted in the wrongful conviction of many drug related cases in the state.
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Tell Me Who I Am
The feature-length Netflix documentary deals with the heartbreaking story of Alex Lewis, who lost his memory at the age of 18 after a motorcycling accident.
Alex relied on his twin brother Marcus to teach him who he was and about their past, but Marcus chose not to tell him about their abusive childhood in a bid to protect his sibling from further trauma.
However, following the death of their mother Jill Dudley in 1995, the brothers started to clear out the family home, and Alex made a shock discovery.
At the back of their mother’s wardrobe was a secret compartment, and when he opened it he found a naked photograph of himself and Marcus as 10-year-old boys, with their heads cut off.
The shocking discovery lead him to ask his twin if they had been abused.
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The Staircase
The Staircase follows a war novelist accused of killing his wife in 2001 and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival before it arrived on the streaming giant.
Eight episodes aired in 2004 and the follow-up runs for three installments.
The Staircase has been described as a “gripping real-life courtroom thriller” and has been compared to hit show, Making a Murderer.
Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade was granted access to the case immediately following Kathleen’s death.
De Lestrade captured every moment of the story from arrest to verdict, following in intimate detail Peterson’s home, the family and his defence team as it considered its strategic options.
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The Keepers
This docuseries examines the decades-old murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik and its suspected link to a priest accused of abuse.
Sister Cesnik taught English and drama at Baltimore’s Archbishop Keough High School, and her former students’ believed that there was a cover-up by authorities after Cesnik suspected that a priest at the school, A. Joseph Maskell, was guilty of sexual abuse of students.
The series was directed by Ryan White and released on Netflix in 2017.
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Out of Thin Air
This British documentary focuses on the Reykjavik Confessions, a case where six people were wrongfully convicted for the disappearances of Guðmundur Einarsson and Geirfinnur Einarsson in Iceland.
The film concerns the 1974 disappearances of two unrelated men whose bodies were never found.
The first, an 18-year-old man, vanished on a wintry night after attending a party, then months later, a 32-year-old father drove to a café after receiving a late night phone call.
He parked his car and was never seen again.
The 2017 production reveals how confessions aren’t everything.
