Browse - Most popular shows featuring: true crime adaptation^x

Black Bird centers on James Keene. Keene was a young Chicago kid who was a standout football player headed for a pro career when a few turns in the wrong direction caught him a decade-long prison sentence with no chance of parole. The son of a Chicago cop was offered by the prosecutor who put him behind bars the chance to be sprung from prison and a chance to redeem himself. The stakes were high. Same prosecutor convicted a man named Larry Hall for abducting and killing a 15-year-old, just one of perhaps 19 other women he killed. The killer could be released on appeal. Keene's task was to ingratiate himself with the murderer, in prison, and get him to confess to two murders.

Happy Face is based on the eponymous iHeartMedia podcast, which tells the story of Melissa Jesperson-Moore, a contributor to the Dr. Oz show, who at age 15 discovered that her father, Keith Hunter Jesperson, was the serial murderer, known as the Happy Face Killer. As an adult, Melissa changed her name, guarded her secret, and cut off all ties to her father, who is currently serving life in prison.

Karen is a refreshingly normal and charmingly unfashionable young woman. While she is not slick or a maverick cop, her quick mouth and ingenuity make her an impressive investigator. Following her promotion to Police Scotland's Historic Cases Unit, Karen is tasked with reopening the investigation into a murder that has been the subject of a provocative true crime podcast. When teenage barmaid Rosie Duff was stabbed to death in 1995, suspicion fell on the three drunken students who discovered her body. But despite police suspicion, the boys were never charged. Nearly 25 years on, DS Karen Pirie is determined to uncover what happened that fateful night. Do the men know more than they previously revealed? When Karen uncovers flaws in the initial investigation, she finds herself in conflict with the very officers who led the original hunt for the killer.

I Am The Night tells the story of Fauna Hodel, who was given away by her teenage birth mother to a black restroom attendant in a Nevada casino in 1949. As Fauna begins to investigate the secrets to her past, she follows a sinister trail that swirls ever closer to an infamous Hollywood gynecologist, Dr. George Hodel, a man involved in the darkest Hollywood debauchery and a suspect in the infamous "Black Dahlia" murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947.

Con man, escape artist, thief, master of disguise and psychopath, Charles Sobhraj was the chief suspect in the sensational unsolved murders of up to 20 young Western travellers across India, Thailand and Nepal through 1975 and 1976. Having slipped repeatedly from the grasp of authorities worldwide, by 1976 Sobhraj was Interpol's most wanted man and had arrest warrants on three different continents. When Herman Knippenberg, a junior diplomat at the Dutch Embassy in Bangkok, unwittingly walks into Sobhraj's intricate web of crime, he sets off an extraordinary chain of events that will see these two diametrically opposed men engaged in a chase across the porous borders of the Asian Hippie Trail in its twilight years. The Serpent is based on the phenomenal true story of how one of the most elusive criminals of the 20th century was caught and brought to trial.

Spanning four decades, Say Nothing explores the tumultuous period in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. The series launches with the shocking disappearance of Jean McConville, a single mother of ten who was abducted from her home in 1972 and never seen alive again. But McConville was only one of many others who became known collectively as The Disappeared. Through the eyes of various IRA members, including sisters Dolours and Marian Price-young women who transformed into magnetic symbols of radical politics, Brendan Hughes-a tight-lipped but conflicted military strategist, and Gerry Adams-a savvy political operator who would go on to negotiate peace but ultimately deny his involvement with the IRA, Say Nothing unpacks the extremes some people will go to within a civil rights movement as they pursue their ideals, the mystery surrounding The Disappeared, the cost of silence, and the way society mends - or doesn't - after a long and bloody conflict.

Set in the late 1960s, Aquarius stars Duchovny as a Los Angeles police sergeant with a complicated personal life who starts tracking a small-time criminal and budding cult leader seeking out vulnerable women to join his "cause". The name of that man is Charles Manson. The twists and turns of a complicated undercover operation will lead Duchovny's character and his young partner to the brink of Manson's crimes that will that will eventually lead to the Tate-LaBianca murders in subsequent seasons.

In 1980 in Texas, Candy had it all, a loving husband with a good job, a daughter, a son and a beautiful home in the New Suburb. This loving wife and mother was suspected of murdering Betty Gore with an ax, the wife of a member of her Church with whom she was having an affair.

The Thing About Pam is based on the 2011 murder of Betsy Faria that resulted in her husband Russ's conviction, but he insisted he did not kill her. His conviction was later overturned. This brutal crime set off a chain of events that would expose a diabolical scheme deeply involving Pam Hupp.

Landscapers explores the lives of convicted killers Susan and Christopher Edwards, and asks how this devoted and mild-mannered couple came to kill Susan's parents and bury them in the back garden of their Mansfield home, in a crime that remained undiscovered for over a decade. This blackly comic, narratively playful true crime drama is based on extensive research, hours of interviews and direct access to the accused, who have always protested their innocence of murder.

The Gold opens with the events of November 26th 1983, when six armed men broke into the Brink's-Mat security depot near London's Heathrow Airport, and inadvertently stumbled across gold bullion worth £26m. What started as 'a typical Old Kent Road armed robbery' according to detectives at the time, became a seminal event in British criminal history, remarkable not only for the scale of the theft, at the time the biggest in world history, but for its wider legacy.

The Clearing is adapted from JP Pomare's novel 'In the Clearing' and is inspired by Australian cult The Family and its founder Anne Hamilton-Byrne, one of the few female cult leaders in history.

Told over two parallel timelines, Ruth reveals secret truths about the case which have remained hidden for decades, poses tantalising questions about what really happened in the months before Ruth killed her lover David Blakely, and sheds light on the life of one of Britain's most infamous murderesses. The drama depicts Ruth's entry into a dizzying upper class London world that promises so much, but ultimately delivers treachery. We follow her glamorous lifestyle as a young nightclub manageress, her abusive relationship with the man she later gunned down in cold blood, her arrest, trial and the subsequent legal fight to reprieve her before she was hanged by infamous hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, in Holloway Prison, aged just 28.

On 21 December 1988, flight Pan Am 103 was en route from Heathrow to JFK when a bomb exploded in its hold over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, including 43 British citizens and 190 Americans. It was the worst ever terror attack on British soil and the first major one on US citizens.The Bombing of Pan Am 103 focuses on the investigation into the crash on both sides of the Atlantic and the devastating effect it had on the small town and the families who lost loved ones. From the initial exhaustive search for evidence on the ground in Scotland, via the US and Malta to the trial at Camp Zeist in 2000, the drama takes us right up to the most recent indictment at the end of 2022.

Follow South Africa's first forensic and investigative psychologist, Micki Pistorius, as she studies the minds of South Africa's serial killers. Catch Me A Killer is an adaptation of Micki's autobiography that details her work as the first female criminal profiler in the country, which is brought to life as the events are depicted in the series.

The Helicopter Heist is a reality-based and character-driven suspense series in eight parts about the drama behind one of the most spectacular heists in history, a grand and fast paced Icarus tale about winning, or losing, it all.

The Hunt for Raoul Moat shines a light on the human tragedies that lay behind Britain's biggest manhunt, told through the eyes of those who sought to bring a violent killer to justice. The drama focuses on the innocent victims of Moat's crimes - Christopher Brown, Samantha Stobbart and PC David Rathband; the police officers who put themselves in the firing line in their quest to apprehend Moat; and the local journalist who sought to tell Moat's real story in a landscape of sensationalist reporting and social media provocation.

When Rachel Nickell is stabbed to death on Wimbledon Common in 1992 the police launch the biggest investigation since the Yorkshire Ripper. Colin Stagg is arrested, only for the judge to throw out the case.