Best of 2023: True Crime Podcasts
What was your favorite true crime podcast in 2023?
the true crime that's worth your time
It’s day two of our year-end wrap-up. While yesterday we ran down our favorite books of the year, today our panel tackles the now-ubiquitous true crime podcast. If this list doesn’t make you go listen to You Didn’t See Nothin’ (or send you to the comments to explain why you haven’t), nothin’ will. — EB
Two stood out for me: Violation from WBUR and The Marshall Project, a gripping and infuriating look at the way parole is used to abuse prisoners who have already paid for their crimes; and You Didn't See Nothin', from USG Audio & Invisible Institute, just across-the-board amazing. — Author Sarah Weinman, aka The Crime Lady
CBC podcast Gay Girl Gone hit a lot of my areas of interest: 2010s-era blogging, hoaxers (and their unmasking), and Dolezal-adjacent appropriation. I quickly realized that I could probably just look on Wikipedia to know the truth behind the once-popular A Gay Girl in Damascus blog, but I was enjoying the ride — in large part due to host Samira Mohyeddin — so much that I restrained myself. — Best Evidence co-author Eve Batey
Oh so many good ones this year! And by “good,” I mean, “made me furious”: The Retrievals at the sexism inherent in medicine, The Kids of Rutherford County and Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children at the racism inherent in the judicial system, You Didn’t See Nothin’ at the way media accounts of violence can conspire to overwrite complicated truths. However, if you’d like to not feel angry, I can’t recommend Ghost Story enough. It’s got cozy mystery vibes with a provocative argument about whether learning the truth about our families is something anybody actually wants. — True Crime Fiction author Tracy Bealer
N/A, mostly, but You're Wrong About's true crime eps were pretty good, especially "Mindhunting with Sarah Weinman" and the Lizzie Borden episode. — Best Evidence co-author Sarah D. Bunting
You Didn't See Nothin' from Yohance Lacour and Invisible Institute. A compelling story, yes, but there are plenty of those. The elevation of the medium in this podcast is breathtaking. The freshness of the form, and the flexible and surprising styling weave with the narrator/reporter's own experience and the telling of the story. With none of the "look at how clever I am" stink we dread when we hear that a podcast is 'innovative'. — writer and Crime Seen co-host Sarah Carradine
The Retrievals. I categorize this Serial Productions installment as a true crime podcast because there is a crime at its center – a Yale Fertility Center nurse’s swapping of fentanyl used in egg-retrieval procedures with saline. But this podcast is more than a play by play of the investigation and the lawsuits that followed. It is a layered and empathetic look at the intrinsic dismissal of women’s pain. — Best Evidence contributor Susan Howard
By a long margin, the true crime pod I listened to the most was Crime Writers On... which provided the right level of insight on to whether I should bother with a property or sack it off. — Margaret Howie is a marketing drone by day, co-founder of spacefruitpress.com by night.
Wednesday on Best Evidence: The best and brightest true crime longreads of the year.
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