True crime documentaries: a 1988 film helped free an innocent man

A true crime documentary is a nonfiction film about a real crime: who was involved, what the evidence showed and how the justice system handled the case. Some tell the story of a single night. Others follow a case for years, and a few change what happens next.

The film that set that example came out in 1988. The Thin Blue Line, by the director Errol Morris, examined the 1976 killing of a Dallas police officer. After publicity from the film, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction of Randall Dale Adams, and he was ordered released in 1989. The Library of Congress later added it to the National Film Registry, its list of films worth preserving.

The form reached a much larger audience in 2014, when the podcast Serial debuted. Its first two seasons were downloaded more than 340 million times by 2018, and true crime documentaries and podcasts multiplied in its wake. Relay has 8 of them, listed below in release order, from a killer's Chicago hotel to a man's return to his own prison cell.

What true crime documentaries do

• Reconstruct. Many use dramatic re-enactments built from witness statements, a technique The Thin Blue Line made familiar.
• Question. The best ones ask whether the right person was convicted, or whether anyone ever was.
• Remember. Some exist so that victims, and the people who survived, are named and heard.

8 true crime documentaries to watch

H. H. Holmes: America's First Serial Killer (2005)

Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, built a three-story, maze-like building in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, near the site of the 1893 World's Fair. He called it the World's Fair Hotel. Holmes confessed in writing to 27 murders, but he was officially linked to 9, and the claims of more than 200 victims are considered exaggerated.

John Borowski, a filmmaker, shot this documentary mostly in black and white, with re-enactors playing the people involved. The reviewer Dennis Schwartz called it an engrossing factual account of a killer who was once well known and has since been forgotten by most. Holmes was hanged in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896.

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The House of Suh (2010)

On September 25, 1993, Andrew Suh, then 19, shot Robert O'Dubaine, a nightclub owner and his sister Catherine's boyfriend, in a Chicago garage. Andrew was a prep school graduate and student body president with a full scholarship to Providence College. His father died when he was 11, and his mother was murdered when he was 13, in a case where no one has been charged.

Suh says his sister manipulated him and told him to "make sure he's dead." He received an 80-year sentence, and Catherine is serving life for ordering the killing. Iris K. Shim, an Illinois filmmaker, spent about five years on this documentary, which premiered at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto.

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The Long Island Railroad Massacre (2013)

On December 7, 1993, a gunman opened fire on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train, killing 6 people and wounding 19. Three passengers, Michael O'Connor, Kevin Blum and Mark McEntee, tackled the gunman, Colin Ferguson, and pinned him to a seat. Ferguson dismissed his lawyers, defended himself at trial and was convicted in 1995.

Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband Dennis was killed on the train, ran for Congress on a gun-control platform and was elected in 1996. The director, Charlie Minn, grew up near the site and lost a high school classmate that night. The Village Voice commended him for getting so many people involved to speak on camera, apart from Ferguson.

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Happy Valley (2014)

Amir Bar-Lev, the director, shot this film in the year after Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach, was arrested in November 2011 on child sex abuse charges. It premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. The film does not retry the crimes. It follows the town, a community built around its football team.

The family of Joe Paterno, Penn State's longtime head coach, appears in it, including his widow Sue and sons Scott and Jay. Sandusky did not take part, but his son Matt did. The reviewer John DeFore wrote that the film is more concerned with the phenomenon of team spirit than with any single question of fact or moral judgment.

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77 Minutes (2016)

On July 18, 1984, a gunman opened fire at a McDonald's in San Ysidro, San Diego, killing 21 people and wounding 19 before a police sniper killed him about 77 minutes after the shooting began. It was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history until 1991, and it remains the deadliest in California.

Police arrived about 10 minutes after the first emergency call. Afterward the San Diego police reviewed their tactics and increased training for special units. A memorial unveiled in 1990 has 21 white marble pillars, each bearing a victim's name. Charlie Minn directed this film, as he did The Long Island Railroad Massacre.

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Santoalla (2017)

Martin Verfondern, a Dutch man, moved in 1997 to the village of Santoalla in Galicia, Spain, with his wife Margo Pool. Years of conflict with the neighboring family, the village's only other residents, followed. He disappeared in 2010. In 2014 authorities found the remains of his burned car and his skull. The exact cause of death could not be determined.

Juan Carlos, a son of the neighboring family, was sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison for homicide and illegal possession of weapons. His brother Julio was found guilty of covering up the crime but was exempt from punishment because of the family tie. The Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen's fiction film As Bestas, which won nine Goya awards, was inspired by the case. Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer made this documentary, which follows Margo as she tries to find out what happened.

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The Price of Honor (2022)

Sisters Amina Said, 18, and Sarah Said, 17, were found shot in their father's taxi in the parking lot of the Omni Hotel in Irving, Texas, on January 1, 2008. In the days before, they had fled with their mother to a relative's house in Oklahoma after Amina was threatened at gunpoint by her father. The case is often described as an honor killing.

The father, Yaser Said, was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list and the reward for him was raised. Neena Nejad and Xoel Pamos made the film while he was still a fugitive. He was arrested in August 2020 in Justin, Texas, and a jury found him guilty of capital murder in August 2022. Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, so he received an automatic life sentence.

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Lovely Jackson (2024)

Rickey Jackson was convicted at 18 of the 1975 killing of Harold Franks, a money order salesman, outside a Cleveland grocery store. The case rested on the testimony of Edward Vernon, then 12, who later recanted. He said he never witnessed the crime and that detectives had coerced him. Jackson was freed in November 2014 after 39 years in prison. The National Registry of Exonerations counts that as the longest time behind bars for a wrongfully convicted person in the U.S.

Matt Waldeck directed the film and co-wrote it with Jackson. Jackson returns to the prison where he was sent in 1976 to take part in re-enactments with actors, alongside his real-life accuser.

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Where to go next

• For another film built on a real, unsolved tragedy, see the story behind a documentary on an unsolved New Orleans bar fire.
• For a documentary built on one man's disguised TV interview, see the Bob Lazar spotlight on Relay.