True crime documentaries on Netflix to sink your teeth into

IF YOU’RE suffering withdrawal after polishing off Making a Murderer, here are four more crime docos on Netflix to get into.

IT’S official. We’re obsessed with true crime documentaries.

Audiences have taken to Netflix’s 10-part Making a Murderer series like a fish takes to water — which is a bit of a confusing saying since fish are hatched in water, but we digress.

Much like the first season of the Serial podcast, Making a Murderer has reawakened the armchair detectives in all of us as we question Steven Avery’s guilt and wonder whether cops acted a tad zealously in getting “their man”.

But if you’ve wrapped up the series and you’re suffering some true crime withdrawals, here are four more docos to sinks your teeth into — and, happily, they’re not as long as Making a Murderer. You can polish one off in a single seating — score.

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE

Wrongly convicted.

Directed by noted documentary maker Ken Burns, this looks at the infamous Central Park case from 1989 in which Trisha Melli was assaulted and raped while jogging. She was in a coma for almost two weeks as a result of her injuries.

The sensational case was highly publicised at the time and added to an overall feeling throughout the 1980s that New York City was crime-ridden and unsafe.

Five young men were convicted of the crime, wrongly.

KIDS FOR CASH

The injustice.

This 2013 film follows a 2008 scandal which is likely to further reinforce your suspicions about the corruptibility of the American justice system.

For those unfamiliar with the “Kids for Cash” scandal, two judges were found guilty of sending vulnerable juveniles to detention centres when a more lenient sentence like probation would’ve been enough. Why did they do it? Because the judges were lining their pockets with cash bribes from the for-profit detention centres to boost their inmate numbers.

One kid sentenced to a detention centre had only shoplifted a CD.

THE IMPOSTER

Chameleon.

In 1994, 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay disappeared in Texas. Four years later, a supposed teenager calling himself Nicholas Barclay turned up on the other side of the world. He was flown to Barclay’s family and despite him having different colour eyes and a French accent, the family accepts him as their son.

Of course, he wasn’t their son. He was a Canadian impostor named Frederic Bourdin.

The documentary looks in depth at the case and features interviews with Bourdin and members of Barclay’s family.

JOSEF FRITZL: STORY OF A MONSTER

So creepy.

There are few people in the world who haven’t heard of Fritzl, the Austrian man who kept his own daughter captive for over two decades in his basement and fathered seven children with her.

This documentary features interviews with family, doctors and Friztl’s victims as it seeks to understand what could drive someone to do what he did.