FBI Behavioral Science Unit profiling

2026 brings a slate of major true crime documentaries across Netflix, ID, and HBO Max, featuring everything from Elizabeth Smart's firsthand account of her 1996 kidnapping to the Hillside Strangler's shocking on-camera confession. These releases promise archival footage, FBI investigations, and perspectives rarely heard before from victims and perpetrators alike.

Henry Lee Lucas confessed to around 600 murders between 1983 and 1985, but investigators later determined most were fabrications. The case exposed dangerous interrogation practices that allowed a convicted killer to manipulate law enforcement across multiple states.

Brian Walshe, 50, was convicted of murdering his wife Ana, a 39-year-old Serbian-American real estate executive, who disappeared on January 1, 2023, from their Cohasset, Massachusetts home. After initially misleading police, Walshe pleaded guilty to obstructing the investigation but was found guilty of first-degree murder on December 15, 2025, and sentenced to life without parole.

A senior homicide investigator from Copenhagen Police has published a genre-bending account of how Danish authorities solve murders, blending procedural detail with lyric narrative. The book offers rare international insight into Nordic criminal investigation methods and the human toll of cold cases.

In April 2023, a 13-year-old girl distributing newspapers in Kirkerup, Denmark, was rammed by a car and forced inside. Over the next 27 hours, she endured sexual abuse and violence at the hands of Philip Patrick Westh, a 32-year-old marketing manager who would later be convicted of multiple serious crimes, including murder.

Ann C. Wolbert Burgess, born in 1936, became the first woman on the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit and a pivotal expert witness in high-profile criminal trials—from the Menendez brothers case to serial killer investigations—fundamentally changing how the justice system understands trauma and criminal behavior.

On the night before Halloween 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley was bludgeoned to death outside her home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Now, half a century later, a new 12-episode podcast from NBC News Studios is reopening the case with never-before-heard interviews and newly unsealed evidence.