How Much Do True Crime Podcasts Really Overlap?
"Pick one true crime podcast. They all cover the same stuff."
We hear this constantly. And honestly, we assumed it was an exaggeration. So we pulled the full RSS catalogs of 20 podcasts across PodRanker's crime podcasts and true crime podcasts categories — 13,698 episodes dating back to 2014 — and checked.
It's not an exaggeration. The overlap is real, and it's bigger than we expected.
The numbers
We tracked 37 high-profile cases (Delphi, Gabby Petito, Laci Peterson, JonBenet Ramsey, Casey Anthony, and others) across the full catalog of every podcast. Of those 37 cases, 36 appeared on two or more storytelling podcasts. Not just breaking-news shows — the narrative, one-case-per-episode shows that are supposed to be picking unique stories.
The biggest overlaps among storytelling podcasts alone:
- Delphi murders — 12 podcasts (Crime Junkie, Criminal, Casefile, Generation Why, Morbid, My Favorite Murder, Rotten Mango, Court Junkie, True Crime Obsessed, Serialously, True Crime with Kendall Rae, Wrongful Conviction)
- John Wayne Gacy — 8 podcasts
- Alex Murdaugh — 7 podcasts
- Casey Anthony — 6 podcasts
- Zodiac Killer — 6 podcasts
- Jennifer Pan — 6 podcasts
- Gabby Petito — 5 podcasts
- Idaho murders — 5 podcasts
- Amanda Knox — 5 podcasts
- Gypsy Rose Blanchard — 5 podcasts
Include breaking-news shows (Dateline, Nancy Grace, 48 Hours, Court TV) and the concentration gets denser: the Delphi murders appeared on 15 of our 20 podcasts. Alex Murdaugh hit 11. The Idaho four, 9.
So yes. If you listen to multiple true crime podcasts for long enough, you will absolutely hear the same cases. The critics are right about that.
The greatest hits list
Some cases have become true crime canon. Here are the ones that appeared on the most shows across our full dataset, with total episode counts:
| Case | Podcasts | Total episodes |
|---|---|---|
| Delphi murders | 15 | 113 |
| Alex Murdaugh | 11 | 101 |
| John Wayne Gacy | 11 | 44 |
| Idaho four / Bryan Kohberger | 9 | 151 |
| Lori Vallow Daybell | 9 | 110 |
| JonBenet Ramsey | 9 | 21 |
| Gabby Petito | 8 | 45 |
| Casey Anthony | 8 | 45 |
| Jodi Arias | 8 | 39 |
| Amanda Knox | 8 | 15 |
The episode counts tell their own story. The Idaho four generated 151 episodes across 9 podcasts — mostly because Nancy Grace alone ran 98. Lori Vallow Daybell hit 110. These aren't cases that got a single episode each. Breaking-news shows hammered them for weeks or months.
Storytelling podcasts are different. When Crime Junkie covers the Delphi murders, it's two episodes. When Nancy Grace covers it, it's 55. The overlap exists in both formats, but the volume is wildly different.
The timing gap
Here's the thing the "they all cover the same stuff" complaint gets wrong: it implies you'll hear the same case on different shows around the same time. That's mostly not what happens.
We looked at every case in our dataset and measured the gap between the first storytelling podcast to cover it and the last. The average span: 4.6 years. The median: 4.1 years.
Some examples:
| Case | Span | First | Last |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steven Avery | 9.5 years | My Favorite Murder (2016) | True Crime Obsessed (2025) |
| John Wayne Gacy | 9.2 years | Criminal (2016) | My Favorite Murder (2026) |
| Amanda Knox | 7.7 years | True Crime Obsessed (2017) | Crime Junkie (2025) |
| Laci Peterson | 7.5 years | Crime Junkie (2017) | True Crime Obsessed (2025) |
| Delphi murders | 6.5 years | Crime Junkie (2019) | Serialously (2025) |
| Gabby Petito | 3.6 years | Crime Junkie (2021) | Rotten Mango (2025) |
Crime Junkie covered the Delphi murders in April 2019. Serialously covered it in October 2025. That's the same case on two different shows, six and a half years apart. If you subscribe to both, you won't notice the overlap unless you remember an episode from six years ago.
We found only one case where three or more storytelling podcasts clustered within 90 days of each other: the Idaho four, when Rotten Mango, True Crime with Kendall Rae, and True Crime Obsessed all covered it between January and March 2023 — right after Bryan Kohberger's arrest made international news. That's a news cycle, not a pattern.
The reality is that storytelling podcasts pick up the same cases at completely different points in their editorial calendar, often years apart. The overlap is longitudinal, not concurrent.
The uniqueness spectrum
Not all podcasts overlap equally. We measured each one's overlap rate: the percentage of their total episodes that matched one of our 37 tracked cases.
High uniqueness (95%+ of episodes on non-tracked cases):
| Podcast | Episodes | Cases hit | Overlap % | Unique % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ear Hustle | 174 | 0/37 | 0% | 100% |
| Someone Knows Something | 100 | 0/37 | 0% | 100% |
| Sword and Scale | 197 | 1/37 | 1.0% | 99.0% |
| Criminal | 368 | 2/37 | 1.4% | 98.6% |
| Casefile | 392 | 5/37 | 2.3% | 97.7% |
| My Favorite Murder | 1,122 | 19/37 | 3.6% | 96.4% |
| Generation Why | 176 | 4/37 | 4.0% | 96.0% |
| Rotten Mango | 507 | 14/37 | 4.1% | 95.9% |
| Morbid | 817 | 12/37 | 4.5% | 95.5% |
Moderate uniqueness (90-95%):
| Podcast | Episodes | Cases hit | Overlap % | Unique % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crime Junkie | 490 | 21/37 | 5.9% | 94.1% |
| Court Junkie | 376 | 7/37 | 5.6% | 94.4% |
| 48 Hours | 985 | 21/37 | 5.7% | 94.3% |
| Wrongful Conviction | 564 | 4/37 | 6.2% | 93.8% |
| Dateline | 765 | 20/37 | 9.0% | 91.0% |
| True Crime with Kendall Rae | 273 | 16/37 | 8.1% | 91.9% |
Commentary and coverage shows (below 80%):
| Podcast | Episodes | Cases hit | Overlap % | Unique % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Court TV | 300 | 11/37 | 21.0% | 79.0% |
| True Crime Obsessed | 593 | 30/37 | 26.0% | 74.0% |
| Serialously | 367 | 18/37 | 26.4% | 73.6% |
The pattern is clear. Podcasts that research and produce original narratives — Criminal, Casefile, Morbid, Generation Why — rarely touch the greatest hits. They're mining deeper, less obvious cases, and their catalogs reflect that.
Commentary shows like True Crime Obsessed and Serialously have a fundamentally different model. They're reacting to documentaries, trials, and trending stories their audience is already following. Their overlap rate is high by design, and it's part of the value proposition: you watch the documentary, then you listen to their take.
Nancy Grace is its own category. She covered 33 of our 37 tracked cases across 600 episodes — but that's only 11.7% of her 5,107-episode catalog. The remaining 4,507 episodes cover cases that aren't even on our list, which tells you the true crime universe is far larger than the 37 "greatest hits" we tracked.
The podcast similarity matrix
We also looked at which specific podcasts overlap the most with each other — how many of the 37 cases they share.
The most similar pairs:
| Pair | Shared cases | % of smaller catalog |
|---|---|---|
| Nancy Grace + True Crime Obsessed | 27/37 | 90% |
| Nancy Grace + 48 Hours | 20/37 | 95% |
| My Favorite Murder + True Crime Obsessed | 18/37 | 95% |
| Nancy Grace + Dateline | 18/37 | 90% |
| Nancy Grace + Crime Junkie | 18/37 | 86% |
| Nancy Grace + Serialously | 17/37 | 94% |
| Nancy Grace + True Crime with Kendall Rae | 15/37 | 94% |
Nancy Grace dominates the top of this list because she covers almost everything — 33 of 37 cases. Any podcast that covers a famous case, Nancy Grace probably covered it too.
More interesting: True Crime Obsessed shares 95% of My Favorite Murder's case list. Both are personality-driven commentary shows that gravitate toward the same high-profile stories. If you subscribe to both, you're getting the same cases filtered through different hosts.
The least similar pairs (excluding Ear Hustle and Someone Knows Something, which had zero matches):
Criminal shares exactly one case each with Casefile, Generation Why, Court Junkie, and Serialously. These are podcasts with genuinely non-overlapping editorial tastes. Criminal covered Delphi and John Wayne Gacy — and nothing else on our list. Their 366 other episodes are stories you won't find on any other show in our dataset.
Cold cases vs. hot cases
We split our 37 cases into two groups: "hot" cases triggered by a specific news event (Gabby Petito, Alex Murdaugh, the Idaho four, Gilgo Beach) and "cold" historical cases with no active trial (Ted Bundy, JonBenet Ramsey, the Zodiac Killer).
Hot cases averaged 6.8 podcasts each. Cold cases averaged 6.0. The difference is smaller than we expected. True crime canon is true crime canon — historical or not, the biggest names get covered everywhere.
What does differ is the timeline. Hot cases cluster: the Idaho four saw three storytelling podcasts respond within 90 days of each other. Cold cases spread across years: My Favorite Murder covered John Wayne Gacy in November 2016, Morbid didn't get to him until January 2020, and True Crime Obsessed waited until 2023. Same case, seven years between the first and last storytelling podcast.
What this means for your podcast queue
The critics aren't wrong that true crime podcasts cover the same cases. Over a full catalog, the overlap is undeniable. But the criticism conflates three things that the data shows are different:
Same case, same week — This basically only happens with breaking-news shows, and only during active trials. It's the model, not a flaw.
Same case, years apart — This is what storytelling podcast overlap actually looks like. The Delphi murders appear on 12 storytelling shows, but spread across 6.5 years. You're not hearing the same episode twice. You're hearing a case revisited by a different host, at a different point in the investigation, with a different editorial angle. Whether that bothers you is a matter of taste, not a quality problem.
Same genre, different content — This is the part the criticism misses entirely. Criminal is 98.6% unique content. Casefile is 97.7%. Even Crime Junkie, which touches more famous cases than most, is 94.1% unique. These podcasts aren't recycling each other's work. They're drawing from the same enormous pool of criminal cases and mostly picking different ones.
A 490-episode podcast that touches 21 famous cases is not a podcast about 21 famous cases. It's a podcast about the other 461 episodes, with 21 famous ones mixed in.
The question isn't "do they overlap?" They do. The question is whether it matters. And at 6% overlap for the average storytelling podcast, spread across years rather than weeks, we don't think it does.
Methodology: Full RSS catalogs collected on February 17, 2026 from 20 podcasts (13,698 episodes, dating back to 2014) across PodRanker's crime podcasts and true crime podcasts categories. Case overlap analysis performed by matching 37 high-profile case names (with common variations) across episode titles and descriptions. Timing analysis based on earliest publication date per podcast per case. "Overlap %" = percentage of a podcast's total episodes matching any tracked case. Some cases (e.g., "Zodiac") may produce false positives in descriptions; we accepted this margin as the analysis is directional, not forensic.