Serial is over, and so are Thursdays. At least that’s how it feels. No longer will fans of the podcast phenomenon, which ended this week, spend their lunch hours swearing at the unreliable office Wi-Fi while they attempt to download the latest installment.

All is not lost, however. The show will return in 2015 to tell a new story, and there are plenty of Serial substitutes out there which may help to pass the time. Whether you are a seasoned true crime fan, newly hooked or just looking for a last minute Christmas gift for the highbrow murder fan in your life, here are some suggestions to fill that podcast-shaped hole.

1. Soupçons (The Staircase) (2004)

This eight-part documentary series (originally for French TV, now available on DVD) examines the 2001 trial of US novelist Michael Peterson, who was accused of killing his wife after she was found in a pool of her own blood at the bottom of the family staircase in North Carolina. With unlimited access to Peterson’s family life and defence team, including charismatic high-profile lawyer David Rudolf, this offers a revealing insight into a murder trial in the US. It’s directed by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (his feature-length documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning, for which he won the Oscar, is worth a watch too) and by the end of the show you will have made your mind up and changed it at least five times as the twists unfold.

2. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About his Father (2008)

This documentary began as filmmaker Kurt Kuenne’s attempt to memorialize his murdered childhood friend Andrew Bagby, when Bagby’s ex-girlfriend (who is accused of his murder) announces she is pregnant soon after his death. What starts as a touching tribute soon morphs into something altogether more sinister. For those who don’t know the case, do not Google.

3. The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1979)

This Pulitzer-prize winning book is a thoughtful retelling of death row inmate and double murderer Gary Gilmore’s life, from birth to autopsy. Gilmore was the first person to be legally executed in the United States following a ten-year death penalty hiatus, after he took the unusual step of campaigning for his own right to be killed. It is in a similar vein to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood but with less contention around its ethics and more breadth.

4. The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule (1980)

In 1977, then unknown crime writer Ann Rule had begun researching an idea for a book on a spate of unsolved murders of beautiful young women around America. While working part-time at a crisis hotline in Seattle, unbeknown to her, she knew the killer personally. It was none other than her friend and hotline colleague, the now infamous Ted Bundy.

This global bestseller is a mind-boggling tale. “Logically, statistically, demographically, the chance that Ted Bundy and I should meet is almost too obscure to contemplate,” writes Rule. “As a professional writer, I was handed the story of a lifetime”. As a “plump mother of four”, the book details her unlikely 15-year friendship and “almost instant rapport” with a young, handsome and charismatic Bundy, giving unprecedented insight to the life and mind of one of history’s most notorious serial murderers.

This American PRX podcast is the most direct replacement Serial fans will find. Presented by journalist Phoebe Judge, Criminal (which started this year) delivers monthly bite-sized episodes on those “who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle”. There are 12 online so far, which fall between 15 and 25 minutes each, and range from the case of female serial killer Sheila LaBarre to a whole episode revealing what it calls “the owl theory” in the Michael Peterson case. Available to download or through your browser.

6. Trial by Fire by David Grann (2009)

This is a beautifully written New Yorker story, looking at the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, whom Grann suggests was wrongly convicted for the murder of his three children after they were killed in a fire at the family home in 1991. The prosecution at the time, with the help of expert witnesses, argued the house had been “deliberately transformed into a death trap”. However, Willingham always protested his innocence, refusing to accept an offer of a life sentence for pleading guilty. This 16,000-word investigation deconstructs the entire case.

Also from the New Yorker just last month, Paige Williams’s Double Jeopardy focuses on the impending execution of Alabama inmate Shonelle Jackson. At 18, Jackson was convicted of murder in a gang-related shooting in Montgomery, Alabama. Despite the jury deciding he should not face the death penalty, the judge overruled.

Behind the paywall lives Conversations With A Killer, Alec Wilkinson’s 1994 unsettling profile of “clown killer” John Wayne Gacy, published a month before he was killed by lethal injection. Elsewhere, DNA on Trial from 2000 analyses the case of Calvin Johnson, who was exonerated by the Innocence Project after spending nearly 16 years in a Georgia prison for rape and sexual assault.

7. Paradise Lost: the Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)

This landmark documentary from filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky sparked an international movement to ‘Free the West Memphis Three’ during the 1990s and spawned two equally impressive follow-up documentaries, forming the Paradise Lost Trilogy. The story examines the harrowing 1993 murders of three eight-year-old boys and the three teenagers accused of killing them as part of a Satanic ritual. Read an Observer interview with one of the accused men, Damien Echols, following his release from prison here.

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