Murder 360 Review: Circling the Crime, Missing the Point
- The Emerald Sleuth
- 3 days ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 15 hours ago
Paramount+ | 10 episodes | 2025
Rating: 2 out of 5 – Ten cases promised from every angle, but most landed flat, shallow, and crooked.
Sometimes you wander off the familiar crime trail, Netflix, Hulu, the usual suspects, just to see what else is lurking in the back catalog. That’s how I ended up with Murder 360 on Paramount+. The series bills itself as “a true crime docuseries that uncovers ten gripping murder cases from every possible angle. Through intimate interviews, expert analysis, and rare footage, the series paints a vivid portrait of the motive, method, and aftermath of each crime — from thrill killings to deadly vows.”
That’s a bold pitch. Too bad it’s almost entirely untrue.
On paper, it sounds like a feast. In practice, it was more like an endurance test. What should have been a binge turned into a week-long slog of stops and starts. Some episodes had substance; others felt half-baked or stripped of the voices that should have mattered most. The quality wasn’t just inconsistent, it was wildly inconsistent, enough that writing this Murder 360 review almost feels unfair, because one episode might barely scrape together credibility while the next stumbles into something compelling.
Still, this is a 10-episode series, and I’m rating it as a whole. I could have (wanted to) stopped midway, closed the file, spared myself the time. But I didn’t. I stayed the course. And now, here we are.
On Interviews and “Experts”
The series parades experts across the screen, but “expert” seems to mean whoever was available that day. Case in point: one woman is introduced as a forensic psychologist. Her big contribution? Informing us it’s stressful to watch a man punching a woman. Riveting stuff. This is where the show mistakes authority for insight, padding runtime with obvious statements instead of analysis.
The series leans heavily on interviews, but too often they collapse under their own weight. At first glance, it seems thorough: reporters, police officers, psychologists, even the occasional private investigator. But the illusion fades quickly. Worse, interviews were edited within an inch of their lives. Sentences chopped mid-thought, stitched together with B-roll, leaving you wondering what context got cut. Some episodes leaned too heavily on one voice, others let unrelated commentators ramble. The result wasn’t “360 degrees of truth”, more like a wobbling oval, off-balance and incomplete.
Most of the so-called “expert analysis” came from local news reporters, who carried entire episodes as if they were the custodians of memory. Police officers were usually present, but not always the ones the narrative kept circling back to. And when families or friends were missing, which happened far too often, the vacuum was filled by strangers retelling lives they’d only read about in case files. There’s something hollow about hearing a reporter explain how someone spent their evenings at a bar, when you know that story should have come from a sister or a friend.
Even the psychologists, when they appeared, rarely gave true psychological insight. Instead, they recited mundane details of the victims’ days, who they met, where they went, what they drank, as if they’d been there themselves. That kind of commentary doesn’t elevate the story. It insults the intelligence of the audience. And worse, it undercuts the dignity of the victims by treating their lives as stage directions.
Journalists speculating about killers’ emotions while driving and psychologists describing campsite creeps like they were narrating a police blotter. These weren’t expert insights, they were filler. Misuse of time, misuse of authority. A forensic psychologist should help you understand motive, fear, obsession, not read aloud from a diary no one wrote.
And it wasn’t just what they said. It was how they were presented. Only one “expert” in the entire ten-episode run introduced themselves with credentials and explained their connection to the case. Everyone else just suddenly appeared with a four-second lower third and started talking. At one point, I spent most of an episode assuming a private investigator was just another rent-a-quote P.I., only to learn two-thirds through that he’d actually been hired by the family. The show never thought to make that clear up front.
The strongest episodes were the ones that gave voice to families and friends: raw, flawed, but real. When those voices were missing, the series filled the silence with outsiders: reporters speculating about high school popularity, journalists narrating veterans’ wartime experiences, psychologists explaining social habits that should have come from friends. It felt lazy, disrespectful, and it left a faint chill. Why weren’t the families here, were they unavailable, unwilling, ignored? The series never bothered to tell us.
Scene and Substance
The staging didn’t help. Sometimes interviews looked natural, set in offices or homes that matched the gravity of the story. Other times they looked like halfhearted set pieces, a woman seated in front of a floor-to-ceiling window, someone seated at a bar table with a two-olive martini sweating beside her. The backdrop clashed with the content, leaving scenes that felt staged instead of lived-in.
Without a voice-of-God narrator to steady the story, everything depended on these interviews. And too often, they cracked under the weight.
The Crime Scene Behind the Camera
If the series wanted to brand itself with a signature look, it chose… poorly. The b-roll is the main offender. Every episode leans on it like a crutch: the standard street shots, the slow pans over still photos, and always, always that murder board. Imagine a corkboard littered with photocopied faces, cars, and weapons, each tagged with a colored sticky note scrawled in handwriting so sloppy it could double as a ransom note. “Suspect.” “Cell Phone” “Missing Shoes”
The red string wasn’t even red string all the time, sometimes it was red stickers plopped on like a dollar-store detective kit. Instead of suggesting “immersive investigation,” the board feels more like cheap set dressing, something that wouldn’t pass muster in a community theater production. And the real shame? They never pull back. You get endless close-ups of a few pinned images, but not once does the camera zoom out to reveal the full case web at the end of an episode. Isn’t that the entire promise of Murder 360? A circle that closes? We never see it.
The camera avoids its own interviewees, cutting instead to the same five recycled photographs on loop. When rare home video or cell phone footage appears, the story sharpens, you feel the grain of real life. But most episodes are starved of that, and you’re left with the same tired stills masquerading as narrative depth.
News clips and interrogation footage, when they do show up, add much-needed weight. But their absence in other episodes makes the storytelling feel thin, as though we’re getting fragments rather than the whole. Police bodycam and dashcam footage, the raw material that usually anchors modern true crime, are glaringly absent.
The soundtrack mostly keeps out of the way, which is exactly where it belongs. But every so often, it swells into something closer to a Stallone car chase montage than a homicide case file, and the tonal whiplash is absurd. No reenactments appear, which is fine, but the constant reliance on generic b-roll, schools, toys, random filler shots, gives the impression of padding, not precision.
Then there are the intros. Each episode begins with a “hook” before the credits roll, the kind of teaser designed to convince you to watch the show. The problem is you’re already watching. Worse, these cold opens sometimes spoil crucial details about the very story you’re about to see. Nothing kills tension faster than a show revealing its own punchline.
Technical choices only compound the frustration. Interviewees are labeled once and then rarely if ever again, so if you look away or forget, you’re left guessing who’s talking and what their title is. Sometimes dates flash on-screen without context, forcing you to do math in real time to figure out the timeline. When the captions read “11 days since X happened,” the case suddenly sharpens. But that clarity isn’t consistent, and the unpredictability is maddening.
Pacing is the final nail. Each episode runs about 45 minutes, not long enough to dig deep, yet somehow still padded with filler. During some episodes the storytelling leaps forward and backward in time, often without clear signposting, leaving the narrative shallow, rushed, and disjointed. If you know these cases already, you’ll notice glaring omissions. If you don’t, you’ll be left with half-formed impressions, padded by inconsequential details while major beats go missing.
In the end, production feels less like a carefully crafted docuseries and more like a middle-school craft project. And the cruelest irony? For a show called Murder 360, we never once see the circle close.
Who Gets the Spotlight, Who Gets the Scrapbook Treatment
The cases here aren’t all household names, but they’re not vanishing into the ether either. Some have been chewed up and spat out by every docu-machine in the business, others barely got more than a footnote outside their local press. What follows isn’t just a recap of each episode, it’s a saturation check. How much oxygen do these stories already have in the true crime ecosystem, and who exactly is this show putting in the frame: the victim or the perp?
Saturation Score
Murder 360’s biggest sin may be its case selection. The show promises “every possible angle,” but the angles they chose were wildly inconsistent. Some cases are so obscure they’ve never appeared on national true crime shows. Others have been retold so often you could play a drinking game with their coverage.
To measure this, I’m introducing a Saturation Score. It’s not about the gravity of the crime, but how heavily it’s been covered in the true crime landscape:
Unknown – Little to no coverage.
Obscure – A handful of mentions or local coverage, not much national traction.
Recognized – Familiar within true crime spaces, but not household names.
Well-Documented – Multiple docs, books, steady national attention.
Over-Saturated – Everywhere. Dozens of retellings across Dateline, 20/20, Netflix, podcasts, books, etc.
Spoiler Alert: From this point on, I’ll be discussing the episodes themselves. If you haven’t watched yet and want to avoid details, consider this your line of caution.
Murder 360 Review: Episode Guide & Analysis
The series swings between the familiar and the forgotten, spotlighting cases that range from overlooked tragedies to killers already carved into the true crime canon. Here’s how it plays out:
Episode 1 – Elizabeth is Missing (Saturation Score 3/5, Recognized)
Nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten vanishes on her walk home, igniting a frantic community search. The retelling keeps its lens on the perpetrator, pushing Elizabeth herself into the margins. The case has been covered in Made for Murder and splashed across local headlines, but never fully dissected on film.
Episode 2 – Murder in Moab (Saturation Score 2/5, Obscure)
Newlyweds Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner go missing after whispering about a “creepy guy” near their campsite. This one leans more victim-focused, though national networks barely touched it. Outside of podcasts and local Utah coverage, their story still lives in the shadows.
Episode 3 – Soldier Down (Saturation Score 2/5, Obscure)
Army veteran Tiffany Hill is ambushed outside her children’s school, her final moments caught in broad daylight. The series emphasizes her life, not just her death, making this one of the more victim-centered hours. They even sat down with her friends, giving the portrait more warmth than most episodes managed. Aside from a niche doc and some podcasts, Tiffany’s case never broke through to wider coverage.
Episode 4 – Deadly Vows (Saturation Score 4/5, Well-Documented)
Kelly Cochran’s tangled marriage and trail of violence get the full spotlight. This one is straight-up perpetrator territory, her name already tied to multiple documentaries, books, and steady podcast fodder. She’s infamous in true crime circles, if not exactly a household name.
Episode 5 – Losing Streak Lois (Saturation Score 5/5, Oversaturated)
A grandmother on the run, crossing state lines and leaving chaos behind. The episode chases the tabloid sheen and keeps the focus squarely on the perp. Her story has already had the full media buffet: Dateline, 20/20, Oxygen specials, and even an HBO doc. There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before.
Episode 6 – Where’s Micah (Saturation Score 2/5, Obscure)
Micah Rine’s sudden disappearance rattles her family and community. The show plays it as victim-driven, though the pacing is so flat it’s hard to feel the urgency. Apart from a local Christian doc and scattered reporting, Micah’s case never reached the national stage.
Episode 7 – Killer in the Forest (Saturation Score 5/5, Oversaturated)
Gary Hilton stalked the Appalachian Trail, leaving a string of victims behind. This episode tilts heavily toward the perp, with victims treated as little more than footnotes. He’s already had the Dateline treatment, multiple documentaries, and even taped confessions, saturation doesn’t begin to cover it.
Episode 8 – The Gardener (Saturation Score 4/5, Well-Documented)
The bodies found behind a strip mall in Connecticut trace back to William Devin Howell. Another perpetrator-heavy narrative, bolstered by existing docs, podcasts, and even a book written about his prison confessions. Well-covered, though not entirely overexposed.
Episode 9 – First Response (Saturation Score 3/5, Recognized)
Firefighter William Walker is gunned down outside his home, leaving investigators scrambling for answers. This one stays with the victim, framing him not just as a statistic but as a man caught in betrayal. Oxygen and local outlets have told the story, but no major doc has put it in the national spotlight.
Episode 10 – The Bayou Strangler (Saturation Score 4/5, Well-Documented)
Ronald Dominique preyed on young men across Louisiana, his crimes stretching on for years. It’s perpetrator-centric, pulling from already established docs and podcasts. In the true crime community, his name is known, even if broader media hasn’t pushed him into Bundy-level infamy.
Full Series Saturation Score
Across the ten episodes, the average score lands at 3.4/5. That puts the season squarely in the “Recognized/Well Documented” range: not hidden gems but not entirely wrung-dry either.
Final Verdict
Trying to slap one neat verdict on Murder 360 is like trying to fingerprint smoke. Some episodes pulled me in and delivered something worth the time; others made me want to torch this review and walk away. That inconsistency is the series’ fatal flaw. By setting itself up as an 45 minute per episode anthology, it all but guaranteed shallow takes. Instead of circling around the crime scene from every angle, it skimmed the edges. Victims were outlined, perpetrators were sketched, but rarely did the series ever bother to fill in the detail.
And the pacing? Whiplash-inducing. When the material was rich, episodes rushed past crucial context. When the details were thin, they padded with rambling interviewees and endless b-roll. The result was less a “360-degree view” and more a blurry snapshot that told you neither enough nor the right things.
So here’s the final word: Murder 360 sells itself as “a true crime docuseries that uncovers ten gripping murder cases from every possible angle. Through intimate interviews, expert analysis, and rare footage, the series paints a vivid portrait of the motive, method, and aftermath of each crime — from thrill killings to deadly vows.” The reality? It does none of this. The angles are narrow, most of the interviews shallow, the “analysis” laughable, and the rare footage scarce. What should have been a panoramic view is more like staring down a keyhole.
Rating: 2 out of 5. Murder 360 promised a circle, but what we got was a broken line.
Case closed. 🔍 Verdict delivered. ⚖️
Stay hydrated. 💧 You can drown in detail and still never reach depth. 🌊🕳️
🕵️♀️ The Emerald Sleuth, calling it a night. 💚
What’s YOUR verdict on Murder 360: worth watching, or better skipped?”
Worth Watching
I'm skipping it