Art heists, poison plots and celeb scandals—2025’s wildest crimes kept us scrolling non-stop. These jaw-droppers dominated headlines and true-crime TikToks all year.
While some of the year’s biggest crimes earned themselves pride of place in the pop culture hall of fame, others were too tragic or terrible to be anything other than scroll-stopping stories we read in sadness and disbelief.
Here, we take a look back at the crimes that we couldn’t stop talking about in 2025.
The Mushroom Murders
Erin Patterson’s deadly beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms killed three relatives back in 2023, but her 2025 trial absolutely gripped Australia.
A Victorian jury convicted the 50-year-old of three murders and one attempted murder after weeks of gruesome testimony that had the entire nation glued to live updates like it was the finale of a particularly dark prestige drama.
The suburban poison saga turned global, with every court twist fueling podcasts, think-pieces and collective panic about what’s actually in your next family dinner.
International media descended on the regional Victorian town, and suddenly everyone became an expert on fungal toxicology.
The case raised unsettling questions about trust, family gatherings and whether we’ll ever look at a home-cooked meal the same way again.
The Disappearance of Gus Lamont
What started as a routine missing‑person alert turned into one of 2025’s most chilling mysteries when four-year-old Gus Lamont vanished from his family’s remote Oak Park Station property, south of Yunta in the South Australian outback, on September 27.
Despite massive ground, air and mine‑shaft searches over weeks, police found no trace of the little boy, with investigators now probing whether a third party may have been involved.
The case dominated Aussie headlines and true‑crime podcasts, with theories ranging from tragic misadventure in the harsh desert to sinister abduction.
As the year closed out and Gus remained missing, the haunting disappearance joined the Beaumont children and Joanne Ratcliffe on South Australia’s growing list of outback mysteries.
Diddy’s Bombshell Trial
Hip-hop king Sean “Diddy” Combs faced racketeering and sex trafficking charges in a bombshell New York trial that dominated headlines for months.
FBI raids on his LA and Miami mansions uncovered chaos, landing him a four-year sentence despite acquittals on some counts. Over 50 lawsuits piled on, effectively torching his Bad Boy empire and rewriting hip-hop history in real time.
Each court filing dropped like a new episode, with unsealed documents and raid footage dissected across TikTok, Twitter and every true-crime podcast with a microphone.
The fall from grace was spectacular and brutal, transforming one of music’s most powerful figures into the year’s most-followed legal saga.
The culture shifted overnight, and suddenly everyone had opinions about separating art from the artist.
Catfish Mum
In a case that shocked communities and viewers alike, Kendra Licari, a Michigan mother and former girls’ basketball coach, was revealed to be behind a long-running and unsettling cyberbullying campaign against her own daughter, Lauryn Licari, and Lauryn’s then-boyfriend, Owen McKenny.
Beginning in 2020, the two teens began receiving anonymous text messages, sometimes as many as 40–50 a day, that ranged from threatening and insulting to sexually explicit and psychologically abusive.
It wasn’t until the FBI became involved in 2022 and traced the digital footprint back to an IP address linked to the Licari home that the truth unfolded: the messages were being sent by Lauryn’s mother. Kendra ultimately pled guilty in 2023 to two counts of stalking a minor, one for her daughter and one for Owen, as part of a plea deal that saw other charges dropped. She was sentenced to 19 months to five years in prison and was paroled in August 2024, now under supervision with strict conditions barring contact with her daughter.
The devastating case was the subject of the Netflix documentary Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, which also highlighted broader concerns about cyberbullying, parental control, and digital abuse in the social media age.
Aside from viewers asking themselves the question, “how could a mother do this to her own child?”, perhaps even more baffling was the revelation that Lauryn was considering a future reconciliation with the very woman who had inflicted so much damage upon her.
The Louvre Heist captivated the world
Every year delivers one true-crime story that grabs the world by the throat — and 2025’s belonged to the Louvre.
On October 19, thieves disguised as construction workers infiltrated the Galerie d’Apollon and stole eight French Crown Jewels worth €88 million in less than eight minutes. Eight. Minutes. That’s barely enough time to decide what to order for lunch.
The crew cut through a balcony window, swiped priceless artefacts including a tiara with 1,300 diamonds, then sped off on scooters along the Seine, dropping one piece along the way like they were playing Grand Theft Auto on expert mode.
Art lovers, crime fans and armchair detectives united in parsing every clue, creating Reddit threads longer than French novels. It wasn’t just a heist — it was 2025’s cultural thriller, and we’re all still waiting for the Netflix documentary.
Charlie Kirk assassination
Conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk’s campus rally at Utah Valley University turned into an American nightmare when a gunman shot him dead on September 10.
The shooter faced murder charges, potential death penalty considerations, plus weapons and evidence tampering counts in a case that sent shockwaves through an already fractured nation.
Live-streamed chaos fueled America’s culture war into absolute overdrive, with the tragedy becoming a political flashpoint.
The assassination dominated news cycles for weeks, sparked intense debates about political rhetoric, campus safety and free speech, and left the nation more divided than ever.
Regardless of politics, watching violence play out in real time was a gut punch nobody wanted.
