"Murder 101" is a three-part true-crime docuseries that follows a high school sociology class in rural Tennessee as a classroom exercise in cold-case work turns into a genuine present-day hunt for a killer, with decades-old files reopened by the unlikeliest of investigators.
What is Murder 101 about?
At Elizabethton High School in Tennessee, sociology teacher Alex Campbell has spent years running his classroom as a working cold-case unit, and the series opens as his students take on the Redhead Murders — a string of unsolved killings from the 1980s in which young women, most of them red-haired, were found along highways across several states. Part teen drama, part masterclass and part edge-of-your-seat investigation, the episodes follow the teenagers as they learn to read old case files, interview people connected to the victims and build a profile of the man they believe is responsible. The rest of the story tracks the class as it pushes those findings toward law enforcement and the victims' families, turning a decades-old mystery into a live hunt and working to restore names to victims who had gone unidentified for years.
About the cast
Stacey Lee directs the series, which does not lean on a marquee ensemble so much as a tight classroom setting where a teacher and his students carry the investigation themselves, with the people they interview — detectives, relatives of the victims and locals who remember the era — filling out the picture. That intentionally small circle keeps the story rooted in one Tennessee community rather than sprawling across a wider cast of locations.
Context & significance
Produced in the United States, "Murder 101" sits in the true-crime docuseries tradition but flips its usual vantage point, letting a classroom of teenagers rather than a veteran detective or journalist drive the inquiry while the adults around them learn to take the work seriously. The hour-long episodes give the case room to breathe, spending real time on how the students are taught to think about evidence rather than rushing straight to the investigation's procedural beats. The series grew out of a true-crime podcast about the same classroom, premiered in the episodic section of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and arrived on streaming that summer, with filmmaker Jon Watts among its executive producers.
Watching Murder 101 on Ktime
"Murder 101" streams on K-Time with a free account login, in its original English audio. K-Time's Farsi-language interface lets Persian-speaking viewers browse, queue and follow the series alongside the rest of the platform's mystery and thriller catalogue.