Lifetime's 'Truly Unbelievable Movies,' Ranked From Least to Most Far-Fetched

Ripped From the Headlines stories are baked into Lifetime's DNA, but the network's fall movie lineup came with an additional promise: that of "truly unbelievable" drama. Every weekend since mid-September, Lifetime has aired a "Truly Unbelievable Movie" dramatizing the circumstances surrounding shocking murders, harrowing kidnappings, and one high-profile prison break, with big names like Bill Pullman, Melissa Joan Hart, and Luke Macfarlane playing the real people at the center of each case. While a few of these films focus on older crimes, most of them capitalize on recent cases (including Murdaugh Murders: The Movie and Bad Romance: The Vicky White Story) or pop culture moments — Vanderpump Rules star Ariana Madix plays a police officer in Buying Back My Daughter — making them a bit more relevant than the average Lifetime original movie.

Now that all seven films in the series have aired, it's time to answer the ultimate question: Which of Lifetime's "Truly Unbelievable Movies" best lives up to that label? In celebration of this special fall event, we've ranked these movies from least to most unbelievable, taking into consideration every twist, stupid decision, and ridiculous excuse.

7. Would You Kill For Me? The Mary Bailey Story

The final film to air during Lifetime's Ripped From the Headlines event is also the easiest to understand. Would You Kill For Me? The Mary Bailey Story recounts the murder of Willard Sims (Connor McMahon) from the perspective of three different women: Ella (Melissa Joan Hart), her daughter Veronica (Olivia Scriven), and Veronica's 11-year-old daughter Mary (Presley Allard). In courtroom testimony, they recall Veronica's relationship with Willard, who became increasingly abusive toward the Baileys, including Mary, over the course of several years. The abuse culminated in Willard's death, though the women have conflicting accounts of what happened that night and who pulled the trigger.

When those details are revealed in the movie's final minutes, it's less surprising than heartbreakingly sad. Stories like Veronica's — in which a woman is unable to leave an abusive partner for fear of retaliation or financial hardship — are far too common, as are cases that see a child forced into the middle of a violent situation and required to make a life-altering decision. Unfortunately, while Would You Kill For Me? is one of the more affecting entries in Lifetime's series, the film is all too believable.

6. How She Caught a Killer

At its core, How She Caught a Killer is a story about sexism. In the 1980s, rookie detective Linda Murphy (Sarah Drew) is eager to make a name for herself, but she struggles to overcome the biases of her male coworkers, including her boss Detective David Goodman (Eric Keenleyside). When a serial killer begins targeting sex workers, Linda convinces Goodman to let her go undercover, and she works to develop leads and identify the murderer from the inside. Even now, it's unlikely that police departments would devote many resources to a case involving "working girls," as Goodman calls the victims, lending credence to the idea that Linda would have to jump through all sorts of hoops just to protect these women from an active threat. That said, the actual police work on display is questionable — Linda goes to a potential suspect's house in the middle of the night and doesn't tell anyone she's there, for starters — which does prompt a few questions about why all these cops are so bad at their jobs.

5. Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story

Considering it's been nearly 15 years since Amish man Eli Weaver conspired to kill his wife Barbara Weaver with his mistress (coincidentally also named Barb), it's surprising that Lifetime is just now getting around to dramatizing their story. Dissatisfied with his marriage and the restraints imposed upon him by the world he chose to live in, Eli (Luke Macfarlane) secretly created an online dating profile and began seeing "English" women outside the conservative Christian community. Amish Stud (a reference to Eli's name on various dating sites) depicts his descent into criminality as he becomes frustrated with his wife (Miranda MacDougall) and successfully convinces his lover Barb Raber (Kirsten Vangsness), a Mennonite taxi driver, to murder her. But despite the film's many twists — at one point, Eli waves off Barb's concerns about the children being harmed in a house explosion, as "they'll go straight to heaven" — there's something eerily familiar about Eli's rage, which bubbles up without warning and consumes everything in its path. A man with extreme religious beliefs who fails to live up to those values and takes out his issues on the people around him? You don't say!

4. Murdaugh Murders: The Movie

It's difficult to come at Murdaugh Murders: The Movie with fresh eyes because so much has already been written and reported about the double homicide of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh, who were killed at their family's hunting lodge in June 2021. Prominent attorney Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murdering his wife and son, but during the investigation, additional details about his corrupt financial dealings and connection to other suspicious deaths emerged, leading to the fall of one of South Carolina's most powerful and long-established dynasties.

Lifetime's scripted take on the Murdaugh saga capably hits the major points in the case, including its more sensational aspects, like Alex's (Bill Pullman) suicide-for-hire plot and the video Paul (Curtis Tweedie) was recording seconds before the murders took place, which proved to be a key piece of evidence introduced in the trial. But on balance, there's nothing all that shocking about a rich family that worked within the bounds of a corrupt system to consolidate their power and acquire even more wealth. Some may even say that's how the system was designed to function, and the Murdaughs were merely greasing its wheels.

3. Buying Back My Daughter

Buying Back My Daughter begins from a place of believability. When 16-year-old Alicia (Faith Wright) disappears, her parents Dana (Meagan Good) and Curtis (Roger Cross) turn to the police for help, but they're met with resistance from a department that refuses to prioritize the case of a missing Black girl — a conflict that's rooted in reality, as racial bias remains a serious problem among law enforcement officers and media coverage of missing persons cases.

But once Alicia becomes a victim of sex trafficking, the film begins to go off the rails. After Dana finds Alicia on an escort site and the police again advocate for a measured response (they would rather launch a well-coordinated attack on the trafficking ring, even if it takes months to plan), she and Curtis "buy their daughter back" to rescue her. Dana and Curtis succeed, but in one of the dumbest parenting moves of all time, they decline to get Alicia trauma counseling or any sort of help for the drug addiction she developed while in captivity. As a result, Alicia struggles to reintegrate into her old life, and she ends up running back to the trafficker who abducted her. That decision alone moves Buying Back My Daughter up in the incredulity rankings, because anyone in their right mind — even Ariana Madix's Officer Karen! — can see that this girl is in desperate need of care beyond a hug from her parents.

2. Bad Romance: The Vicky White Story

When corrections officer Vicky White helped inmate Casey White (no relation) escape from an Alabama jail in April 2022, the prison break and 11-day manhunt for the pair made national news. The story has the makings of a perfect Lifetime movie: Vicky (Wendi McLendon-Covey) was the consummate professional until she met Casey (Rossif Sutherland), who lavished Vicky with the attention she craved, but never got, in the outside world. But what started as a flirtation turned into something more dangerous when Vicky hatched a plan to spring Casey free so they could be together, and the two hit the road in hopes of beating authorities to the Canadian border.

Bad Romance: The Vicky White Story emphasizes that Vicky's crush on Casey stemmed from her loneliness and boredom with her everyday life, which she compares to Groundhog Day. To a certain extent, their relationship makes sense; it's perfectly believable that a woman who feels invisible would be drawn to someone like Casey, with his devilish charm and clear sexual interest in her. However, the lengths Vicky goes to excuse Casey's behavior or dismiss the red flags in their relationship are astounding: When he confesses to a murder in order to be closer to her (or so he claims), Vicky is touched by the gesture, saying, "That's the sweetest thing I've ever heard." The mental gymnastics required to sustain their relationship make this story feel all the more implausible, even if the origin of Vicky and Casey's romance scans as somewhat credible.

1. Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard

"Stranger than fiction" doesn't come close to describing the events leading up to (and following) the murder of Heidi Broussard. In December 2019, Heidi (Anna Hopkins) was strangled to death by her best friend Magen Fieramusca (Emily Osment), who kidnapped Heidi's three-week-old daughter and claimed she was her own child. As Stolen Baby shows, Magen pretended to be pregnant alongside Heidi in the months before the murder, and despite her unconvincing inflatable bump and lack of other symptoms, everyone in her life bought it, including her ex-boyfriend Greg (Jamie Spilchuk). In fact, the Lifetime version of Greg is so naive that when Magen passes Heidi's daughter off as their newborn — Magen tells him she had the baby that morning and was discharged a few hours later, which is not how labor and delivery works — he takes her bizarre story at face value without asking more than two follow-up questions.

If any of these people thought about Magen's pregnancy and sudden birth for just half a second, they would've realized she was lying (or at the very least, looked into it further), preventing Heidi's tragic death. For that reason, Stolen Baby is every bit deserving of the "Truly Unbelievable" descriptor — Lifetime could even throw a "Really" in there and it would still apply.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.