I enjoy true crime as much as the next girl, not so much the deep dive of podcasts, but docuseries definitely and there's one truly unfortunate thing in common with a lot of them: Bad police work.

I had some free time on Saturday afternoon so I sat down and watched a short three-part documentary called 'American Nightmare' on Netflix and it detailed a horrific account of a couple being home invaded and a young woman being kidnapped and held for ransom.

The couple were blinded by taped up swim goggles and forced to drink one of those cough syrups that makes you drowsy, all at the threat of gunpoint.

But things admittedly looked quite suspect when the woman was released two days later - seemingly unharmed.

Here's where it gets bad. During her absence, the male partner was interrogated for 18-hours straight where Californian police decided his account of the abduction was too fantastical, so naturally he was the culprit.

They grilled him saying he had killed her, lied to him that he had 'failed' a lie detector test and began searching nearby scrub and wetlands for her body.

Then when the woman was released from her abduction, suddenly she became the object of police interrogation.

Her story matched her partner's almost word-for-word with the addition of accounting the abduction and tragically two assaults she endured.

Police still weren't having it, had she faked it, was it a hoax or a scam. Police literally accused her of recreating the film 'Gone Girl' to get back at her partner for an argument.

Police then defamed the couple and pursued them for criminal charges.

But wait. Almost three months later in a different county a strikingly similar home invasion occurs to a 22-year-old woman, but her parents are home and her Dad fights off the attacker - who drops his phone in the altercation.

Police from a different station track the man down and find toy guns with lasers and flash lights taped to them among a bunch of weird things and then some taped up swim goggles with a long blonde hair.

Of course it belongs to the first abductee. But investigators had been so hell bent on pursuing the boyfriend, and then the girlfriend they had never even actually looked for a real perpetrator.

Now that's bad enough in isolation, but it reminded me of another documentary I'd seen 'Unbelievable'. A young woman in social housing reported an assault to police and said she'd been tied up with her own shoelaces and threatened with one of her own kitchen knives before being assaulted.

She told detectives she recalled flashes like that of a camera.

Investigators found no fingerprints and no physical evidence of the assault so basically took the stance the woman was lying and they hounded her until she recanted her statement.

Two female detectives from different departments began following similar assaults closer to their precincts and after months finally caught the man .... who guess what, had photos of the victim police had thought to be lying.

And another docuseries called Victim/Suspect follows a journalist uncovering women who were sometimes charged with false reporting following claims they'd been assaulted.

As a man it reinforces why the #metoo movement was an important revolution for women, but it also broadly makes my blood boil about the seeming ineptitude of investigators in so many of these cases.