Swipe Right on the Devil on Hulu and Disney+ follows Sydney Loofe’s last Tinder date

Sydney Loofe went on a second date with a woman she had matched with on Tinder, and the next morning she did not turn up for her shift at a home-improvement store in Lincoln, Nebraska. The woman was Bailey Boswell. Swipe Right on the Devil, a three-part Hulu original true crime docuseries that also streams on Disney+ outside the United States, goes back over that disappearance with the detectives who worked it.

Hulu’s synopsis promises “an astounding world of manipulation, witchcraft, mind control and black magic”, and behaviour “that shocks even seasoned FBI agents”. That is the marketing. The court record behind it is more specific. Prosecutors described a recruitment process that started on the same dating app, and three women who had matched with Boswell before Loofe testified about what came after the match.

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Who made Swipe Right on the Devil

Brian Biegel directed the series for Imagine Documentaries, the documentary banner of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. The executive producers are Grazer, Howard, Sara Bernstein, Christopher St. John and Justin Wilkes for Imagine, Biegel himself, Pete Kasko for Carousel Films NYC, and Craig D’Entrone. Biegel and Imagine approached the Lincoln Police Department with questions about the case. Two of its investigators, Matt Franken and Bob Hurley, agreed to be interviewed on one condition: that Loofe’s family chose to share their story too. Hurley has since retired, but still works for the department as professional staff in its Crime Analysis Unit.

That condition tells you what kind of programme this sets out to be. The premise puts the people who searched for Loofe, and the people who lost her, at the centre, rather than the couple who killed her. Whether the finished episodes hold that line is something only viewing will show. On paper, at least, the access was granted on the family’s terms.

The case behind the series

Loofe was 24 and worked as a cashier at a Menards store in Lincoln. She was reported missing in November 2017, when she failed to arrive for work the morning after the date. Nineteen days later, after a search and a manhunt for Boswell and her boyfriend, Aubrey Trail, her dismembered remains were found in rural Nebraska, in Clay County.

Trail gave investigators different accounts across roughly a dozen interview sessions. At first he said he knew nothing about what had happened to her. Later he said Loofe died after a sex act went wrong. He eventually said that he and Boswell had lured her to his apartment in Wilber to draw her into their criminal lifestyle, and that he killed her because he was afraid she would tell others what they were doing. In a jail interview he told authorities that half of what he said was “garbage”. At his trial he testified that he had told police lies to steer them in several directions, and said he did it to protect Boswell.

A jury convicted Trail of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and a three-judge panel later sentenced him to death. Boswell was tried separately. More than a year after Trail’s conviction, a jury found her guilty of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and improper disposal of human remains. Her lawyer had argued that Trail killed Loofe alone and that Boswell “did what she was told because of the threats from Aubrey Trail”. When the panel weighed a death sentence for her, two of the three judges found the killing met the legal test for exceptional depravity and one disagreed. That dissent spared her a death sentence, and Boswell was sentenced to life in prison. Her defence said it would appeal the verdict.

The swipe as a recruitment tool

The title points at the app, and the trial record explains why. Prosecutors said Trail and Boswell had a “recruitment process”: find women on Tinder, support them financially, and talk about torture and murder. Three women in their early twenties testified that they had matched with Boswell and then learned she was in an open relationship with Trail. They said they were told they were, or could become, part of a group of twelve or thirteen women in what Trail called his witchcraft “covenant”. They described weekly allowances and an antiques business; one said the money came from stealing antiques and selling them online.

One of the women said she was told she would have to kill to fully become a witch. Another said she never believed in the witchcraft or in Trail’s claimed powers, but came to believe the talk of murder: “They were talking more and more about potential murder so I did believe this part of the story was true, that they were capable of it.” None of the three testified to being at the apartment when Loofe was killed. Prosecutors also said that, unlike the women before her, Loofe was not told about Trail at the start.

That is the gap between what Swipe Right on the Devil appears to be and what the case was. The synopsis sells witchcraft and black magic. Jurors heard witnesses say Trail had convinced his followers he was a flying, mind-reading vampire with a coven of a dozen witches. What they convicted him of was ordinary by comparison: murder, and a conspiracy to commit it. The occult language was the pitch the couple used on young women. The dating app was where the pitch began. A series with access to the investigators is in a position to show how they separated the two, and how they dealt with a suspect who kept changing his story.

Where it sits in dating-app true crime

Netflix‘s The Tinder Swindler turned dating-app deception into a streaming genre of its own, but its subject was money. The Loofe case belongs to a darker branch, closer to Dirty John, where the person behind the profile is the danger. The case has been on television before, in an episode of the true crime series An Hour to Kill. What a three-part docuseries can add is room: for the many versions Trail gave police, for the testimony of the women who walked away, and for whatever the family decided to say on camera.

The release itself says something about where American true crime now travels. Swipe Right on the Devil is a Hulu original, but outside the United States it arrives on Disney+ on the same day. A Nebraska murder case, with its three-judge sentencing panels and death-penalty procedure, is being placed in front of viewers in markets that never followed the trials. For most of them, Sydney Loofe’s name will be new.

What no verdict closes

The Lincoln Police Department said its “hearts remain with Sydney’s family as they continue to navigate the impact of this senseless murder and a life lost far too soon.” At Boswell’s sentencing, Judge Vicky Johnson said: “Ms. Loofe was completely harmless and her murder was completely unnecessary.” Two convictions, a death sentence and a life term later, the account of what happened inside that apartment still rests in part on the word of a man who admitted lying about it. The courts settled who killed Sydney Loofe. What they could not settle is how much of what her killers said can ever be checked.

Swipe Right on the Devil: what to know

Is Swipe Right on the Devil a true story? Yes. It is a documentary series about the real murder of Sydney Loofe in Nebraska, for which Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell were convicted.

Where can I watch it? In the United States on Hulu, and on Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Outside the United States it streams on Disney+, subject to each country’s catalogue.

How many episodes are there? Three, released together rather than weekly.

Was the witchcraft real? The witchcraft, the “coven” and Trail’s claimed powers are what witnesses said the couple told the women they recruited. The juries convicted both of them of murder.

All three episodes of Swipe Right on the Devil premiere on October 22, 2026, on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ in the United States and on Disney+ internationally. Hulu lists the series as TV-MA. Trail was sentenced to death in June 2021; Boswell received her life sentence in November 2021.

Tags: true crime, Disney+, hulu, Aubrey Trail, Bailey Boswell, Swipe Right on the Devil

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