A journalist with over three decades in the business and editor of multiple Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative teams, Joe Sexton is no stranger to the cold call. So he wasn’t surprised when he opened his email one day in 2017 to see an email from Kansas resident and true crime fanatic Eileen Umbehr asking him to look into a mysterious double-homicide in Topeka, Kansas. She and her husband Keen Umbehr were convinced the state had tried and convicted an innocent person, she wrote. Tips flooded his inbox every day, so initially he ignored it. But Eileen persisted, sending emails varying from a few messages a week to 25 emails in a single 24-hour period, often with dozens of attachments, transcripts, court records, and evidence. She kept this up for over two years.
“[Tips] are more of a crapshoot than it should be. I’d like to tell you that we take every one dead serious. But if you’re working at a place like the New York Times, the volume of stuff that that can come in — you’re just never gonna get to it,” Sexton tells Rolling Stone. The no-nonsense, often-foul mouthed reporter worked at the New York Times for over 25 years, first covering sports, then city, before becoming an editor and eventually moving to the award-winning independent newsroom ProPublica. He built a career on getting to the bottom of stories that seem impossible to unravel — one of the many reasons Eileen became convinced he could help.
The Case Against Dana Chandler
Authorities had considered the case closed. On July 7, 2002, a Kansas woman Karen Harkness and her boyfriend, Mike Sisco, were found shot to death in Harkness’ Topeka home. There were no forced signs of entry, no considerable DNA or evidence left at the scene, and no witnesses. According to Ray Lundin, an investigator at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, authorities believed the attack wasn’t random, but rather motivated by intense emotion. And every person interviewed could only think one of possible suspect: Sisco’s ex-wife, Dana Chandler.
Sisco and Chandler had been married for 15 years, but had a contentious divorce in 1998. Sisco retained primary custody of their two children, Hailey Seel and Dustin Sisco, while Chandler moved to Denver, changed careers, and got sober from alcohol. When interviewed by police, Chandler said that she was in Colorado at the time of the murders, and had bought gas, got some groceries, and then went camping. She wasn’t seen in Kansas that day, and denied being involved in the murders. But even when the case went cold, people in the town believed Chandler was guilty. When 48 Hours visited Topeka in 2009 to examine the case, renewed interest — not any new evidence — convinced authorities to arrest Chandler. In 2012, Chandler was convicted on two counts of first degree murder, based entirely on the fact that Chandler and Sisco had a contentious relationship after their divorce. But in 2018, the conviction was overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct.
A Killer Story: Investigating the Truth
HBO’s new docuseries, A Killer Story, follows Sexton and director Matthew Galkin as they explore the twists and turns of Chandler’s case and attempts from the amateur husband and wife duo to convince police that they put the wrong person behind bars. The Killer Story team filmed for over six years, repeatedly visiting Kansas to talk to key players in the story, including the prosecutors who chose not to charge Chandler initially, local residents who believed she was guilty, and Jeff Sutton, Harkness’ son-in-law, who the Umbehrs were convinced knew more about his mother-in-law’s death.
“It was never about the case for us. It was a story about a story,” producer Josh Levine says. “We were trying to lean into the interesting characters but balance the true crime with layers of journalism. We were trying to avoid the traps of the genre and our own desires to solve the case.”
What makes the documentary compelling, besides all the twists and turns, is that it’s interested in the art of true crime as much as it is interested in whether or not Chandler actually killed her ex-husband and his new girlfriend on that early morning in 2002. And as true crime and entertainment become more intertwined, audiences are forced to reckon with how the genre can actually leave its marks on a courtroom.