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. She sent emails asking him to investigate the case, 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.
“In this case, once Eileen in Kansas had my email, there was no stopping her,” Sexton says.
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 (née Sisco) 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. It was this news that finally convinced Sexton he needed to get to Topeka, Kansas.
“I think I’ve always had a pretty good sense for what can make a great story, and once you climbed into the details of what had taken place out in Kansas and who the characters were and the idea that it was still not yet fully resolved, it felt like natural TV to me,” Sexton tells Rolling Stone. “What do you need for a great story? You need compelling characters. You need a sense of outrage. You need a degree of mystery. This had it all.”
HBO’s new docuseries, A Killer Story, follows Sexton and director Matthew Galkin (One Night In Idaho: The College Murders) 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. (Part Two of A Killer Story premieres on HBO on Sept. 17 and the series finale will be released on Sept. 24.) One aspect of the documentary’s unique draws is how much of the case it covers. After saying he would meet with the Umbehrs in 2019, Sexton immediately called up Story Syndicate, the documentary production company he was familiar with while at ProPublica. (The group worked with PBS Frontline to turn ProPublica articles into small episodic documentaries, like I Don’t Want To Shoot You, Brother, an investigation into the 2016 shooting death of suicidal 23-year-old R.J Williams.)
“The second I met Joe, it [was] like ‘Holy shit! This guy is one in a million,’” says Galkin, who was part of the team at Story Syndicate who green-lit the production. “He’s an incredible reporter, but he’s also a really charismatic person, and his frame on the Dana case, and his frame on both Keen and Eileen, created our entry point into the story,” Galkin says. “It became clear that we could build this whole thing through Joe’s voice as a reporter as a sort of surrogate for the audience trying to piece together what the hell is going on here.”
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.”
And characters abound. The winding tale of A Killer Story wouldn’t be possible without Keen and Eileen, two amateur sleuths who dedicated their lives to helping Chandler. Their initial interest was sparked the day they read about Harkness’ death. Before Keen became a lawyer, he had earned a reputation as a local political muckraker, with many of his exposés focused on members of the local government. One of his constant subjects was Sutton, a former county attorney. When they read about the death of his mother-in-law, they kept digging.
While their initial interest, they admit in the show, was linked to their animosity toward Sutton, Keen and Eileen quickly became fully focused on proving Chandler’s innocence. They worked to get her access to the prison law library, built a case, connected her to lawyers, made their own evidence packages, and even sold land that had been in Keen’s family for generations to help finance their investigative work on the case. Before this case, they never even knew her name.
“Keen and Eileen thought the system was both broken and that a woman had been put away for something she very well might not have done,” Sexton says. “They came to fully believe Dana Chandler was both innocent and had been effectively railroaded, not only by the criminal justice system, but by true crime TV.”
In Chandler’s first trial, a lack of physical evidence meant that the prosecution focused all of their efforts on proving that Chandler and Sisco’s relationship was fraught, often filled with verbal altercations, and that Sisco believed Chandler was a physical threat. Both Chandler’s children testified against their mother, saying she was often emotional and said publicly that she hated their father. But the trial hinged on a protection of abuse order, one prosecutor Jacqie Spradling said proved that Sisco was afraid of Chandler. There was only one problem — no such order existed.
Chandler’s 2012 conviction was overturned in 2018 after the Kansas Supreme Court found evidence that Spradling had lied during the trial about the protection order. In 2022, Spradling was disbarred, with the Kansas Supreme Court citing a “serious pattern of grossly unethical misconduct” during Chandler’s trial, including that she, “repeatedly made arguments to the jury that lacked any evidentiary support, intentionally lied to this court in her briefs and in oral arguments, and made false statements during the disciplinary investigation.” After Chandler’s conviction was overturned, Topeka prosecutors retried her.
It would be great TV if Sexon, Galkin, and their team had been able to unearth a cut and dry answer to this years-long saga, one that could be revealed as Chandler continued to return to court. But the team behind A Killer Story pulls off something even harder: convincing people to keep watching even when there is no smoking gun. “This is a story about confirmation bias. Almost every faction in this story feels very passionately about their one theory of what happened here,” Galkin says. “We’re coming in and telling the story of the storytelling of this case. We were trying desperately to not be pulled in any direction so we could stay objective about how to portray each individual theory clearly.”
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. Is it entertainment? Is it someone’s life? Can it be both?
“The journalist is to be a wholly, fully objective person in covering news. There’s a lot of merit to that. But there are moments in the course of reporting [where] you see real misconduct. You see real unfairness. You see the possibility that somebody could pay with their freedom as a consequence of cynical and devious work by the authorities,” Sexton says. “Maybe it’s time to take a fucking side.”
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