The tip came in 2017 from Alma, Kansas, from a stay-at-home mother. Eileen Umbehr asked whether Joe Sexton, a veteran investigative journalist who worked at The New York Times and ProPublica, wanted to know the truth about a double homicide in Topeka. Karen Harkness, daughter of a bigtime Topeka businessman, and her boyfriend Mike Sisco, a divorced father of two kids, were murdered on July 7, 2002, in the middle of the night, and authorities were convinced that Sisco’s ex-wife Dana Chandler was the killer.
She was arrested, tried, and convicted of first-degree murder. Sexton, who thought the case was closed, emailed Umbehr back a polite “thanks, but no thanks.” Umbehr kept writing Sexton, anyway. Some weeks brought 10 emails, then none for two, then 25 in a single day, packed with packed with court records, ballistics reports, property filings.
Her correspondence grew from hundreds to thousands of letters. Sexton wasn’t sure whether to call the police on Eileen or hire her for her thoroughness. But he gave her a nickname: “pen pal.” By then, Umbehr and her husband Keen, a lawyer, had spent years working the case and advocating for Chandler at their own expense.
The Kansas Supreme Court, Umbehr explained, had thrown out Chandler’s murder convictions, a rare occurrence. Sexton replied in six words: “Perhaps I should come see you.” Those six words began a journey which is now the subject of A Killer Story, a three-part documentary premiering Sept. 10 on HBO. Featuring Sexton alongside the married true-crime enthusiasts who recruited him—strangers to Chandler when they took up her case—it unspools the story of the deaths of Sisco and Harkness, and the case against Chandler, who was convicted in 2012, granted a new trial in 2018, retried to a hung jury in 2022, and convicted again in 2025.
Directed by Matthew Galkin and executive produced by Joshua Levine, the series, filmed across the final six years of the case, explains how the final verdict was reached, without pretending a verdict also doubles as a definitive answer. Its deeper subject is the more amorphous notion of certainty: how detectives, prosecutors, and true-crime believers cling to it, and the collateral damage it can leave behind. The initial draw to the project, according to Levine, was how much material piled up before their cameras even arrived to capture it.
Those layers built up at the intersection of the media and a couple whose devotion, and what it cost them, kept changing the course of the case. The facts of what took place on July 7, 2002 are clear. Harkness and Sisco spent the previous evening at a casino, cameras catching them until they left around 1:30 a.m.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
