A man and a woman are murdered in cold blood inside their Topeka, Kansas bedroom under cover of darkness in 2002. Suspicion quickly falls on the man’s ex-wife, Dana Chandler, with family and forensic evidence painting her as the jealous type. But the county prosecutor at the time declines to pursue charges in large part because nothing places Chandler at the scene of the crime.
It’s only after a politically motivated prosecutor is appointed and CBS’s 48 Hours airs a 2009 report rehashing the case that Chandler is arrested on two counts of premeditated first-degree murder in 2011 and condemned to consecutive life sentences the following year. No doubt: the story is hot copy. And more than likely, Chandler’s conviction marks the conclusion if a husband-and-wife team of true crime enthusiasts hadn’t become convinced that the real killer was still walking free.
It’s a three-part journey driven not just by their collective skepticism of its three bombshell legal outcomes, but led by one of the country’’s foremost cynics. Joe Sexton doesn’t just look the part of a hardscrabble newsman, with his resplendent gray mane and goatee for doubtful stroking. The older defense lawyer with glasses was Mr Magoo.
The nickname they gave me, which I’ve kind of leaned into, was Tracksuit Jesus.” A Pulitzer prize-winning veteran of the New York Times and ProPublica, Sexton has a deep wariness of the juicy lead. In the first episode, Sexton still radiates with contempt as he recalls the 3,000 unsolicited emails he received from Eileen Umbehr, a self-described pyjamas housewife who couldn’t let Chandler’s conviction stand. It wasn’t until Umbehr wrote Sexton to tell him that the Kansas supreme court would hear an appeal of Chandler’s sentence in 2016 that Sexton conceded there was no more avoiding a trip to Topeka, site of the landmark school-segregation case that reached the US supreme court.
It’s at that point the lens widens on Umbehr, who proves to be more than just a concerned citizen. Her husband, Keen, is a lifelong good troublemaker who went from toiling as a garbageman to uncovering local government corruption for the town newspaper with scoops collected along his garbage route. When the county moved to cancel his garbage contract in retaliation for his muckraking, Keen filed a first amendment lawsuit that went all the way to the US supreme court and won a 7-2 decision in 1996.
It was all the motivation Keen needed to go to law school and open his own practice. (Fun fact: he also ran for governor as a libertarian, losing in 2014 to Republican former US senator Sam Brownback.) Years later, Keen and Eileen helped assemble the materials and arguments that prompted the Kansas supreme court to review Dana Chandler’s conviction – and overturn it. That final revelation, of these plucky underdogs winning yet another challenge to the legal system against all discernible odds, marked the first time I pumped my fist watching a documentary. Gaskin and Levine really make viewers fall hard for the Umbehrs – who offload 200 acres of inherited family property to fund the legal defense for Chandler, who goes from crusade cause to actual client.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
