The tip that would not stop

In 2017, Kansas resident Eileen Umbehr emailed veteran editor Joe Sexton about a double homicide she believed was wrongly pinned on an innocent woman. He ignored it. She kept writing for over two years.

“In this case, once Eileen in Kansas had my email, there was no stopping her.”

Twenty-five emails a day

Her messages came a few a week, sometimes 25 in a single day, loaded with transcripts, court records, and evidence packets.

Most tips go nowhere

Sexton spent 25 years at the New York Times and later ProPublica. He is blunt that the volume of incoming tips means almost none get a real look.

“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 can come in, you're just never gonna get to it.”

Two bodies in Topeka

On July 7, 2002, Karen Harkness and her boyfriend Mike Sisco were found shot dead in her Topeka home. No forced entry, no usable DNA, no witnesses.

Everyone named the same person

A Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent read the scene as driven by intense emotion, not a random attack. Every person interviewed pointed to one suspect: Sisco's ex-wife, Dana Chandler.

Her account: Colorado

Chandler and Sisco divorced in 1998 after 15 years. She moved to Denver, changed careers, got sober. She said she bought gas, got groceries, and went camping the day of the killings, and denied any part in them.

A TV crew, then an arrest

The case went cold, but the town's suspicion did not. When 48 Hours came to Topeka in 2009, the renewed attention, not any new evidence, pushed authorities to arrest Chandler.

Convicted on a bad marriage

In 2012 a jury found Chandler guilty on two counts of first degree murder. The case rested on the fraught relationship after the divorce, including testimony from both of her children.

The order that did not exist

The trial hinged on a protection from abuse order that prosecutor Jacqie Spradling said proved Sisco feared Chandler. No such order had ever been filed.

“There was only one problem, no such order existed.”

Overturned, then disbarred

The Kansas Supreme Court threw out the conviction in 2018 over Spradling's lies about the order. She was disbarred in 2022 for what the court called a serious pattern of grossly unethical misconduct.

“repeatedly made arguments to the jury that lacked any evidentiary support, intentionally lied to this court”

Sexton finally goes to Kansas

The overturned conviction was what moved him. He saw compelling characters, outrage, and mystery in a story still unresolved, then called the team at Story Syndicate.

“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.”

They sold the family land

Keen and Eileen Umbehr got Chandler into the prison law library, connected her with lawyers, built their own evidence packages, and sold land that had been in Keen's family for generations to pay for it. They had never known her name before the case.

It started as a grudge

Their first interest came from animosity toward Jeff Sutton, a former county attorney and Keen's frequent expose subject, who happened to be Harkness' son-in-law. That grudge turned into years of work on Chandler's behalf.

A story about a story

The team filmed for over six years across repeat trips to Kansas, and kept resisting the urge to crack the case themselves.

“It was never about the case for us. It was a story about a story.”

No smoking gun, on purpose

A Killer Story, on HBO, holds viewers without delivering a clean answer. Its real subject is how every faction here is sure it already has one.

“This is a story about confirmation bias. Almost every faction in this story feels very passionately about their one theory of what happened here.”