HBO’s latest true-crime offering, A Killer Story, doesn’t open with a body. It opens with an inbox. Three thousand unsolicited emails, to be precise, landing in the lap of Joe Sexton, a Pulitzer-winning veteran of the New York Times and ProPublica. The sender? Eileen Umbehr, a self-described “pyjamas housewife” from Topeka, Kansas, who refused to accept that Dana Chandler had murdered her ex-husband and his fiancée in their bedroom back in 2002.
Sexton deleted them. Then he deleted them again. It took a tip about a Kansas Supreme Court hearing to finally drag him to the plains state – and into a six-year rabbit hole that has produced one of the most unsettling documentaries of the year.
The crime that wasn’t supposed to be solvable
Mike Sisco and Karen Harkness were executed at close range with a suppressed machine pistol – a weapon once reserved for Israeli special forces – in the early hours of July 7, 2002. No forced entry. No shell casings. No witnesses. The killer vanished like smoke.
Suspicion settled instantly on Chandler. She was the jealous ex-wife, 500 miles away in Denver, with a trail of angry texts and a receipt for two fuel canisters bought on her credit card. The local prosecutor passed. There was no physical evidence placing her at the scene. Then came the 2009 *48 Hours* special. A politically ambitious prosecutor took office. By 2011, Chandler was in cuffs. By 2012, she was serving consecutive life sentences.
Case closed. Except it wasn’t.
Tracksuit Jesus and the garbage-man lawyer
Enter the Umbehrs. Keen Umbehr isn’t your average true-crime hobbyist. He’s a former garbageman who turned his route into a muckraking beat, exposed local corruption, lost his contract in retaliation, took a First Amendment fight to the US Supreme Court – and won 7-2. He went to law school. He ran for governor. He and Eileen didn’t just write letters; they bankrolled an appeal, selling 200 acres of inherited land to fund Chandler’s defence.
Sexton – “Tracksuit Jesus” to a jury foreman, thanks to his bright North Face vests and a grey mane that screams 1970s newsroom – watched it all with the scepticism of a man who has seen every angle played. “We would talk about noir films, a Sam Spade-type character,” says producer Josh Levine. “But he also had this flavour of Capote in In Cold Blood.”
The nickname stuck. So did the story.
When the alternate suspect collapses
The documentary’s middle act hinges on the Umbehrs’ alternative theory: Jeff Sutton, Harkness’s son-in-law and a former county attorney with a grudge against Keen. It’s compelling. It’s detailed. And then it disintegrates on camera, leaving Eileen – usually a force of nature – strikingly, painfully silent.
The second trial in 2022 ends in a hung jury after six days of deliberation. The third trial, months later, lasts an hour and a half. Chandler, having fired her lawyers, represents herself. The prosecution manufactures a witness who admits it on camera. The verdict comes back guilty.
Galkin and Levine don’t flinch. They let the silence speak.
Why it Matters
A Killer Story is not really about who killed Mike Sisco and Karen Harkness. It’s about what happens when certainty hardens into dogma – when a *48 Hours* episode becomes a charging document, when a local press corps evaporates and leaves a vacuum filled by national spectacle, when a couple of “amateurs” do the work the system won’t, only to watch their client torch her own lifeline. The Umbehrs bet the farm and lost. Chandler will likely die in prison. And the real killer? Still out there, somewhere, while the credits roll on a system that confused narrative with evidence.
