A Killer Story Topeka Blackout: Why Local News Looked Away

0 0

A killer story. Thanks to Topeka’s own newsrooms, apparently, a killed one.

By Bob Cutler

There’s an A Killer Story Topeka blackout underway, and it’s a strange one. This is a hometown press corps that will absolutely lose its collective mind over a Pokémon pun or a throwaway “Ted Lasso” joke about an Irish pub — but goes completely, eerily silent the second HBO parks a three-part documentary called A Killer Story on its doorstep, with the words “Welcome to Topeka” as the title of episode one. There’s no polite way to describe what’s happening here, so let’s just name it again: this is a blackout, on a story this same press corps would normally be tripping over itself to cover.

Let’s do a quick inventory of what gets Topeka’s finest reaching for a live shot and a headline:

• A city council resolution renaming Topeka to “ToPikachu” for a month in 1998, because Pokémon.
• A city council resolution renaming Topeka to “Google, Kansas” for a month in 2010, because fiber optics. Local outlets ran, by one contemporaneous count, more than a dozen stories on that one, plus editorial-page cheerleading, plus prominent links to the fan campaign pushing it.
• A WalletHub press release ranking Topeka 40th out of 50 state capitals. Or fifth in the nation for something called “economic strength.” Doesn’t matter which direction the number points — if a listicle mentions Topeka, somebody’s writing it up.
• A Pittsburg State outfielder’s MIAA Hitter of the Week honor. A Washburn wideout entering the transfer portal. A basketball coach getting hired at a Division II school in Alabama. All real headlines. All fine, actually — that’s what local news is for.
• A fictional sitcom mom making an unflattering crack about “that Irish place in Topeka,” which got the Celtic Fox’s general manager an on-camera quote about how much she loved the free publicity.

The A Killer Story Topeka Blackout, Part One: What Local Media Won’t Touch

Now here’s what apparently doesn’t clear the bar: a national television event that puts Topeka’s name in Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, Newsweek, TIME, and every other outlet that still employs a TV critic — one that revisits, in detail, how this city’s police department and district attorney’s office spent the better part of a decade fixated on one suspect while the actual murder weapon, the DNA, and the fingerprints never showed up anywhere.

I was there for some of this, for what it’s worth. I sat in the back row of the second trial in 2022 taking notes like everybody else who showed up hoping this thing might finally resolve into something resembling clarity. It didn’t. It hung. That’s not editorializing — that’s just what a hung jury is. (If you want the fuller rundown of the case itself — the trials, the DNA, the timeline — this site covered all of it back in September.)

What I remember more vividly, though, is how unbothered local coverage was about presuming guilt well before Dana Chandler was ever formally charged — nine years after the murders, mind you, in a case that had gone cold enough that CBS’s “48 Hours” had to come to town and effectively reopen it themselves before then-DA Chad Taylor picked the case back up. That’s not me being cute with the timeline. Investigators found her ex-wife status, her temper, and her phone records. They never found a gun. And when the Kansas Supreme Court finally looked at how that first conviction was won, it didn’t just reverse it — it found that the prosecution, Taylor included, had let the jury believe a protective order existed that never did.

Funny how “we got our guy” was a story local media couldn’t stop telling in 2012, and “the state’s highest court says the prosecution lied to the jury” barely got a paragraph in 2018. That gap, right there, is the A Killer Story Topeka blackout starting a decade before HBO ever showed up.

And here’s a detail nobody in the local press seemed all that curious about: when Mike Kagay took over as DA and Spradling left the office, he talked in general terms about wanting to clean up the office’s culture — the win-at-all-costs stuff, the dirty pool. Fine. Except Kagay didn’t parachute in from Wichita to fix the place. He’d spent his own years as an assistant DA in that very office, under Taylor, while all of this was supposedly going on. Nobody handed him the obvious follow-up question: what, exactly, did you not notice? And whatever the answer, “cleaning house” apparently didn’t stop him from marching the same evidence-free case back into court not once but twice more — a 2022 retrial that hung, and a 2025 third trial that only landed a conviction after the defendant fired her own lawyers and represented herself. If the office’s culture problem was solved, somebody forgot to mention it to the case file.

What a Local Reporter Could Have Found Without Leaving the Building

Here’s a detail the local beat had for over a decade and somehow never turned into a headline: since 2009, the Umbehrs have been formally naming an alternate suspect to the same police department running the investigation — Karen Harkness’s own son-in-law, Jeffery A. Sutton. To be very clear, because it matters: Sutton has never been charged with anything, this is Eileen Umbehr’s dossier and allegation, not a police finding or a court ruling, and he’s on record in the HBO series flatly denying any involvement. But her materials — public, published in full, sitting at personofinterest2.com since well before this docuseries existed — lay out that Sutton held a Federal Firearms License, had a documented history of violence and fraud allegations, and stood to benefit financially from Harkness’s death. And somewhere in an evidence locker sits an FBI-tested mitochondrial DNA profile pulled from a hair at the scene that excludes Chandler and both victims — meaning there has been unidentified third-party DNA in this case file for years. None of that is secret. None of it required an HBO crew or a six-year investigation to dig up. It required someone local willing to read a public document. Nobody in Topeka media apparently was — which is exactly how an A Killer Story Topeka blackout gets to run for two decades instead of two news cycles.

Credit where it’s due: it wasn’t the Capital-Journal or WIBW that put Spradling’s law license on the chopping block, either. It was Keen Umbehr — the same small-town lawyer local coverage loved to file under “obsessive” — who filed the formal ethics complaint against her back in 2016. Six years and a 101-page disciplinary opinion later, the Kansas Supreme Court disbarred her outright, finding a “serious pattern of grossly unethical misconduct.” A private citizen did the accountability work. The people whose actual job that is didn’t, then or now.

None of this required HBO to surface. It was all sitting in public records, court filings, and a website Eileen Umbehr has been maintaining for over a decade, in a city with two daily news operations and at least three local TV newsrooms. The docuseries didn’t break this case open — it just pointed a national spotlight at a stack of documents Topeka’s own press had apparently never bothered to open.

The Case Nobody Local Wanted to Poke At

And while we’re on the subject of things nobody local bothered to reconcile: the same coverage that spent years painting Chandler as erratic, obsessive, borderline unhinged never seemed to notice the contradiction sitting in the middle of its own narrative. This supposedly scattered, chaotic woman needed to drive roughly 500 miles from Denver to Topeka, commit a double homicide with a weapon that fired ammunition typically associated with military-style firearms, leave behind zero DNA and zero fingerprints, and make the same 500-mile drive home — without a single person noticing her anywhere along the way. That’s not the profile of someone who loses her car keys in her own driveway. That takes planning, control, and a level of proficiency nobody local ever tried to explain, because nobody local ever tried to ask. “Unstable and impulsive” and “flawlessly executed, evidence-free double homicide” don’t belong in the same paragraph. A press corps with any curiosity left in it would have noticed that on its own, years before HBO had to point it out for them. That’s the A Killer Story Topeka blackout in miniature: not a lack of information, just a lack of anyone local willing to look at it.

Then there’s the witness testimony — people recalling specific, vivid details from a random day twenty years earlier, with a confidence the record apparently just accepted at face value. Human memory doesn’t usually sharpen that precisely with two decades of static in between, especially for casual acquaintances describing a stranger’s comings and goings. Maybe it’s coincidence that a key memory got so crisp right around trial time, two decades after the fact. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, it’s the kind of detail a halfway-skeptical local press corps exists specifically to lean on, and none of them did.

The A Killer Story Topeka Blackout Isn’t an Accident

So which is it, Topeka press corps? Are you worried about what the rest of the country now thinks of a DA’s office that manufactured a bogus fact to seal a conviction — or are you worried about what your own neighbors might figure out, watching three hours of HBO, that you had two decades and a filing cabinet’s worth of public records to figure out yourselves?

Meanwhile the two people who actually did the digging — a homemaker and a small-town lawyer with zero connection to Dana Chandler — get a three-part HBO deal and a write-up in Vanity Fair, while the newsrooms that sat within walking distance of this story for twenty-plus years can’t manage a single local segment on it. Eileen Umbehr cold-emailed a Pulitzer-adjacent New York Times reporter literally thousands of times before anyone with a real platform would listen. She had to go outside the city, outside the state, and eventually outside the medium, because the outlets built to do exactly this kind of digging weren’t doing it.

Nobody’s making anybody cover this. But a press that finds room for a Pikachu joke, a Ted Lasso pub gag, and a WalletHub listicle, and can’t find thirty seconds for the biggest national media story to ever use Topeka’s name in a title, isn’t being modest. It’s being selective. Call it what it is: an A Killer Story Topeka blackout on the one story about this city HBO actually wanted told — and on a story this unflattering to your own DA’s office, that’s not an accident. It’s a choice, and it’s the only part of this whole saga where the outcome is actually still up to them.

Bob Cutler writes for Dystopeka.com. He was present for portions of Dana Chandler’s second trial.

About Post Author

Chrome Tuna

bobscutler@gmail.com

https://chrometuna.com

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %