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Starting September 10th, HBO drops A Killer Story, a three-part docuseries about the 2002 murders of Mike Sisco and Karen Harkness in Topeka, and the two-decade legal odyssey of the woman convicted of killing them, Dana Chandler. This site has been covering that case, in one form or another, for years.
Full disclosure up front, because I’d rather you hear it from me than notice it yourself: I sat through nearly the entire second trial back in 2022, and apparently that means I show up in the trailer for about a frame and a half, somewhere around the 1:42 mark. I am not going to pretend this isn’t funny to me. I’m also not going to let a frame and a half distract from the actual story, which deserves more than a punchline.
What A Killer Story Dana Chandler Is Actually About
Directed by Matthew Galkin, produced by Joshua Levine, and centered on reporting by former New York Times and ProPublica journalist Joe Sexton, A Killer Story was filmed over six years. It starts with a strange premise: Sexton, an experienced investigative reporter with zero personal connection to Topeka or this case, was flooded with thousands of emails from a Kansas homemaker named Eileen Umbehr, who was convinced the state had convicted the wrong person. Eventually, he looked into it.
The series unfolds in three episodes, one per week:
- Episode 1, “Welcome to Topeka” (Sept. 10): Eileen and her husband Keen Umbehr recruit Sexton to dig into Chandler’s original conviction, which is eventually overturned on appeal.
- Episode 2, “Person of Interest” (Sept. 17): During the retrial, the Umbehrs point toward a different person they believe is the actual killer, while prosecutors keep building their case against Chandler. That trial ends in a hung jury.
- Episode 3, “A Dangerous Notion”: Chandler, heading into her third trial, fires her legal team and represents herself.
The series doesn’t promise a tidy ending, and it shouldn’t — because there isn’t one. As at least one outlet already reviewing the series put it, this is a story that “refuses to deliver the certainty the genre trains us to expect.”
The Murders Behind A Killer Story Dana Chandler
On a night in July 2002, Mike Sisco and his partner, Karen Harkness, were shot to death in their Topeka home — shot at least five times while in bed. Investigators never recovered a murder weapon. There was no DNA and no fingerprints tying anyone to the scene.
Family members steered investigators toward Sisco’s ex-wife, Dana Chandler, describing a bitter divorce and accusing her of repeatedly calling and showing up uninvited. Prosecutors would later claim Chandler called Sisco and Harkness more than 600 times in the six months before the murders, and pointed to a 27-hour gap in her cellphone activity around the time of the killings as suspicious. Chandler said she was in Colorado that weekend, and that she’d bought two gas cans to help a stranded stranger — an explanation prosecutors treated as a lie and her defenders treated as exactly the kind of mundane detail an innocent person doesn’t bother making up.
None of that added up to an arrest for nearly a decade. The case sat uncharged until a new district attorney green-lit Chandler’s arrest in July 2011.
Conviction, Overturned
In 2012, a jury convicted Chandler after just 83 minutes of deliberation. She was sentenced to life.
Six years later, in 2018, the Kansas Supreme Court threw the conviction out entirely — both counts. The reason wasn’t a technicality. The court found that prosecutor Jacqie Spradling had engaged in what the justices themselves called “intolerable acts of deception” at trial. Spradling was later disbarred over her conduct in this and another high-profile case.
This site covered that specific misconduct in detail back in 2021: Spradling had built part of her motive theory around a five-minute phone call between Mike and Dana 48 hours before the murders — and misrepresented what was actually said on that call to the jury. Separately, prosecutors at the time couldn’t establish that Chandler was even in the state of Kansas that weekend. The Supreme Court found the misconduct serious enough to void the conviction, while still ruling there was sufficient evidence on the record to allow a retrial.
The Second Trial: A Hung Jury and a New Witness
Chandler’s second trial ran in 2022. I was there for most of it.
The case still had no physical evidence connecting Chandler to the scene — no DNA, no fingerprints, no weapon. What it did have, for the first time in twenty years, was a new witness: a neighbor named Terri Anderson who testified she saw Chandler leaving the Sisco/Harkness home the night of the murders. It was a significant development, and also a strange one — twenty years is a long time for a key eyewitness to surface for the first time.
After six days of deliberation, the Shawnee County jury deadlocked. Hung jury, no verdict.
Change of Venue, and a Defendant Who Fires Her Own Lawyers
Ahead of the third trial, the case moved out of Shawnee County to Pottawatomie County — a shift this site covered skeptically at the time, given how visible and reputation-sensitive the case had already become locally.
Then, in February 2025, as her third trial began, Chandler did something almost no defendant does: she fired her attorneys and represented herself.
It didn’t go her way. A jury convicted her on two counts of first-degree murder. In June 2025, Judge Cheryl Rios sentenced her to two consecutive life terms — no parole eligibility for 50 years, with credit for roughly 13 years already served. Chandler maintains her innocence and has said she plans to appeal.
That is where things stand right now, as A Killer Story Dana Chandler cameras roll out this series: Chandler is not free. She is not exonerated. She is sitting in prison on a conviction her most dedicated advocates believe is wrong, with an appeal ahead of her and a national audience about to relitigate the case in real time.
Why This Case Won’t Sit Still
Set aside where you personally land on Chandler’s guilt or innocence for a second, and look at the shape of the evidence itself, because it’s genuinely unusual:
- No DNA. No fingerprints. No murder weapon, ever recovered. In a case with two people shot multiple times in their own bed, that’s a strikingly clean scene for whoever did it to have left behind.
- A distance problem that never got solved. Chandler’s advocates put her home roughly 540 miles from Topeka at the time of the murders. Prosecutors never definitively placed her in Kansas that weekend — a gap this site flagged back in 2021 and one the Umbehrs lead with in HBO’s own trailer.
- A key eyewitness who took twenty years to come forward. Whatever you make of Terri Anderson’s testimony, its timing alone — appearing for the first time at trial number two, decades after the fact — is the kind of detail that cuts against a clean, confident case.
- A prosecutor found by the state’s own Supreme Court to have deceived the jury. That’s not conjecture or spin. That’s a disbarment.
- A case that took a coin-flip jury (hung, not acquitted) and a defendant representing herself pro se to finally land a conviction — on the third try.
None of that proves Chandler is innocent. People with strange histories and bad relationships with the truth do sometimes commit murder, and juries don’t convict on vibes alone. But it’s also not the profile of an open-and-shut case, and it’s worth sitting with why it took twenty-plus years, three trials, one disbarred prosecutor, and a change of venue to get a conviction to actually stick.
The Name the Umbehrs Have Been Saying for Fifteen Years
Here’s the part that doesn’t make it into a two-minute trailer: the Umbehrs haven’t just argued Chandler is innocent in the abstract. They’ve been naming who they think actually did it, in writing, to law enforcement, since 2009.
Eileen Umbehr compiled a dossier on a man named Jeffery A. Sutton — Karen Harkness’s son-in-law — and distributed it to law enforcement agencies statewide. In February 2012, roughly two weeks before Chandler’s first trial began, she sent a formal cover letter to then-Topeka Police Chief Ron Miller laying out why she believed Sutton deserved real scrutiny: access to weapons, a history of violence and fraud, and a close personal connection to Harkness that gave him something to gain from her death. She’s since published the letter and supporting materials publicly, at personofinterest2.com.
See the Full Case Against Sutton
Eileen Umbehr didn’t just mention Jeff Sutton in passing — she built an entire site laying out the case against him, in her own words: personofinterest2.com.
The site republishes her original 2012 cover letter to then-Police Chief Ron Miller, along with the full dossier she compiled on Sutton — Karen Harkness’s son-in-law — starting back in 2009. Her own stated case, in her own words: Sutton “had access to weapons and a history of violence and fraud,” was “closely connected to Karen Harkness,” and “stood to benefit from her death.” Her core claim is that he was, in her words, “not thoroughly investigated by law enforcement officials in Topeka.”
Same disclaimer as above applies here too: this is Eileen Umbehr’s own allegation and research, not a police finding, a prosecutor’s conclusion, or a court ruling. Sutton has never been charged with anything in connection with this case. Read her materials and draw your own conclusions.
To be clear about what this is and isn’t: this is Eileen Umbehr’s own allegation, made in her own words, about a private individual who — as far as any public reporting shows — has never been charged with anything in connection with this case. It is not a finding by police, a prosecutor, or a court. Dystopeka is reporting that this allegation exists and has been formally submitted to law enforcement for over a decade; we are not asserting it as fact. That distinction matters, and it’s exactly the kind of tension HBO’s second episode — pointedly titled “Person of Interest” — appears to be built around.
What it does tell you is that the Umbehrs’ case was never just “the state got the wrong woman” in the abstract. It came with an alternative, on paper, with a name attached, sent to the same police department investigating the murders — years before Chandler was ever arrested.
Watch A Killer Story Dana Chandler, and Then Come Back
A Killer Story premieres September 10th on HBO and HBO Max, with new episodes weekly on Thursdays. Featured voices include Joe Sexton, Eileen and Keen Umbehr, witness Terri Anderson, and several jurors from the case.
If you want the deeper background — the stuff a 40-minute episode doesn’t have room for — this site has been tracking this case for years. Start below.
Related Dystopeka Coverage of the Dana Chandler Case
- Free at Last: Dana Chandler Released From Shawnee Co. Jail
- Dana Chandler’s Double Murder Conviction Was Reversed in 2018 — Retrial Begins in Topeka
- With Limited/No Physical Evidence, Dana Chandler Gets a Second Day in Court
- Shawnee County DA Chad Taylor Could Not Prove Dana Chandler Was Even in the State of Kansas the Weekend of the Murders
- From NY Post: Dana Chandler’s Second Murder Trial Ends in Hung Jury
- Week-Long Round-Up of the Dana Chandler Trial: Looking at Media Bias and BS
- WIBW Finds a Lawyer to Explain What’s Next in the Dana Chandler Case
- Terrified of Yet Another Embarrassing Loss, Judge Upholds Move of Chandler Trial to Pottawatomie Co.
- Dana Chandler to Receive a 3rd Trial
- WIBW Gives Prosecutor Kagay the Same Free Promo They Gave Chick-fil-A: The Chandler Trial
- Breaking News in the Chandler Trial
- Jury Still Deliberating in the Chandler Trial
- Court Recesses for Five Days in the Chandler Trial: High Weirdness in Topeka Courts
More on the HBO Series
- PEOPLE’s exclusive on the Umbehrs and the making of “A Killer Story”
- Official trailer: youtube.com/watch?v=GIIu90DJQ1c — and yes, that’s me, blink and you’ll miss it, around 1:42.
- Person of Interest 2 — Eileen Umbehr’s own published dossier and cover letter naming Jeffery A. Sutton as an alternate suspect, originally sent to Topeka law enforcement in 2012.
A Killer Story premieres September 10 on HBO and HBO Max.
This article is connected to newer related coverage and supporting context below.
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Related Dystopeka reporting and context:
