No One Involved in ‘A Killer Story’ Would Have Convicted Dana Chandler of Double Murder

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Joe Sexton, five-time Pulitzer Prize-winning senior editor at The New York Times, knows a killer story when he hears it. Sometimes it just takes a few thousand emails for him to listen.

In 2017, Sexton began to get bombarded by messages from an Alma, Kansas, woman named Eileen Umbehr, who, for some reason, became obsessed with proving a local stranger named Dana Chandler innocent in the 2002 double murder of Chandler’s ex-husband, Mike Sisco, and his new partner, Karen Harkness. Despite a complete lack of physical evidence, the courts saw otherwise — twice (out of three trials; one was a hung jury).

At first (and second, and third and more attempts), Sexton blew Umbehr off. But curiosity — and possibly a lack of email storage — ultimately got the best of him.

Sexton’s midwest visits over the course of years would become the basis for numerous newspaper columns — and eventually, for Matthew Galkin’s perfectly titled documentary A Killer Story.