Host/producer Joe Sexton of HBO’s A Killer Story on Kansas’ legal loopholes and citizen investigators
Courtesy HBO
For decades, Joe Sexton has faced the challenge of deciding whether an email most people might ignore is spam or the kind of tip that helped him earn Pulitzers and other accolades for The New York Times and ProPublica.
As Metropolitan Editor of the former, he covered the downfall of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, and he also helped cover the Penn State sex scandal and more recently worked on ProPublica’s coverage of then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous treatment of nursing home residents during COVID.
His latest project is narrating and producing the HBO documentary series A Killer Story, and most of it takes place in Topeka. He began what became a 7-year quest with director Matthew Galkin (One Night in Idaho: The College Murders) after finally responding to his almost 2,714th email from Eileen Umbehr.
She was writing to him because she suspected that Dana Chandler, who had been convicted in 2012 of killing her former husband Michael Sisco and his wife-to-be Karen Harkness in 2002, might have been innocent.
As Sexton explained over the phone from the Big Apple last Wednesday, an important development in the case came when he finally responded to one of Umbehr’s missives.
“It could have been any number, but as we say in the series when state murder convictions are overturned, it’s not an everyday occurrence. If you then look at the Kansas Supreme Court’s unanimous reversal (in 2018) and start to look at the language of that opinion and the kind of devastating critique of the prosecution, that was a pretty provocative email to get,” he said.
Some of the details, like the ballistics data, do seem puzzling on further examination. The person who took Michael Sisco and Karen Harkness’ lives intended to kill them because valuable jewelry and other lucrative items stayed in the home after the murder. The shooter also fired 12 rounds, far more than what was needed to kill the couple.
Deciding what kind of gun the killer used is another matter. “I would suspect the question of what was the murder weapon, as with any number of aspects of this case, I don’t know that it has been subjected to the most rigorous examination,” Sexton explains.
“The bullets found at the scene, and this is memorialized in the police records, were determined to typically be from an Uzi-style weapon. I think they would like to theorize it was a pistol rather than a rifle.”
He adds that Eileen Umbehr and her husband Keen, who live in Alma, KS, spent years going over the murder and have become adept at using quirks in Sunflower State law.
Many of the twists in A Killer Story happen because the Umbehrs exploited this option.
“I don’t know how unique this is in Kansas, but it struck me as kind of outrageous, is the idea that a citizen of the state of Kansas can appear before a judge and submit what they would argue is an affidavit of probable cause to have some other citizen investigated for a potential crime. It does not have to be a prosecutor. It does not have to be a judge. It does not have to be police detectives. It could be citizens like Keen and Eileen Umbehr,” Sexton said.
Keen has previously worked as a trash collector.
Some of the Umbehr’s unorthodox investigations had long-term results beyond Dana Chandler’s case. Jacquie Spradling, who led the case against the suspect in the 2012 trial, was one of the casualties.
Sexton said, “It was Keen’s professional ethics complaint against her that actually led to the disbarment of Jacquie Spradling (in 2022). That disbarment is ultimately signed off on by the very Kansas Supreme Court that had a couple of years earlier opted not to file any kind of complaint against her. So a little bit of irony there.”
Curiously, she prosecuted Chandler despite her predecessor’s refusal.
Sexton recalled, “They had had a long-serving District Attorney named Bob Hecht, who had a nickname as “The Iceman” because he was not a particularly bashful prosecutor and often sought the death penalty in certain terrible cases, and who had made a reputation for himself in investigating and prosecuting crooked politicians and cops. He declined to ever bring a case forward against Dana Chandler because he was persuaded there wasn’t enough evidence.”
In 2009, it was reopened. A new district attorney was in place, and Dana Chandler was shortly thereafter arrested and tried on evidence that hadn’t meaningfully changed over the 7 years. You would think the local press might have been interested in actually sort of interrogating the integrity and the wisdom and accuracy of that kind of decision-making by the local authorities.”
Sexton covered a similar case in New York, where a 17-year-old was convicted of murder despite the judge’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. At the moment, the conviction stands, but Sexton said, “That may be about to change, actually. So, that drama is still playing out and there may be an actual just resolution to it. So stay tuned on that one.”
The Umbehrs have pursued another potential suspect, a prosecutor named Jeff Sutton, who sat for an interview in the film. He is Karen Harkness’ son-in-law. Sutton acquired a variety of guns through a unique arrangement.
“The single most interesting thing about his career as a prosecutor, and it’s only touched upon lightly in the series, is he entered into this bizarre relationship with the local sheriff where I think they were doing some work together in terms of seizing property and other things as a consequence of their criminal investigations,” explained Sexton.
“Jeff Sutton proposed that he be paid not in cash or by county check or sheriff’s department check, but in guns from the weapons that have been seized at either crime scenes or as part of civil forfeiture proceedings. Pretty unusual and ultimately determined to be, I think, illegal. But, you know, there are memorialized documents that outline and specify the deal that he entered into. Pretty unusual by my lights.”
Courtesy HBO
Chandler’s primary defense is her claim that she was not in Topeka on the night of the murders. The DNA found on one bullet matched neither hers nor Sutton’s.
“I’m pretty tough on (the Umbehrs) in the series, you know, because I warn them that they may well be doing to Jeff Sutton what they fear the local authorities had done to Dana Chandler, which was to look at him or her as the likeliest suspect almost to the exclusion of anyone else. And that’s a dangerous road to walk down,” said Sexton.
Unlike his work in print or text-based reporting, Sexton is constantly in the spotlight in A Killer Story.
“I’m a lifelong Brooklyn bullshit artist, so I love the sound of my own voice,” Sexton laughed.
“I got a chance when I first moved to ProPublica to do some documentary film work. And we won a nice handful of Emmys for stuff we did with PBS’ Frontline. And you know, I have a daughter (Lucy) who is a documentary film producer.”
The documentary has received raves from publications like The Guardian, which declared, “A Killer Story is a sideways proposition, but it is rather compelling—a rare true crime story that’s as much about the viewers as it is the victims.”
HBO was willing to wait for the more complicated story. It takes all three episodes to explain why this case remained cold for a decade and why it has so far spawned three trials.
Sexton adds, “When they reversed the convictions in 2018, I went out to Kansas, and I started to dig into it. There were plans that we could make a film and write a story and see a retrial happen if it was going to happen pretty quickly, and it could be a real tantalizing story. It is not in the way you expected. Seven years later, we finally produced the documentary series that we did. So, who could have foreseen that? So sometimes it is genuine diligence, and sometimes it is just bad luck that sees you sink a number of years of your life into these cases.”
At 67, Sexton said that he was eager to keep looking for other stories and that coming to the state where In Cold Blood took place was irresistible.
“I was always kind of tickled by the idea that the story we were chasing in Topeka was in the land that was the birthplace of what is today the true crime industrial complex.”
