HBO’s A Killer Story turns true-crime obsession into the story
The three-part documentary revisits Dana Chandler’s murder conviction and the amateur investigators who pushed journalist Joe Sexton into a case that grew increasingly entangled.
HBO’s three-part documentary A Killer Story examines the conviction of Dana Chandler for the 2002 murders of her former husband, Mike Sisco, and his new partner, Karen Harkness. The Guardian’s review presents the series as both a murder investigation and a study of the audience appetite that surrounds such cases.
Eileen and Keen Umbehr believed Chandler had been wrongly convicted. The couple campaigned for the case to be reconsidered and identified another person as a possible suspect. Their pursuit eventually reached journalist Joe Sexton, who received 2,714 emails from them before agreeing to investigate.
Sexton, formerly associated with The New York Times and ProPublica and an editor on Pulitzer-winning projects, became increasingly drawn into the Umbehrs’ campaign. Chandler’s state conviction was overturned, although the supplied material does not establish whether she was exonerated, retried or otherwise cleared.
The documentary also questions the confidence of armchair detectives. The Umbehrs believed they knew who was responsible for the killings, but the series examines whether their evidence justified bringing their suspicion to law enforcement and whether they risked repeating the treatment Chandler had received.
For The Guardian, the case is ultimately less a straightforward miscarriage-of-justice narrative than a portrait of true-crime obsession. A Killer Story follows the victims and the conviction, but also the viewers, supporters and investigators who decide they can intervene in a real murder case.
