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.
In the HBO docuseries releasing on Thursday (at 9:00 p.m. on HBO and Max), produced by Joshua Levine, Sexton comes off as anything but a stuffy reporter. If you know his work — or from the old neighborhood — that won’t surprise you one bit.
“[Sexton’s] voice was so fucking specific and singular,” Galkin (One Night in Idaho: The College Murders) tells The Hollywood Reporter. “He was like a stand-in for a private investigator from film noir — from crime novels of like the 1950s and 60s.”
Sexton says his loose, foul-mouthed form of storytelling stems from being raised as “a Brooklyn bullshit artist.”
“As a kid in 1960s Brooklyn, your entire culture was just telling the same fucking stories over and over again with a little bit of flourish, or a little embellishment here or there,” Sexton tells THR.
Even so, it was “a little bit of a challenge” for the self-described “newspaper man” to write for TV, he says. What Sexton wrote — and what he spoke into Galkin’s camera lens — was some of the best documentary narration in recent memory.
“He didn’t approach it in a way that was intellectual,” Levine (Maternal Instinct) says. “It was very, I don’t know, visceral.”
Together, Sexton and Levine landed A Killer Story‘s alternate suspect, Jeff Sutton, in Galkin’s interview chair. They’d been working on Sutton “for a while,” Galkin says. The possibility opened when Sutton, an attorney, finally became comfortable that Sexton had no “axe to grind,” in Levine’s words.
“It was better for him to sit down (for an interview),” Levine says.
Indeed it was. As viable a potential killer as Sutton can seem at times, A Killer Story ultimately serves him well. In part, Galkin credits the “nuanced” approach made possible by finding a home at HBO, which bought A Killer Story way before it had an ending.
The trio of Galkin, Sexton and Levine started their work on what would become A Killer Story before the COVID pandemic reached the United States. (Liz Garbus is also among the docuseries’ executive producers.)
Outside of HBO, “There is virtually no one out there in the market that would have supported us for this long,” Galkin says.
Elsewhere, the guys believe pressure would have wrapped their work before it was ready. A Killer Story would have been a “much different piece” as a quick-turnaround doc, Levine says — no offense to Netflix’s new Instadocs series, probably — that’s simply not what these guys are about.
Galkin and Levine do not like where they see the documentary business going.
“I don’t think documentaries will cease to be made, but I think you know the more nuanced and complicated ones might cease to exist at some point in in favor of something that’s just more reductive and a quicker turn,” Galkin says. “I am personally fearful of the the the direction that our market seems to be going in.”
Dana Chandler in A Killer Story.
Courtesy of HBO
With HBO’s long leash, A Killer Story is able to cover all three Chandler trials.
So… did Dana do it?
Even after damn near seven years of work, Galkin says he “genuinely” does not know the answer to that question.
“To this day, I have moments where I’m like, ‘I think maybe she did it,’ and then, in that same breath, I’ll start to think about the details of the case and be like, ‘How the fuck did she ever pull this off?’” he says. “There were so many needles to thread that… I don’t think she’s capable of.”
Galkin would not have voted to convict.
“If I were a juror, given the complete lack of physical evidence, I can’t see how I could ever get to a place where I could say beyond a shadow of a doubt that Dana Chandler was guilty of these two murders,” Galkin says. “She may seem guilty, and she may have done a terrible job arguing her own case, but there will always be doubt, whichever way you argue it.”
(Chandler, who is definitely not an attorney, served as her own lawyer in her retrial.)
Levine would have also been among the dissenting voices in the deliberation room.
“It would have been difficult to vote ‘guilty’ without hard evidence. ‘Beyond a reasonable doubt’ is a high bar and I don’t think the prosecution cleared it,” he says. “Dana Chandler absolutely could have committed the murders. But jurors are asked to apply a legal standard, not their gut feelings about whether or not she did it.”
Sexton makes it a trend.
“In the course of the six or seven years we did this, on any week you would have called me, I might have had a different guess,” he says. “Were I on the jury, would I have convicted her? No.
“Their entire prosecution in all three instances was basically an emotional pitch, like: She’s a fucking witch. She’s terrible. She’s done batshit crazy things before. Surely she’s capable of a double homicide pulled off by driving 1,100 fucking miles round trip in a single night, leaving a pristine crime scene, never being seen by an eyewitness,” he elaborated. “This, you know, second-rate accountant in Denver, jumps in her car and pulls that off. So I don’t think the state met its burden — but I wouldn’t declare her innocent either.”
The Joe Sexton Experience, AKA A Killer Story, premieres Thursday on HBO and HBO Max; episode two premieres on Sept. 17 and the finale on Sept. 24.
