“Obsessiveness is a double-edged sword, right?” Sexton tells Vanity Fair. “The obsessed can achieve remarkable things, and the obsessed can lead to terrible and wrongful outcomes. But there’s little doubt that they meet the definition of obsessed, and that’s not a healthy place to be.”
For nearly two decades, the case has been tied up in the true-crime entertainment machine. CBS’s 48 Hours took it on in 2009 while the case was still cold, an unusual maneuver for a franchise that typically revisits closed cases. More unusual still was that the show went so far as to propose a culprit in the course of its investigation: It was the first time that Chandler had been publicly identified as the primary suspect. The national attention from the special prompted the district attorney’s office to reopen its investigation, and Chandler was arrested in 2011 and convicted the following year. For the Umbehrs, the 48 Hours special drew them into the case but had the opposite effect: After Chandler’s trial, which relied on circumstantial evidence, they became convinced that she couldn’t have killed Sisco and Harkness. The couple began visiting Chandler in prison while laying exhaustive groundwork for an appeal; the two sold 500 acres of family property and Keen closed his law practice so that they could devote every day to the case. “I get very emotional about this,” Eileen says in A Killer Story. “My voice goes up, my blood pressure goes up. My hands turn cold and I have to ask Keen to warm my hands.”
Eileen and Keen Umbehr devoted themselves to proving the innocence of a woman accused of double homicide.
Courtesy of HBO
In some sense, the strangest twist in the series is that these citizen sleuths, far from merely airing their wildest theories online or bombarding reporters, had a material impact on the legal saga that ensued. The Umbehrs unearthed prosecutorial misconduct that led to the disbarment of one of the district attorneys in the trial, and a unanimous Kansas Supreme Court overturned Chandler’s conviction six years later. Under a rare Kansas legal procedure, the couple was able to go before a judge with a citizen’s probable cause affidavit and trigger an investigation into Harkness’s son-in-law, though it didn’t go anywhere in the end. “That just seems like it’s out of fucking, I don’t know,” Sexton says, “fucking Somalia or something.”
A Brooklyn-born Irish Catholic who adorns most of his sentences in this way, Sexton is one among a colorful cast of characters in A Killer Story. Aside from the single-minded Umbehrs, Chandler emerges over the series as an alternately sympathetic and chilling figure. She was retried in 2022 but the trial ended with a hung jury; in 2025, she made the startling choice to represent herself in another retrial. Could this Denver accountant have traveled to and from Kansas, orchestrated a double murder using rare ammo typically fired from a military-style weapon, and left a pristine crime scene behind? Her resolutely flat affect as she cross-examines her and her murdered husband’s children makes it seem more plausible. Chandler was convicted during her third trial and sentenced to life in prison, but even Galkin remains uncertain.
