One night in July 2002, Mike Sisco and his girlfriend, Karen Harkness, returned to their home in Topeka, Kansas, after a night at the casino. They lived in a nice part of town, and Harkness’s father, Harold Worswick, was a prominent business leader in the area.
When Worswick and his wife arrived the next day for a summer fish fry, he was the first to encounter the crime scene: His daughter and Sisco had each been shot at least five times with what investigators would later learn were subsonic bullets sourced from an Israeli weapons manufacturer. The couple’s cash and jewelry were left behind; no DNA, fingerprints, or murder weapon were ever recovered.
As true-crime yarns go, here was a tantalizing one—and that was before an unaffiliated Kansas couple turned it into their life’s work. After the case went cold for several years, Sisco’s ex-wife, Dana Chandler, was convicted of double homicide in 2012, but the lack of direct or forensic evidence has always cast doubt over her guilt.
In A Killer Story , an HBO documentary series premiering next week, former New York Times and ProPublica journalist Joe Sexton and director Matthew Galkin probe the murders and the arc of Eileen Umbehr, a true-crime TV obsessive who roped Sexton into the story with a relentless stream of unsolicited emails, and her husband Keen, a onetime trash collector who refashioned himself as a lawyer and political gadfly. The couple devote themselves to proving Chandler’s innocence, and it makes for some disorienting viewing in its own right.