How Two Citizen Sleuths Spent Decades Trying to Solve the Double Homicide of ‘A Killer Story’

The tip came in 2017 from Alma, Kansas, from a stay-at-home mother. Eileen Umbehr asked whether Joe Sexton, a veteran investigative journalist who worked at The New York Times and ProPublica, wanted to know the truth about a double homicide in Topeka. Karen Harkness, daughter of a bigtime Topeka businessman, and her boyfriend Mike Sisco, a divorced father of two kids, were murdered on July 7, 2002, in the middle of the night, and authorities were convinced that Sisco’s ex-wife Dana Chandler was the killer. She was arrested, tried, and convicted of first-degree murder. Sexton, who thought the case was closed, emailed Umbehr back a polite “thanks, but no thanks.”