HBO’s A Killer Story asks the question true crime usually avoids: what if no one really knows?

True crime television was built on a promise: given enough evidence and enough storytelling skill, the truth can be reconstructed and served to the audience clean. From I’ll Be Gone in the Dark to Making a Murderer, the genre’s power has always come from that sense of a puzzle with a solution — even when the justice system failed to find it. A Killer Story, the new HBO documentary series, begins from exactly that premise and then spends three episodes methodically dismantling it.

At the center of the documentary is Dana Chandler, arrested and eventually convicted of the 2002 murders of her ex-husband and his girlfriend in Topeka, Kansas. The case, which drew national attention, is the kind of story the true crime machine feeds on: a clichéd narrative of jealousy, a conviction later overturned on appeal, and then not one but two retrials — the third of which ended with Chandler representing herself. Filmed over six years, investigative journalist Joe Sexton — formerly of The New York Times and ProPublica — was drawn into the case after receiving thousands of emails from Eileen Umbehr, a homemaker turned citizen sleuth, and her husband Keen. The Umbehrs are convinced Chandler is innocent and have devoted their lives accordingly.

What director Matthew Galkin and his team do with that material is something more rigorous than the genre usually demands. In following the Umbehrs as they build their case — pointing the finger at a different person of interest, marshaling witness testimony, operating with the total conviction of the converted — A Killer Story turns its camera on the investigators as much as on the investigation. The documentary probes what it calls “the dangers of blinkered certainty”: the way confirmation bias operates not just in juries and prosecutors, but in the very citizen sleuths who believe they are cutting through institutional failure. Sexton, arriving as a skeptical professional, finds that the truth becomes more elusive, not less, the closer he looks.

The Kansas State Capitol dome in Topeka, Kansas — Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansas. Photo: Aviper2k7 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The series comes from Story Syndicate, whose track record in this space is serious: they produced HBO’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, projects that treat true crime as social history rather than genre exercise. Galkin, who previously directed Kevorkian and One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, is joined here by executive producers Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, and Davis Guggenheim — a line-up that signals HBO Documentary Films at something close to full weight.

A Killer Story debuts Thursday, September 10 on HBO and Max, with new episodes airing on subsequent Thursdays through September 24. Each of the three episodes runs approximately 40 minutes.

Tags: HBO, A Killer Story, Joe Sexton, Liz Garbus, Matthew Galkin, Story Syndicate