Your Weekend Binge Watch: A Killer Story
Your Weekend Binge Watch: A Killer Story
Available to watch on HBO; 1 season, 3 episodes, just about 40 min. each; Documentary
If you’re a true crime fan, watch A Killer Story for an intriguing true crime story that might just leave you stumped…and if you’re not a true crime fan, watch A Killer Story for the mere sake of understanding the toll that true crime obsession can have on someone’s life.
Synopsis
Investigative journalist Joe Sexton receives thousands of emails from citizen sleuth Eileen Umbehr, a woman convinced that accused murderer Dana Chandler is innocent. Spanning three trials, complex tales of family conflicts, and competing narratives, Joe Sexton discovers the truth is more elusive.
Thoughts
Let me be crystal clear upfront: I love true crime stories. Harkening back to my days studying sociology during my undergrad, I’ll never forget one of my favorite classes: Social Psychiatry (which, according to my professor, would’ve been more appropriately named Psychiatric Sociology). The entire class was an offshoot into the criminology side of sociology with a strong focus on – dun dun DUNNNN – serial killers. The class even came with a day-one lecture about Medical Student Syndrome and how, although not entirely impossible, it was highly unlikely that anyone in our class was a serial killer. I remember feeling equally thrilled and terrified. Perfect class. 10/10. No notes.
There’s an ongoing joke in some circles about how Virgos make the best serial killers because they’re analytical, methodical, exacting, detail-oriented, and love order, but I promise my fascination with serial killers is not because I am a Virgo…though I do love applying order to chaos. *chef’s kiss*
A Killer Story is only three episodes long. You can binge it in one sitting, and although I am definitely pitching it to you as Your Weekend Binge Watch, I would actually recommend having some downtime between episodes instead of watching them back-to-back-to-back. I watched them over the course of a couple days, which allowed time for my boyfriend and I to talk about each episode.
I don’t always mention my boyfriend as part of my recommendations because although we watch most of these shows/films together, we don’t always get equally-invested in the content we watch.
He deserves a lot of credit for the number of true crime and cult documentaries he’s endured during our time together (to varying degrees of interest). Most of the cult and/or true crime documentaries we have watched are exploratory and explanatory, seeking to illustrate the existence of some cult or true crime with a narrative through-line, e.g. this happened because of Exhibit A and now that you know that, we’ll show you every ripple effect that led to Exhibit Z.
A Killer Story has been different than a lot of the true crime documentaries we’ve watched in the past in that it does not provide answers wrapped up in a neat little bow.
I mentioned a few paragraphs ago that we watched these three episodes over the course of a couple days and took time to talk about each episode. Our behavior, taking walks and talking about the case presented in the show, nearly mirrored the behavior of Keen and Eileen Uhmber – the married couple who have devoted their lives to proving Dana Chandler’s innocence in the murders of her ex-husband Mike Sisco and his fiancée, Karen Harkness. We would watch an episode and then have a bit of a debrief on what we thought about everything as we walked our dog around the neighborhood, asking each other questions with deep discussion: what we thought about new developments presented in the show, how such obvious corruption in a small town in the middle of the country could be so blatant and yet so accepted, and how Dana Chandler could’ve possibly done the crime she was accused of.
To me, A Killer Story’s most interesting effect is that it sucked me in and held up a mirror to my reality: the reality of a Virgo wanting order applied to the chaos of a case that has no real evidence, and yet, has a conviction and a suspect held accountable for a double homicide. To say the case has been controversial would be an understatement, but to say that my behavior in discussing and debriefing the case started to mirror that of the Uhmbers, albeit to a lesser scale, would be fair.
A Killer Story is worth your time, especially since it leaves us with more questions than answers… Totally BingeReady.
Note to self: Don't represent yourself in a trial.