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| A Killer Story: Where Are Eileen and Keen Umbehr Now? Their Dana Chandler Fight Explained |
Eileen and Keen Umbehr spent more than a decade doing something most true-crime fans only do from the comfort of a sofa: digging through evidence, questioning the case against Dana Chandler and trying to find answers themselves. Their involvement in the Kansas murder case eventually turned them from ordinary genre enthusiasts into amateur sleuths and outspoken supporters of Chandler, despite having no personal connection to her when they first became interested in the case.
The story behind their involvement is explored in HBO’s A Killer Story, which revisits the long-running case surrounding the 2002 deaths of Mike Sisco and Karen Harkness. The pair were found shot inside Harkness’ home after a night out in July that year, but the investigation continued for years before Chandler, Sisco’s former wife, was publicly identified as the main suspect and arrested in 2011. What followed was an unusually lengthy legal saga, eventually stretching through multiple trials and culminating in Chandler’s third conviction in 2025.
For Eileen and Keen, however, the case never looked quite as straightforward as it did from the outside. Their interest in true crime had started long before Chandler entered their lives, meaning this was not exactly a couple suddenly deciding to play detective because they had watched one particularly addictive documentary at 2am. They had already spent years reading about real cases, watching crime programmes and discussing how investigations were solved.
Eileen Van Kirk was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the late 1950s and grew up largely in Hudson, Wisconsin, with her brother Robert and their parents. Her family later moved to Singapore because of her father's work with 3M, and in 1973, the teenager enrolled at Singapore American School. That move turned out to be rather more consequential than a standard overseas school transfer because it was there that she met Keen Umbehr, the Kansas-born teenager who would eventually become her husband.
Keen has recalled seeing Eileen at school and immediately telling a friend that he planned to ask her out. The confidence took a little longer to arrive than the declaration, but the feeling was clearly mutual. Eileen later described him as essentially the sort of person she had always imagined herself falling for. The two began dating, married on June 10, 1978, and eventually returned to the United States, settling in Kansas in 1979.
Their lives developed in a fairly conventional direction at first. Eileen became a homemaker while Keen worked as a trashman, and together they raised four sons. Their shared fascination with true crime, meanwhile, remained something of a hobby. They followed cases, read books and watched programmes, partly because they were interested in how investigations worked and partly because, as Keen put it, people naturally want to understand what happened when a serious crime occurs.
The 2002 deaths of Sisco and Harkness therefore caught their attention partly because the killings happened relatively close to home in Topeka, Kansas. By the time Chandler was arrested in 2011, Eileen and Keen had already familiarised themselves with the case. They were unconvinced that the evidence pointed convincingly towards her, particularly because they believed there was no eyewitness placing her at the scene and no physical evidence that directly connected her to the killings.
Chandler's possible motive did not persuade them otherwise. Her troubled history with Sisco provided investigators with a potential explanation, but to Eileen and Keen, a motive was not the same thing as proof. After Chandler was convicted in 2012, their interest became considerably more personal. Rather than simply discussing the case at home, they contacted Chandler themselves and began helping her investigate the case.
That decision effectively changed their lives. The Umbehrs became vocal supporters of Chandler and started conducting their own research, assembling evidence files that eventually ran into the thousands of pages. They also pursued other possible avenues of investigation and became involved in civil proceedings connected with their efforts to examine alternative suspects and unanswered questions.
For more than ten years, they remained firmly in Chandler's corner. Their involvement was unusual precisely because they had no family connection to her and were not initially working for her as legal professionals. They were simply two people who believed something about the case did not add up and became increasingly determined to find out why.
There is also a rather interesting twist to their story because Keen eventually became a lawyer himself. After spending 17 years as a trashman, he sold his business in the late 1990s and returned to education. He graduated from Kansas State University in 2001 before studying at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka. He received his Juris Doctor in 2005, passed the bar soon afterwards and later established a private law practice in Alma, Kansas.
Keen was already known locally before becoming a lawyer. He had written a newspaper column called My Perspective, and one dispute surrounding his work as a waste collector eventually developed into a major free-speech case. After contracts were terminated, he argued that the decision amounted to retaliation for his writing. The dispute ultimately reached the US Supreme Court, which ruled in his favour in 1996.
Eileen later chronicled that experience in her 2007 book Small Town Showdown, giving the couple another unusual chapter in an already unconventional story. Keen's legal career subsequently continued, while he also became a consultant for Atlas MD, a clinic operated by one of the couple's sons. Away from work and the Chandler case, the Umbehrs have a large family life to occupy them, with four sons, three daughters-in-law and ten grandchildren.
Their relationship with Chandler, however, changed after her 2025 conviction. Eileen and Keen stopped communicating with her and stopped taking her calls, but they have said that this was not because they suddenly decided she was guilty. Their position remained that they believed in her innocence. The problem, from their perspective, was the direction of Chandler's legal defence and her decision to represent herself.
That distinction matters because the Umbehrs' withdrawal was not presented as a dramatic change of heart. They apparently felt that they could no longer participate constructively while Chandler was handling her own legal proceedings in a way they believed created additional difficulties. In other words, after years of trying to help, they decided that stepping back was preferable to becoming even more entangled in the case.
Today, Eileen continues to follow true-crime cases, researching them largely because she remains fascinated by how investigations unfold and how seemingly tiny details can become important. Her idea of a productive afternoon apparently does not necessarily involve leaving the house either, as she has joked about happily staying in her pyjamas until 4pm while concentrating on case material. Honestly, there are worse ways to spend a Tuesday.
Keen, meanwhile, continues his work as a lawyer, while the couple remain focused on their family. Their story has therefore moved considerably beyond the Chandler case, even though their belief about what happened remains unchanged. They went from true-crime fans to amateur investigators, then became closely involved with a woman they believed had been wrongly convicted, only to eventually take a step back after the latest legal proceedings.
Fan reactions to Eileen and Keen understandably vary. Some viewers see them as unusually committed people who were willing to spend years examining a case when most observers would have moved on. Others are more sceptical about amateur investigators becoming deeply involved in a complicated criminal case, particularly when their certainty appears stronger than the conclusions reached through the legal process.
That divide is arguably what makes their role in A Killer Story so interesting: depending on where you stand, they can look either like determined citizens refusing to stop asking questions or people who became so invested in one theory that walking away became almost impossible.
My take is that Eileen and Keen are probably the most fascinating side story in this whole saga because they show how true crime can stop being entertainment remarkably quickly. There is something admirable about two people seeing unanswered questions and deciding to investigate rather than simply complaining about them online.
At the same time, good intentions do not automatically make an amateur investigation reliable, and years of commitment can make it harder to recognise when a theory needs challenging. Their decision to step away after Chandler's 2025 conviction may therefore be the most sensible thing they have done. They still believe what they believe, but they have recognised that they cannot control another person's legal strategy. That is a surprisingly grounded conclusion for a story that spent years getting increasingly complicated.
As for where Eileen and Keen Umbehr are now, they appear to be carrying on with their own lives while maintaining their belief that Dana Chandler is innocent. Eileen remains immersed in true crime and family life, while Keen continues his legal work and professional commitments. Their direct involvement with Chandler may have ended, but the questions that drew them into the case in the first place clearly have not disappeared. After watching A Killer Story, do you think the Umbehrs' decade-long involvement was admirable dedication or did they become too personally invested in the case?