HBO Max is about to test just how much appetite true crime fans still have for a case with no clean answer. The streamer’s new three-part documentary series, A Killer Story, premieres Thursday, September 10, and instead of delivering the tidy resolution the genre usually promises, it leans into ambiguity as its entire selling point. The series lands at a moment when HBO Max has been steadily building out its nonfiction true-crime slate, and this one arrives with an unusually specific hook: a case that has already survived three separate criminal trials and still hasn’t settled the public’s mind.
The show centers on Dana Chandler, accused of killing her ex-husband and his girlfriend in a 2002 double homicide in Topeka, Kansas. Filmed over six years, the series follows New York Times and ProPublica journalist Joe Sexton as he gets pulled into the case by Eileen and Keen Umbehr, a couple of self-taught “citizen sleuths” convinced Chandler is innocent. Rather than building toward a verdict, the three episodes — titled “Welcome to Topeka,” “Person of Interest,” and “A Dangerous Notion” — trace how confirmation bias, prosecutorial misconduct claims, and competing narratives kept the case alive for over two decades without ever producing hard forensic evidence either way.
What makes the timing interesting is less about A Killer Story itself and more about what’s happening around it. The series drops its first episode on HBO and HBO Max on September 10, then continues weekly through September 24 — which means its finale lands the same week Netflix unloads all eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on September 17. Both are true-crime projects built around unresolved 19th- and 21st-century American murders, but they’re approaching the genre from opposite directions: Netflix’s Ryan Murphy vehicle leans into speculative, stylized drama with Ella Beatty as Borden and a “female rage” framing pushed by the show’s own star, while HBO Max’s entry stays in documentary mode and explicitly refuses to hand viewers a conclusion. The overlap sets up a natural comparison point for anyone tracking how differently the two biggest streamers are currently packaging true crime.
The pedigree behind A Killer Story is doing a lot of the pre-release heavy lifting. Director Matthew Galkin previously made Kevorkian and One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, and the series comes from Story Syndicate, the production company behind HBO’s acclaimed I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York. Executive producers Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, and Davis Guggenheim round out a lineup with serious documentary credentials, signaling HBO Documentary Films is treating this as a prestige entry rather than a quick true-crime cash-in. Whether audiences reward that restraint the same way they’ve rewarded Murphy’s more theatrical approach to real-life murder cases is exactly the question this month is set up to answer.