Tried Three Times: The Contested Case of Dana Chandler and the Topeka Double Murder

In 2002, two people were shot to death in a Topeka home. Their names were Michael Sisco and Karen Harkness. For nine years, no one was charged. Then the authorities charged Sisco's former wife, Dana Chandler. A jury convicted her. And that was only the beginning.

Chandler's conviction was reversed by the Kansas Supreme Court, which found that the prosecutor had committed serious misconduct, including telling the jury about a protective order that did not exist. The prosecutor was later disbarred. Chandler was tried again. A jury could not agree. She was tried a third time, and convicted again. Through all of it, she has maintained her innocence.

Built entirely from the public record, the appellate decisions, the trial files, the disciplinary records, and years of reporting, this book tells a genuinely contested case with the honesty it demands. It states the convictions as the facts they are. It states the misconduct and the reversal as the documented facts they are. It lays out the doubts, no eyewitness, no recovered murder weapon, a case built on circumstance and confirmation bias, fairly and fully. And it declines to resolve what the record cannot.

Clear, fair, and disciplined, it keeps the victims at its center and refuses the easy certainties of innocence or guilt. It is the story of a conviction that stands, a doubt that will not be stilled, and two people whose murder should not be forgotten in the contest over who ended their lives.