Kansas woman convicted of double murder after three trials spanning 23 years

On a July morning in 2002, Mike Sisco and Karen Harkness were found dead in her Topeka, Kansas home, shot multiple times as they lay in bed. The murders seemed to point toward someone close to them—a crime of passion, investigators believed. What followed was a 23-year pursuit of justice that would fracture a family, overturn a conviction, and ultimately land in a courtroom where a mother would face her own daughter as the key witness against her.

Mike Sisco's ex-wife, Dana Chandler, lived eight hours away in Denver. She had no alibi for the night of the murders, no gun, no forensic evidence connecting her to the crime scene. But she had something else: a history of obsession with her ex-husband that family members found deeply disturbing. After their bitter divorce in 1998, Chandler had stalked Sisco repeatedly—showing up at his home in the middle of the night, jumping on his trampoline, peering through windows. Sisco kept a day planner documenting the incidents. By spring 2002, just months before the murders, he told his brother-in-law Mark Boots he feared for his life. "You're gonna wake up and find me dead," Sisco said. "And I want you to know who did it, Dana Chandler."

But without a murder weapon, without DNA or fingerprints, without any eyewitness placing Chandler in Kansas, the case stalled. The initial district attorney declined to prosecute. It was Hailey Seel, Sisco's 17-year-old daughter at the time of the murders, who became the case's unlikely investigator. Beginning in 2005, three years after her father's death, Hailey secretly recorded phone conversations with her mother, trying to extract a confession or some admission of guilt. In one recording, when Hailey asked if her mother had ever thought about killing her father, Chandler replied: "I did. Honestly, I can say I did." Hailey never heard her mother deny involvement outright. Instead, each conversation left her more convinced of her mother's guilt.

In 2011, a new district attorney, Chad Taylor, decided to move forward with a circumstantial case. Chandler was arrested in Oklahoma with cameras rolling—a show of force that would later trouble even some who believed in her guilt. At her first trial in 2012, prosecutors presented evidence of Chandler's obsession: more than 600 phone calls to Sisco and Harkness in the six months before the murders, many made late at night or in rapid succession. They introduced the gas cans Chandler had purchased the day before the murders—two five-gallon containers that prosecutors suggested she bought to avoid stopping for fuel on a drive to Kansas. They played Hailey's secret recordings. A jury deliberated for 83 minutes and returned a guilty verdict. Chandler was sentenced to life in prison.

But in 2018, the Kansas Supreme Court overturned the conviction, finding prosecutorial misconduct so severe it warranted reversal. The prosecutor, Jacqie Spradling, had made false statements about a protection order that never existed and had speculated about Chandler's route between Colorado and Kansas without evidence. The court called her actions "intolerable acts of deception." Chandler remained in prison as the state prepared to retry her. The years that followed were a blur of motions—nearly 400 of them—and delays. Chandler fired multiple lawyers and represented herself at times. Hailey, now a mother of three, was called to testify again, and this time her mother cross-examined her directly, a confrontation Hailey described as "the most awful thing I've ever" experienced.

The second trial, in 2022, ended in a hung jury: seven votes to convict, five to acquit. The jurors who voted to acquit cited the absence of physical evidence. The jurors who voted to convict pointed to Chandler's behavior and her own recorded words about wanting to kill her ex-husband. Chandler was released on bond with GPS monitoring while awaiting a third trial. She posted to Facebook images of Hailey's children, which Hailey interpreted as intimidation. The third trial began in February 2025, this time in a smaller county after a change of venue. On the morning of opening statements, Chandler dismissed her attorneys and decided to represent herself.

For seven days, Chandler testified, speaking for roughly 20 hours. She acknowledged her drinking problem and the cruel emails she had written about Sisco when she was blackout drunk. She explained the gas cans as a purchase for someone she met at AA. She insisted she had never owned a gun, had never been in Topeka on the night of the murders, and had been confused when she gave different alibis to different people. She challenged the gas station clerk's identification, noting the woman was only 70 percent sure and had since died. She questioned whether police had adequately investigated other suspects. But the jury, after 18 days of testimony, deliberated for about four hours and returned a guilty verdict. Chandler was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder. She is now appealing, and her supporters at organizations like Miracle of Innocence maintain that the state never proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

For Hailey Seel, the verdict brought no relief. She had spent more than two decades convinced her mother killed her father. Now that conviction was official, and the cost was total: she had lost her father and Karen Harkness to murder, and she had lost her mother to the justice system. "It is so much worse that my mom is the one behind these murders," Hailey said after the verdict, "because we lost my dad and Karen, but then through all this, now we've lost our mom." More than 20 years after Mike Sisco and Karen Harkness were shot in their bed, their families are still living with the consequences of that night—and with the question of whether the person convicted of killing them is truly guilty.