F45 instructor jailed for three years for faking her own death in outrageous life insurance scam

An F45 gym franchise owner who faked her own death to get a $700,000 life insurance payout has been jailed for three years. 

Karen Salkilld – who claimed she had died in a car crash – was sentenced in Perth District Court on Monday.

In February, the 43-year-old posed as her partner Kelly Winter to tell the Insurance Line company she had died in a crash in Broome, WA two months earlier. 

She submitted a claim with a fake death certificate, a falsified Western Australia Coroner’s Court letter and a mocked up record of investigation into the death. 

The hoax was initially successful and a week after the fake claim, the insurance company paid out $718,923 into a bank account opened by the mother-of-two in Ms Winter’s name. 

But the fraud unravelled when Salkilld began making large withdrawals from the account. 

The bank flagged the payments and froze the account before police stepped in.

Despite facing serious fraud charges, the so-called ‘dead woman walking’ had regularly been seen casually going about her business.

Salkilld used the documents of her partner Kelly Winter, who is not implicated in the scam, to pretend to be her after faking her own death to defraud $718,923

At the sentencing hearing on Monday, Judge Vicki Stewart said Salkilld’s crime took effort and persistence and was not ‘opportunistic’, WA Today reported. 

‘You were living beyond your means and overcommitted yourself,’ she said.

Salkilld had moved back to Perth in 2019, bought an F45 gym and part-owned a farm with her mother in Beverley, 133km south-east of Perth.

In 2023, with mounting debts, she decided to sell the farm, but a deal to do so fell through and she had already said she would buy another F45 gym, the court heard.

The farm was eventually sold for less than she had hoped to get and Salkilld came up with the plan to fake her own death.

Ms Winter – who the court heard had nothing to do with the fraud – wrote a character reference in support of her former partner, saying she was concerned for Salkilld’s children if their mum was jailed.

But Judge Stewart said her crime was too serious for a suspended sentence, and jailed her for three years.

Salkilld also has to to pay back $101,771 to TAL Insurance, which owns Insurance Line, after the judge ordered the return of $617,191 being held by MyState Bank.

She will be eligible for parole in February 2026, after serving half of her sentence, which was backdated to August 2024, however, police indicated she could also be hit with further charges over the fraud.