An upstate New York man who has been convicted of killing his first wife in a house fire and crushing his son with a truck for insurance money has likened the deaths to other instances of ‘bad luck’ in his life, including losing a horse and having a barn burn down.
Karl Karlsen, 60, was found guilty earlier this month of first-degree murder by arson for setting fire to his family’s home in California in 1991 that killed his then-wife and the mother of their three children, Christina Karlsen.
He faces a sentence of life without the possibility of parole when he is sentenced next month over his wife’s arson death motivated by a $200,000 life insurance policy, which Karlsen had taken out in Christina’s name just 19 days before the fire.
Karlsen, who is already serving a prison sentence of 15 years to life for the 2008 murder of his 23-year-old son, Levi, has sat down to an interview with NBC’s Dateline, which is scheduled to air at 9pm on Friday.
Convicted killer Karl Karlsen, 60, sits down to an interview with NBC’s Dateline to discuss the deaths of his first wife, Christina, and his son 17 years apart
Karlsen’s son, Levi Karlsen, was 23 years old when he was crushed to death while repairing a truck on his father’s property
The deaths of Christina and her son Levi Karlsen have enriched Karl by more than $900,000 in life insurance payouts
In the two-hour episode, titled ‘The House on The Hill,’ Dateline correspondent Andrea Canning questions Karlsen about the deaths of his wife and son 17 years apart, which have left him as the sole beneficiary of life insurance payouts totaling more than $900,000.
‘Bad luck that they died?’ Canning asks the convicted killer sitting across from her.
‘What would you call it?’ Karlsen shoots back. ‘I’ve had many other things in my life that… I’ve had horses died, I’ve had a barn fire.’
When the reporter presses Karlsen on whether he considers himself ‘a victim of bad luck,’ he offers a vague response, saying: ‘If I told you everything, you wouldn’t believe what’s happened to me.’
The Dateline episode also features new interviews with Karlsen’s second wife, Cindy, who helped police bring him to justice by wearing a wire, Christine’s sister Colette Bousson and Karl’s brother, Mike Karlsen.
Karl’s children long suspected Karlsen was responsible for their mother’s death.
On New Year’s Day in 1991, Christina, who was 30 at the time, died trapped in the bathroom of the couple’s home in Murphys, California, after spilled kerosene and a faulty electric light ignited a fire.
Karlsen, Christina and their three children were living in Murphys, California, when Karl set fire to the home after boarding up the bathroom window, leading to his wife’s death
Karl later claimed he could not rescue Christina (left and right) after saving all three of their kids from the burning home
A firefighter who responded to the scene described for Dateline a harrowing scene, with smoke rising from the ravaged home. After a few minutes, his partner announced that he found Christina’s body.
When Levi Karlsen died in what was initially deemed an accident in 2008, leaving behind a wife and two daughters, his father cashed in on his $700,000 life insurance policy
Karlsen was credited with saving Levi and the couple’s two daughters, Erin and Katie, by getting them out of the burning home.
He told investigators at the time that he was not able to go back for his wife.
It was later determined that Christina couldn’t escape through the bathroom window because Karlsen had boarded it up from the outside just days earlier because it was supposedly broken.
Investigators listed Christina’s official cause of death as an accident.
Karlsen left California with his three children two weeks later and used the $200,000 life insurance money to buy a home in New York.
In a 2013 interview with ABC News, the couple’s daughter Erin Deroche – who was just six at the time – recalled hearing her mother screaming as the fire burned.
‘At the time, I was six years old. I didn’t understand that my mother was behind that wall dying,’ Deroche said.
As she got older, Deroche said she was able to process what happened and came to believe that her father didn’t do enough to help save her mother.
‘He didn’t make an effort to save her. He just stood there,’ Deroche said.
Karl’s second wife, Cindy (right), helped police bring him to justice when in 2012 she agreed to wear a wire and elicited a partial confession from him about his son’s death
‘That’s not how people are supposed to act when someone they love is trapped and literally burning in front of them.’
Deroche said she and her brother Levi were about 11 or 12 when they secretly discussed the possibility that their father was somehow involved in their mother’s death.
Levi, a married father of two young daughters, died on November 20, 2008 in an apparent accident when he was just 23.
An old Chevy pickup truck fell on top of his chest, crushing it and killing him, while he was working underneath it doing repairs at his father’s property in upstate New York.
Karl, by then married to his second wife, found his son in the garage and told Cindy to call 911. The family had jest returned home from another relative’s funeral.
LEvi’s death, like his mother’s 17 years prior, was initially ruled an accident.
Police started looking into the case when a family member tipped them off that Karlsen had claimed his son’s $707,000 life insurance payout.
In early February, a California jury convicted Karlsen of first-degree murder by arson in the killing of his first wife in 1991
In 2012, Cindy Karlsen became alarmed after learning that her husband had taken out a $1.2million life insurance policy on her.
Fearful that she might be next to die, she agreed to cooperate with the police by secretly recording her conversation with Karl, in which he admitted to removing his truck’s front tires and raising it on a single jack before Levi volunteered to do the repairs.
Following a 10-hour interrogation, Karlsen eventually told police he had been there when the truck fell on his son. He maintained it was an accident but admitted that he left his son to die.
He later pleaded guilty in exchange for 15 years to life in prison.
After Karlsen was charged with his son’s murder, police in California reopened the investigation into his first wife’s death, eventually bringing formal charges against him.