Karl Karlsen on Dateline: Two Deaths, Payouts, and Convictions

The Dateline NBC episode “The House on the Hill,” which aired February 28, 2020, told the story of Karl Karlsen, a convicted murderer who killed his wife in a 1991 California house fire and his son in a 2008 truck “accident” in upstate New York, collecting life insurance after each death.¹ Both deaths were first ruled accidents. Karlsen later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for his son’s death and was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder for his wife’s. He is serving consecutive sentences that effectively amount to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The 1991 Fire That Killed Christina Karlsen

On January 1, 1991, Christina Karlsen, 30, died of smoke inhalation inside the family’s wooden mining shack in Murphys, California. She was trapped in a bathroom whose window her husband had boarded up with plywood just days earlier.² Karl Karlsen and the couple’s three young children got out. Four days after the fire, he moved the children across the country to New York.

Karlsen had taken out a life insurance policy on Christina 19 days before her death and collected more than $200,000 within days of it. A California Department of Forestry investigator, Carl Kent, found the circumstances suspicious, and an independent fire cause investigator, Kenneth Buske, determined there was evidence the fire had been set deliberately. The case stalled anyway. Investigators cited a lack of funding to travel to New York to interview Karlsen, and the local District Attorney’s office concluded that while it was a “good circumstantial case,” there was not enough evidence to prosecute at the time.³ The fire was ruled an accident.

The 2008 Death of Levi Karlsen

In November 2008, Karlsen’s 23-year-old son, Levi, was killed on the family property in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Levi was working underneath a pickup truck supported by a jack. Karlsen later admitted he jumped into the cab to make the truck drop, then left his son pinned underneath while he went to an event with his second wife.⁴ Levi died of his injuries. The death was initially classified as an accident.

Seventeen days before Levi died, Karlsen had coerced him into taking out a $700,000 life insurance policy that named his father as the sole beneficiary.³ Karlsen collected the full payout. Former New York State Police investigator Jeff Arnold later described the timing of the policy as “beyond bizarre.”

A Pattern of Fires and Payouts

Prosecutors eventually traced a longer pattern. In 1986, while Karlsen was on the verge of bankruptcy, his new Dodge Charger caught fire in his driveway after he had removed his belongings from the vehicle; he collected insurance on it. In 2002, a fire destroyed his horse barn in Varick, Seneca County, killing his Belgian draft horses. He had raised the coverage on the barn from $20,000 to $115,000 eighteen days before the fire and had removed custom horse harnesses beforehand. He collected the full $115,000.⁵

Seneca County District Attorney Barry Porsch argued in court filings that the fires were part of a “continuous scheme” of insurance fraud, writing that when Karlsen ran out of money, he “commits another insurance fraud by killing an immediate family member or burning his own property.” Across the incidents, Karlsen collected more than $1 million in insurance money over a 22-year span.³ Karlsen was never charged over the car fire or the barn fire, and the New York trial judge ruled prosecutors could not introduce the barn fire as a “bad act.”⁵

How His Second Wife Helped Catch Him

The case cracked open through Cindy Best, Karlsen’s second wife, whom he had married roughly two years after Christina’s death. By 2011, nearly two decades into the marriage, Best had grown suspicious that her husband was responsible for both Levi’s and Christina’s deaths. She was particularly alarmed to learn Karlsen had taken out a $1.2 million life insurance policy on her, making her, as she put it, “worth $1.2 million to Karl if I was dead.”³

Best hired a private investigator and had her cousin contact the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office in February 2012, launching an eight-month investigation. She agreed to work as an informant. On November 16, 2012, deputies wired her with a hidden microphone for a meeting with Karlsen at a restaurant in Seneca Falls, while four plainclothes detectives monitored from nearby tables. Over about an hour, Karlsen stopped short of a full confession but made a telling admission: “I didn’t push the truck. But I took advantage of the situation once it happened.”⁶

A week later, on November 23, 2012, investigators intercepted Karlsen on his way to another meeting and took him to the Seneca County law enforcement building. Over a nine-and-a-half-hour video-recorded interrogation, he cycled through versions of events before admitting he had knocked the truck onto Levi and walked away. He was arrested and charged with murder.⁶

Guilty Plea and Sentence for Levi’s Murder

On November 6, 2013, the day his trial was set to begin in Seneca County Court, Karlsen pleaded guilty to second-degree depraved indifference murder for Levi’s death.⁷ Prosecutors dropped a second murder count for intentional killing and a charge of insurance fraud, and the federal government agreed not to pursue additional charges. On December 16, 2013, Judge Dennis Bender sentenced Karlsen to 15 years to life, telling him: “You belong in prison and I suggest you belong there until you die.”⁴

Investigators had also discovered that Karlsen used $60,000 of the insurance proceeds from Levi’s death to buy life insurance policies on Levi’s two young daughters, Elletra and Ivy, with a combined death benefit of $744,000 and himself as the sole beneficiary. Their mother, Cassie Hohn, said she was certain the girls “were in his line of victims.”⁸ Cindy Best cashed out the policies in 2015.³

Trial and Conviction for Christina’s Murder

The New York conviction pushed California authorities to reopen the 1991 case. In 2014, the Calaveras County District Attorney’s office charged Karlsen with first-degree murder, and he was extradited to face trial. Christina’s sister, Colette Bousson, had suspected Karlsen since 1991 and had spent years pressuring law enforcement, writing letters to politicians, and building a Facebook group to keep attention on the case.³

The trial took place in Calaveras County Superior Court in January and February 2020. District Attorney Barbara Yook led the prosecution. Jurors heard from Karlsen’s eldest daughter, Erin DeRoche, from Bousson, and from fire investigator Kenneth Buske, who testified he had found evidence the fire was set. They also watched the eight-hour New York interrogation video and listened to a four-hour audio interview California investigators conducted in 2014.⁹

DeRoche, who was six when her mother died, testified that her father had made no effort to save Christina. “He didn’t make an effort to save her. He just stood there,” she told ABC News.¹⁰ She also recounted visiting her father in jail after his 2012 arrest, where she said he smiled and told her, “It’s been 22 years, they haven’t caught me yet and they’re not going to.”¹¹

On February 3, 2020, the jury found Karlsen guilty of first-degree murder.¹² In March 2020, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, with that sentence to run consecutively after his New York 15-years-to-life term.¹³

Appeal and Where Karlsen Is Now

Karlsen appealed his California conviction. In March 2024, the California Third Appellate District Court of Appeal issued a 56-page decision rejecting his arguments, which included claims of prejudice from the nearly three-decade delay between the fire and the criminal complaint, allegations that the prosecution had lost defense evidence, instructional errors, and ineffective assistance of counsel. The court upheld the conviction and a restitution order requiring Karlsen to pay his two daughters $200,000 in insurance proceeds collected after Christina’s death. It agreed with him on one narrow point, striking a $10,000 statutory restitution fine.¹⁴

Karlsen remains incarcerated, serving the consecutive sentences for the murders of his wife and son.

Beyond the Dateline hour, the case has been covered in an ABC News “20/20” segment featuring Karlsen’s daughters, his sister-in-law, and Cindy Best, and in an Oxygen “Accident, Suicide, or Murder” episode.³ In 2023, true-crime author Aphrodite Jones published “Levi’s Eyes,” drawn from near-daily interviews with Karlsen at San Andreas State Prison over two years, with cooperation from Cindy Best, who wrote the epilogue.¹⁵

1
Democrat and Chronicle. Who Is Karl Karlsen NBC Dateline Airs Story About His Killings
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Syracuse.com. Murder Trial of Karl Karlsen Starts for Death of His First Wife
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ABC News. Daughters on Losing Mother, Brother After Dad Killed for Insurance Payouts
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6ABC. Karl Karlsen Case
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Syracuse.com. DA Murder Suspect Karl Karlsen Got $1 Million From Insurance After Fires, Deaths
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Syracuse.com. Police Karl Karlsen Investigation Hit Full Speed Ahead After He Confessed to Wife
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Syracuse.com. Karl Karlsen to a Nearly Empty Courtroom Admits He Killed His Son
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Syracuse.com. Karl Karlsen Had Nearly $750,000 of Life Insurance on Granddaughters
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Union Democrat. Karl Karlsen Trial Coverage
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ABC News. Daughter of Murder Suspect Karl Karlsen Believes Father Killed
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Good Morning America. Daughters on Losing Mother, Brother After Dad Killed for Insurance Payouts
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New York Times. Karl Karlsen Convicted of Murdering Wife for Insurance
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Syracuse.com. Karl Karlsen Who Killed Son for Money Will Spend Life in Prison for Wife’s Murder
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Calaveras Enterprise. High Court Denies Murderer Karlsen’s Appeal to Avoid Paying Daughters
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Finger Lakes Times. Levi’s Eyes Looks at Karlsen Cases