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Thread: Karl Karlsen Sentenced to LWOP in 1991 CA Murder of his wife Christina Karlsen

  1. #11
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    Bousson: Karlsen called sister a “crispy critter”

    By Giuseppe Ricapito
    The Union Democrat

    Collette Bousson testified on Friday at the Calaveras County Superior Court that her sister Christina’s husband, Karl Karlsen, said Christina “looked like a whore” after she took glamour photographs for her thirtieth birthday and referred to her as a “crispy critter” just hours after her death in a 1991 Murphys house fire.

    It was a few months after Christina Karlsen’s birthday on June 19 and the Karlsen clan had traveled up to Chico to visit Bousson and her then-husband.

    A photo projected large onto a courtroom screen shows Christina looking over her shoulder at the camera. She’s wearing pink lipstick, pink eyeshadow and casts a pink shadow behind her. Her hair is rolled back and covered with a pink and gold headband.

    Christina was excited and happy until they returned to Bousson’s house, Bousson said.

    “The first thing he said to her was ‘take your makeup off. You look like a whore.’”

    Christina Karlsen ran from the room crying, Bousson said.

    Christina Karlsen, about four feet, eleven inches tall, had recently gained weight to about 150 pounds, Bousson said.

    She went by an affectionate nickname, Chucky, but Bousson recalled Karl Karlsen referring to her as “chubby” or “fat or fatty.”

    “Those weren’t nicknames,” Bousson testified. “Those were derogatory comments.”

    On Jan. 1, 1991, Bousson drove to Sacramento and told her mother about the fire in which her sister died. The same day, she raced to her father Art Alexander’s house in Murphys to find out what happened.

    Outside the house, she was first contacted by Christina’s daughter Erin DeRoche, then 6 years old.

    “I heard mommy calling for daddy and daddy ignored her,” said Bousson, recalling DeRoche.

    “I put my hand up because I wasn’t ready to hear what she had to say,” Bousson said.

    She confronted Karl Karlsen inside.

    “I told him I wanted to see my sister and he said I could not,” she said. “He said she was all burnt up... then he told me she was a crispy critter.”

    Bousson said she was taken aback by Karlsen’s callousness.

    “I mean, who does that?” she said. “I did not overreact. We continued our conversation.”

    Karl Karlsen asked her what she wanted to do with the body and she said she hoped Christina would be buried. Karl Karlsen ignored her request, cremated Christina and did not attend her cemetery funeral in Murphys, Bousson said.

    Calaveras County District Attorney Barbara Yook showed Bousson a variety of photos taken before the house fire, including photos of her children with the Karlsen children taken on Easter. Yook had Bousson point out the physical attributes of the home from the exterior, such as where bedroom and bathroom windows were located, and the elevated deck under the children’s feet.

    She told Karlsen’s attorney Richard Esquivel, the bathroom window was about five feet off the ground (and three feet above the deck), in contrast to some testimony by firefighters who said a ladder was needed to access it.

    Bousson was asked by fire investigators on Jan. 30, 1991 to diagram a schematic of the home — she testified Friday she visited there approximately 20 times — and noted a china cabinet with “knobs” around the top in the hallway.

    They used a variety of containers for fresh water because Chrsitina Karlsen was concerned about the cleanliness of the water delivered via a flume behind the home.

    She recalled “milk jug containers,” but never remembered a five-gallon blue jug being used for water. Other witnesses previously testified they were told by Karl Karlsen that Christina brought in a drum containing kerosene, thinking it was water.

    Bousson last saw Chrsitina alive on Christmas 1990. She had spent a few days at the Karlsen house with her children, before they all went to the house belonging to Christina Karlsen and Bousson’s father, Art Alexander.

    On the day after the fire, Bousson visited the burnt out home.

    “I walked into the bathroom where she died. That bathroom had not been burned,” she said.

    Bousson offered the same evaluation of Christina Karlsen as others who testified to knowing her outside of the relationship with her husband, a “best friend” and “free.”

    She said when she saw them together, she believed Karl Karlsen was “stifling her personality.”

    “If you didn’t abide by his rules… it could be detrimental,” she said.

    Pam Satterfield, a friend of the Alexander family, said she drove to the fire with her husband, but she waited in the car while he went to help. The Karlsen children stayed the night at her house the day after the fire, and Mike Karlsen and Jackie Karlsen, Karl’s brother and sister-in-law, respectively, stayed one night during their brief Murphys trip.

    Satterfield testified Karl Karlsen told her a kerosene heater was being filled in the house which led to the fire.

    The prosecution played another portion of a 2012 interview between Karlsen and law enforcement officials investigating the death of his son, Levi Karlsen.

    In the portion shown Friday morning, an unidentified official feigning unfamiliarity with the Murphys fire asks Karlsen for an explanation of the circumstances. Though over a dozen witnesses have testified to what Karl Karlsen told them about the fire, it was the first opportunity the jury had to see and hear it for themselves.

    Inconsistencies arise almost immediately between Karl Karlsen’s claims and the witness testimony, which began two weeks ago. Karl Karlsen tells the investigator kerosene was spilled two to three weeks before the fire and insurance was purchased on his family two months before the fire. Multiple witnesses have testified to no kerosene odor in the house as late as Christmas and the insurance policy was purchased on Dec. 12, two-and-a-half weeks before the fire. The investigator appears armed with outside knowledge of the fire and casually mentions Karl Karlsen’s omissions.

    Karl Karlsen said a cause was never determined, but when the official mentions a trouble light, Karlsen said it was on the floor in the spill zone. Karlsen said when he broke out the window to save five-year-old Levi, a fireball blew out the window, singed his face and knocked him off the porch.”

    “Where was Levi?” the investigator asked, handing Karl a pencil to mark it on a makeshift diagram of the house. “I’m not a fire guy.”

    Karl Karlsen also claimed he boarded up the window in the bathroom because “the whole wall was rotten,” contrasting his previous claims he did so because he and his wife broke it with a plunger handle. He cannot recall what agency sold him the insurance on his wife (State Farm) and said he had $50,000 policies on the children (he had $100,000 policies on each). He said his family forced him to move back and he did so within 10 days (both family members testified he wished to go back and they left four days after the fire) and in direct contradiction to the testimony he was stoic after the fire, he described himself as “a fricken trainwreck.”

    Karl Karlsen, as he has done throughout over six hours of footage already shown, reverts to a discussion on his injuries to disrupt the conversation.

    “My memory is not the best,” he said, noting he took methadone for many years.

    The official also asks questions about a barn fire in New York after the Murphys fire, where Karl received an insurance payout for the structure and the horses who died inside.

    During the video, Karlsen appeared to plug his fingers in his ears. At one point, he and Esquivel whispered and laughed with each other.

    https://www.uniondemocrat.com/news/a...a5880e0a8.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  2. #12
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    Karlsen inquired about insurance policy on wife weeks after her death

    By Giuseppe Ricapito
    The Union Democrat

    Karl Karlsen called a State Farm Insurance investigator twice in the two weeks following the death of his wife Christina in a Murphys house fire to inquire about the status of a $200,000 life insurance policy he had in her name.

    Darrin Luttrell, a former automobile claims adjuster with State Farm insurance called to testify Monday morning in Karl Karlsen’s murder trial, read from a page of notes he said he wrote after Karl Karlsen called him on Jan. 17, 1991.

    “He doesn’t want to seem like he only cares about the money,” Luttrell said. “He would like to get everything wrapped up ASAP.”

    Luttrell said Karlsen had called him another time, just over a week before on Jan. 9, 1991, to inquire on the status of the investigation. Luttrell said he offered his condolences — Christina Karlsen died of suffocation in the Murphys house fire on Jan. 1 — and Karl Karlsen told him he could “only grieve for so long” and had to move on.

    During the calls, Karl Karlsen told Luttrell living with his parents in Seneca County, New York, was not working out and he needed the means to leave. Luttrell, still reading from his notes, said he was in the process of conducting a routine investigation and needed to acquire Christina Karlsen’s medical records to confirm the information he had was accurate.

    Luttrell said he participated in the investigation of the life insurance claim with members of the Special Investigation Unit Heather Gower Small and Ulises Castellon, former State Farm employees who previously testified.

    Luttrell said he visited the fire scene twice, on Jan. 29, 1991, and some time around the “Thursday after Feb. 4.”

    He could not recall with certainty who was with him during each visit, though he testified Gower Small, Castellon, fire investigator Kenneth Buske and a forestry firefighter joining him.

    Luttrell did not offer any testimony regarding a conclusion or evaluation of the case. Gower Small and Castellon previously testified on Jan. 17 that they recommended Karl Karlsen’s claim be denied. Bolstered by a report from Buske, they said they believed Karl Karlsen intentionally set the fire with kerosene spilled in the hallway of home. The fire started, they said, outside a bathroom with a boarded up window where his wife Christina was bathing.

    Castellon testified their recommendation was not taken and Karlsen was paid $215,438.33 on Jan. 31, 1992.

    Mike Whitney, a Calaveras County District Attorney’s Office investigator, testified that he charted the distance between where the Karlsen residence once stood and the nearest neighboring home belonging to Vic Lyons, at 270 feet along a winding path, and 200 feet as the crow flies.

    A series of photographs taken in 2013 were projected on a courthouse screen to Calaveras County District Attorney Barbara Yook and the jury.

    The photographs advanced incrementally toward a vacant clearing with the address of 4060 Pennsylvania Gulch Road: through a scattering of trees, over a dilapidated and drooping barbed wire fence, onto a path hedged by brush and manzanita, past a water tank and to three red metal bars on the ground attached to an upright wooden panel.

    In some of the pictures Yook stands near Nic Lucero, the owner of the home while the Karlsens lived there and during the fire, to act as landmarks.

    “In all of the pictures he stood in, he was explaining to me where the house was,” Whitney said of Lyons.

    Whitney used the estimations to set GPS coordinates and tracked the distances between the neighboring homes, as well as the proximity of Karlsen home to Highway 4 and to the Roaring Camp Drive home of the first firefighter responder, Ken Thurston.

    Whitney also received carpet samples from the Lyons home — it was previously testified that they were the same in the Karlsen home — and provided it to investigators for analysis.

    The prosecution did not resume with the remainder of a video interview between Karlsen and Seneca County law enforcement in 2012 which lasted more than eight hours during testimony the previous week.

    John Cleere, undersheriff of the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office, testified he was present during a subsequent court hearing where Karl Karlsen admitted the charge of second degree murder in the 2008 death of his son, Levi.

    “He admitted that he caused the vehicle to fall on Levi Karlsen,” Cleere said.

    Cleere said he and other investigators knew about the 1991 Murphys house fire because they received reports from the Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office.

    “We were focused on Levi at the time, but we saw it as a part of an overall pattern,” Cleere said.

    Karlsen attorney Richard Esquivel asked Cleere to explain the concept of a ruse (Cleere described it as “a deception”), or lying to Karl Karlsen during the interrogation to elicit a confession.

    “The ultimate purpose of the interview is to gain the truth,” Cleere said.

    Esquivel said Cleere established a false fidelity with Karlsen to establish rapport.

    “I exaggerated my relationship with him to be more friendly than I was,” Cleere said.

    Cleere’s testimony also related to the investigations in a barn fire on Karlsen’s property which earned him an insurance payout and how Levi Karlsen sought an insurance policy with his father as the beneficiary.

    Gayle Hardy, who dated Christina’s father Art Alexander for five years before the start of the fire, said she remained friends with Christina after the relationship dissolved.

    “She was almost like another daughter to me,” she said.

    Hardy had dinner at the Karlsen home on Dec. 30, 1990, and smelled kerosene. On Jan. 1, 1991, she rushed to speak to Karl Karlsen at a San Andreas hospital about what happened. She said she knelt down to him while he was seated on a chair and placed her hand on him.

    “He showed no emotion at all. He just sat there, stared straight ahead. I didn’t know what to do,” she said.

    Aaron Lucero testified that he lived in the house alone after his parents, Nic and Norma Jo Lucero, moved out. He said he left the house in good condition and noted neither he nor his family used kerosene heaters.

    The prosecution previously stated their expectation to rest their case on Monday, at which point the defense will be allowed to call witnesses and present evidence. It is unknown whether Karlsen will testify.

    https://www.uniondemocrat.com/news/a...d53d2a295.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  3. #13
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    Edited:

    KARLSEN GUILTY

    By Giuseppe Ricapito
    The Union Democrat

    A jury of seven women and five men found Karl Karlsen guilty Monday morning of first-degree murder by arson in the death of his wife, Christina.

    Two special allegations against Karlsen, that he committed the murder for financial gain and that he had a previous murder conviction in the death of his son Levi, were found to be true.

    Members of the audience gasped when the verdict was read. Karlsen did not show any emotion.

    He will be sentenced on March 17. He faces a sentence of life without parole. His attorney, Richard Esquivel, said Karlsen will appeal the conviction.

    Before going into the courtroom to hear the verdict, members of Christina Karlsen’s family gathered in a group hug.

    Christina's mother, Arlene Meltzer, said to family members after the verdict, "Three years is a long time to stand firm." She has attended most of the hearings leading up to the trial, which was postponed several times.

    Erin De Roche, Christina and Karl's daughter, said, "I'm just happy."

    Christina's sister Colette Bousson said, "It's a long battle. It should have taken effect in 1991."

    Karlsen's brother, Mike, said. "I'm just glad it's over. It's done, finally. And I hope justice is served."

    The jury deliberated for more than seven hours, beginning Friday morning and concluding Monday morning at 10 a.m. When they emerged from a rear door at the Calaveras County Superior Court, none of the individuals looked at Karl Karlsen.

    “You’ve done a very important civic duty in this case, I must thank you,” said Judge Thomas A. Smith.

    Smith referred the case to the Calaveras County Probation Office to prepare Karl Karlsen’s sentencing report.

    The court was filled with more than 30 people. Many were relatives, though some spectators, employees of the Calaveras County District Attorney’s Office and cameramen packed the seats at the opposite side of the room from Karl Karlsen.

    A representative of the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said Karl Karlsen would serve the duration of his sentence in New York before he would be transferred to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to serve out a new sentence in the Christina Karlsen murder.

    https://www.uniondemocrat.com/news/a...b09dba36f.html



    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  4. #14
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    It's life for Karlsen

    By Giuseppe Ricapito
    The Union Democrat

    Karl Karlsen was sentenced to life without parole Tuesday morning in Calaveras County Superior Court.

    "You were a coward," Judge Thomas Smith said, referring to Karlsen leaving the courtroom because he had a low-grade fever. He listened to the proceedings from a holding cell.

    "If I could impose a harsher sentence I would," the judge said.

    Karlsen was convicted of first-degree murder of his wife, Christina, who died on New Year's Day in 1991 after a kerosene-fueled fire consumed their family home at 4060 Pennsylvania Gulch Road in Murphys.

    Cristina Karlsen's mother Arlene Meltzer testified, "You have caused me grief and to hurt and cry. I leave you in God's hands. You need to be locked up for the rest of your life."

    Colette Bousson, Cristina's sister, said "The one person, the only person who could have saved my sister's life drove away and left her alone."

    Meltzer burst into tears as she left the courtroom.

    Karlsen's attorney Richard Esquivel said after the hearing that he didn't disagree with Karlsen leaving the courtroom because "he maintains his innocence."

    He said he will appeal the judgment on Wednesday.

    District Attorney Barbara Yook said, "We were really impressed with the strength of Christina's family in delivering their impact statements. It didn't just end when she died. Look at the trauma that was caused after."

    https://www.uniondemocrat.com/news/a...9d8f22d9e.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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