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.
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