
District Attorney Barry Porsch calls them crucial to the case. Karlsen’s attorney is fighting to keep the statement and the restaurant conversation with Cindy Karlsen out of trial. If convicted, he could get up to life behind bars.
#Karl karlson murder trial
The 52-year-old has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in advance of his trial scheduled for next month. After years of taking pain medication for various ailments, his mind was fuzzy, he told detectives. In the videotaped interview, Karlsen explained he never would have intentionally caused the truck to fall. Eventually, he signed a statement acknowledging he had knocked the truck off its jack and walked away. Seventy-five times, Karlsen denied killing his son, said his lawyer, Lawrence Kasperek. “It was never planned from Day One to ever go that way.”Ī week later, Karlsen would spend 9½ hours being interrogated by police. “It was so wobbly,” Karlsen said, according to a recording of the conversation, heard against the backdrop of restaurant noise, played recently in court. The wire picked up Karl Karlsen telling Cindy how he’d removed his truck’s front tires and raised it on a single jack before asking Levi to repair the brake and transmission lines.

“I led him to believe our marriage had a chance if he came clean,” Cindy Karlsen said in a recent hearing, the husband she is now in the process of divorcing sitting in prison orange just a few feet away. “I would be worth $1.2 million dead to Karl,” she testified during a pretrial proceeding.Īfter speaking to sheriff’s investigators last year, she agreed to wear a wire and sit down with her husband in a crowded restaurant in New York’s picturesque Finger Lakes region in hopes of getting him to confirm her suspicions about the death of his son. She learned Karlsen had invested some of the insurance money from his son’s death into a life insurance policy on her. And New York and California authorities are now taking a new look at the circumstances of the 1991 death of his former wife, Christina Karlsen.Ĭindy Karlsen’s cooperation evolved from an unnerving revelation a year before she came forward. Investigators alleged that Karl Karlsen encouraged his son to take out an insurance policy and, days later, convinced him to work under a truck with an unstable jack, according to the article.That’s what prompted her to work with police, leading to second-degree murder and insurance fraud charges against Karl Karlsen in the death of his 23-year-old son, Levi. “I came out of there as a child who threw a stone out a window and did not want to be caught,” Karlsen said in a video that was shown during a court hearing, according to the newspaper article. But, he claimed, his actions were the result of panic and he claimed it was an accident, the article says. He said that he did not try to save him and let him die, the article says. In an interview with police, he admitted to police that he moved the van his son was working on from the cats, resulting in the crushed death of Levi Karlsen, the newspaper reported. Karl Karlsen gave investigators multiple versions of the story to explain how his son died, according to. “You know how some people go through life and everything that can go wrong goes wrong?” Karlsen told police, according to the Enterprise.wikipedia How old was Levi Karlsen? He said that he “went through the glove” by taking out the insurance policies, according to the article. He admitted to Cleere that he had taken out life insurance policies for his wife and his young children only months before the fire, according to the article.

Something’s not right with that,” Seneca County Sheriff’s Office Investigator John Cleere recalled the cousin saying, according to the newspaper article.
