Karlsen Found Guilty Of Homicide In Wife’s 1991 Death
San Andreas, CA — A jury has convicted a former local brought back into the Mother Lode to face a decades-old murder charge.
After a nearly two-week trial, Karl Karlsen was found guilty Monday of killing his wife, Kristina Karlsen, who died in 1991 during a house fire, trapped in a bathroom at the family’s residence on Pennsylvania Gulch Road while Karl and their three children escaped.
At the time, the incident was deemed accidental even with admittedly suspicious circumstances in play such as a boarded-up bathroom window and her husband’s apparent lack of emotion in the aftermath. He later received $200,000 from a life insurance policy due to her death.
Spokesperson Sgt. Greg Stark shares. “The Calaveras County Sheriff’s Department wishes to send our condolences to the victim’s family…sentencing is scheduled for March 17 in Calaveras County Superior Court.”
As reported here in early January, Karlsen was extradited by deputies to Calaveras County from New York, where he was serving a 15 years-to-life sentence for the 2008 murder of his son Levi, who was crushed to death under a truck he was working on.
That case involved a $700,000 life insurance policy on his son for which Karlsen was the sole beneficiary. In 2013, five years after Levi’s death and one day before that trial was set to begin, Karlsen pled guilty to second-degree homicide.
