Carol Carlson

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An unlikely pair finds love in the Pacific Northwest.

He was a nurse, and she was a nurse's aide, and it just bloomed from there.

It was sort of like the storybook wedding.

They were pretty happy.

But the fairy tale ends when something evil befalls the remote Washington wilderness.

Her sweatpants have been pulled down to her knees and there's a lot of blood around.

As investigators take a closer look at this rural community, they uncover a disturbing family dynamic.

She essentially controlled his life, ran his life, told him what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

They were unnaturally close.

She was terrified that something was going to happen to her.

She told me that if anything should happen to her, this needed to go to the police.

She wanted to humiliate and embarrass her, even in death.

July 18th, 1998, Kapowson, Washington.

It's a tranquil summer night in this remote community just south of Tacoma.

But at 8:59, the peace is shattered when the sheriff's office receives a desperate call from 27-year-old Daniel Carlson.

He says, I found my wife, she's covered in blood.

I don't know what happened.

Please send help, send the police.

There's something wrong.

Officers and first responders race to the secluded location.

It takes them about 13 minutes to arrive.

They can see that there's a woman on the couch,

that there's a lot of blood around.

The victim, Lisa Carlson, a young mother, had been found in her residence.

Police arrived and they found her husband there, Daniel Carlson.

They don't really know what they have here, but they don't want it contaminated anymore by Daniel's presence.

So it's standard procedure to remove people who are in the scene out.

While EMTs render aid to Lisa, officers calm down her husband and ask him to recount what happened.

Dan says that he was at work when he received a disturbing call from his mother, who lives just up the road.

His mom is telling him, look,

your twin boys have walked up to the house here

and I've been trying to reach Lisa on the phone and I can't reach her.

I've called repeatedly.

So I think you should go check and see what's going on.

Dan says when he arrived home, he found his wife of four years unresponsive and covered in blood.

Police don't really know what they have here.

Of course, Dan is the person that finds Lisa, so the investigators have a lot of questions questions for him on him and on Lisa and their relationship.

Lisa Dahm was born in 1971 in San Diego, California, the elder of two children.

Lisa grew up as a military brat.

Her father was Army.

She spent a lot of her youth moving around from military base to military base.

When Lisa's nomadic family finally settled in Tacoma, Washington, Lisa was able to really come into her own.

She had a great presence, she was sharp, sharp wit,

and she did not suffer fools lightly.

So, yeah, she was amazing.

After high school, Lisa decided to pursue a career in healthcare.

She was tough as nails on the outside, but once you got to know her, there was a tenderness and a caring within her that

really

you got to have to be a good nurse.

After getting her certification, Lisa took a job as an aide in a nursing home.

There, she met 22-year-old Dan Carlson.

He was a nurse, and she was a nurse's aide.

And she needed to ride home one night.

And that was the beginning of their relationship, and it just bloomed from there.

On the surface, Lisa and Dan couldn't be more different.

I met Dan in sixth grade camp.

He was a great kid.

He was a little shy, a little bit off-kilter.

Dan was the quintessential virgin.

He had had no experience whatsoever with anybody.

He gets to nursing school and he meets Lisa and he was, I was doing everything I could to get her attention.

They say that opposites attract, and I think that In the case of Lisa and Dan,

that has to be it.

Dan was quiet, and perhaps his obvious adoration of Lisa was attractive to her.

Dan is very friendly, hard worker.

He was extremely efficient in his job.

Obviously, he's a caring person.

I thought he was a great guy.

Dan and Lisa dated for about a year and then decided to get married.

Shortly after the couple married in 1994, they both transferred to the Rainier Rehabilitation Center, a home for disabled adults where Dan's father, Darryl, worked as an attendant counselor and Dan's mother, Carol, worked in housekeeping.

Dan seemed to have a very good relationship with both of his parents.

They seemed very close.

Dan and Carol were very, very tight at work and would meet quite frequently.

Working with each other on a daily basis brought the entire family even closer together.

And soon enough, they were welcoming new additions to their tight-knit unit.

About a year after Dan and Lisa married, she was pregnant and she had twin boys.

Of course, everybody was very happy about that, the parents and the grandparents on both sides of the family.

Lisa's mother was amazing.

She was a doting mother.

She was extremely protective of her children.

She loved those children absolutely dearly.

They were, without a doubt, her heart and soul.

After the birth of their sons, Lisa and Dan were forced to make a difficult financial decision.

She had decided to be a stay-at-home mom because twins are expensive.

The cost of two kids in daycare would have just been absolutely, economically unfeasible for them.

That forced them to be a one-income family.

Unfortunately, they immediately had financial problems.

They had accumulated 10 credit cards and a lot of debt.

debt.

As the couple watched their last pennies slip away, Dan's parents reached out with an offer.

His parents started floating the idea of having them move out to live in Kapowsen, which is very, very pretty, but very

thinly populated.

Dan's mother, Carol, invited them to come to their property where they'd put up another mobile home for the couple and their children.

So it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The couple moved out to the Carlson homestead in September of 1997.

While Dan worked to get the family's finances back on track, his parents stepped in to help with the twins.

Dan and Lisa filed for bankruptcy finally to try to get on their feet, get rid of all the debt they had from credit cards and school loans.

We talked a lot about his plans that he had for the future.

He was really focused on his family.

But on July 18th, the Carlsons' future is ripped out from under them when Lisa is found covered in blood inside their mobile home.

Mrs.

Carlson had been shot,

and there were multiple shots that she had received.

Two shots were to the head and one to her chest.

She's dead.

Homicide investigators are immediately summoned to the residence and waste little time getting to work.

So the detectives, when they arrive, they walk in, they immediately see Lisa is on the couch.

She is

lying with her head on a pillow that is up on the end of the couch.

Her lower half is covered with a blanket.

When police take the blanket off of Lisa, they see her sweatpants have been pulled down to her knees and they're kind of inside out.

Additionally,

in Lisa's left hand, she has an electronic controller.

This is attached by wires to, it's a sex toy.

The television is on, set to the VCR.

The tape in the TV was a triple X-rated, you know, pornography tape.

Your first take on this is that she was engaged in masturbatory activity, auto-erotic activity, watching a pornographic tape, and she was killed while she was in that position.

Coming up, a possible motive is uncovered.

Drawers are pulled out and then dumped, basically upside down.

It looks like maybe it was a burglary gone wrong, but the evidence suggests far more sinister.

A neighbor reports seeing this white car that he didn't recognize headed down the road towards Lisa's house.

You could see marks from where the hair and her blood had been dragged along the back side of the sofa.

On July 18, 1998, investigators in Kapowsen, Washington are on the scene of a gruesome homicide.

Dan Carlson says he found his wife, Lisa, shot dead in the couple's remote mobile home.

It's clear, at least from their understanding before the autopsy, that she has two gunshot injuries to her head and one up on the upper part of her left chest.

A bizarre crime scene has thrown investigators for a loop.

Lisa's body is on the couch in the living room.

She's kind of splayed out in a kind of awkward pose.

She's got a sex toy in her hand and it's a pornographic video in the VCR.

Detectives begin scouring the trailer for clues.

Police are searching mostly for the weapon.

Police cannot find the gun.

And that's key to building a case.

In their search of this crime scene, they identify, locate, and recover three 22 long rifle shell casings.

They're also looking around the house to see what's the level of disturbance in this house, in the master bedroom, and in the master bathroom.

Drawers are pulled out and then dumped basically upside down.

It looks like the house has been ransacked, trashed.

You know, maybe it was a burglary gone wrong.

But upon further examination, investigators find evidence that points elsewhere.

There were many items of value that were clearly in plain view that were not taken.

The TV wasn't taken, the computer wasn't taken, the stereo wasn't taken, Lisa's jewelry wasn't taken.

taken, there's nothing missing at all, and there's no sign of forced entry at all.

In light of the puzzling crime scene, investigators turn back to Lisa's husband in hopes that he can help bring some clarity to the situation.

When you have a homicide, the spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend is always going to be the very first people that law enforcement are going to look at.

Dan tells police that his wife had gone out in the morning and was supposed to be home in time for him to leave for work at 1.30.

Daniel reports that she's late, that she doesn't get home till about 2.15,

and he immediately takes the car and then heads off to work.

He says he leaves around 2.20 in the afternoon and gets to work around 3 o'clock.

Dan says he was supposed to work until 10.30, but at 8 p.m., he received a phone call from his mother, Carol Carlson.

He got a call from his mother that the twins had walked up to her place all by themselves and that she couldn't reach Lisa on the phone.

Carol assumed that Lisa was sleeping.

Dan told police he left work early to go home to check on Lisa.

He says he comes through the front door.

He sees Lisa right there and she's covered in blood.

He goes immediately to Lisa.

He takes her pulse.

He then goes to the phone and he calls 911.

You want to know, are there people that had it out for Lisa?

Was there anybody following her, stalking her?

Did she report being harassed by anybody?

All these questions get asked, and the answers to all those questions are no.

Everybody liked Lisa.

She didn't have any enemies.

Without any leads to go on, detectives turn the scene over to crime scene investigators and begin canvassing the neighborhood.

When they're doing a neighborhood canvas, they do identify a neighbor that lives down the lane from the Carlsons who reports seeing this white car that he didn't recognize but had headed down the road towards Lisa's house.

Any unknown vehicle would really stick out in this area because everybody knows everybody.

Everybody knows what everybody drives.

And you'd know if there was any vehicle that didn't belong there.

Could the driver of this suspicious vehicle be Lisa's killer?

Police put out an all-points bulletin looking for this white band.

As investigators continue the canvas, they follow up with Lisa and Dan's closest neighbors, Dan's parents, 52-year-old Darrell and 47-year-old Carol Carlson.

Daniel's parents' home was about 150 yards from their home through a very, very heavy forest.

Couldn't be seen from their house.

Carol's been home all day long and she says she never heard anything until

in her time estimate at 5.45 p.m., the twins show up on her front door.

But Lisa's not with them.

The twins had never, according to Carol, ever come up to the house by themselves.

The twin boys, who were just three years old, said that their mommy was sleeping.

Carol reported that she was a heavy sleeper and she thought, well, I'll just call her and, you know, try to wake her up.

She telephoned Lisa, got the answering machine a couple of times, left two, you know, fairly irate messages saying, wake up, Lisa, where are you?

As Carol tells her story, detectives can't help but ask a curious question.

If the twins have come up to your house and they've never done this before, should that make you concerned?

Most people would then have gone down to check on Lisa to see what's going on.

Carol's explanation was that she wasn't welcome.

Carol says that the problem started when she and her husband let the financially strapped couple move into their spare trailer rent-free.

When you live near your in-laws and you're indebted to them for a place to live,

they sort of feel that they have the right to drop in.

And Dan's mother, Carol, did drop in a lot.

Lisa did not appreciate this, not even a little tiny bit.

And that was a source of friction.

Carol says that Lisa had mistaken her well-intentioned help as meddling.

Carol says, I didn't want to create any problems by going down to the house myself.

As detectives wrap up with the Carlsons, their radios crackle with an urgent message from the crime scene.

CSI has encountered additional problems with the evidence.

From doing blood spatter analysis of the high-velocity spatter on the couch and on the wall, the position in which Lisa was shot indicates that she was sitting up on the couch, in the center of the couch, and not where she was found.

The entry wounds, they were all from left to right, all three of them, and from up to down.

Also on the back of the couch, one could see that there was a hair swipe pattern from the bloody hair.

So she was moved from the position where she was shot.

There's this pornographic tape in the VCR and the VCR is on.

So if she's actually watching this tape, I would expect to find the remote within easy reach, likely on the couch next to her.

But it's not there.

This was a very poorly staged crime scene.

It was a massive screw-up on the people that staged it.

It didn't fit the narrative whatsoever.

Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to set up a scenario that made Lisa look bad.

There was a very strong attempt here to humiliate humiliate Lisa.

Humiliate her in death.

Humiliate her as a person.

Humiliate her as a mother.

Now, who would do that?

Would a stranger do that?

A stranger doesn't care.

They have no connection to Lisa.

Coming up, an unexpected love affair is exposed.

Police want to know if there'd been some kind of lover's quarrel.

What's his relationship with Lisa?

Was there a jealousy component?

And a new piece of evidence reveals telling statements.

She decided to secretly tape record a conversation with him.

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Investigators working the murder of 27-year-old mother of two Lisa Carlson have uncovered inconsistent evidence suggesting a doctored crime scene.

When it's a stranger-to-stranger type thing, or it's a home invasion, they don't move bodies and pose them, such as this.

So this immediately puts it into some intimacy with somebody somewhere very close to her that she's had contact with before.

Investigators don't need to look far for someone who fits the bill.

Lisa's husband, Dan, is still on the scene, and when detectives ask him about the recent state of his marriage, he drops a bombshell.

She was planning on leaving him and taking her kids, taking the two boys, and moving away.

Dan tells police that their marital issues coincided with their financial woes.

They realized that their marriage had deteriorated and there was probably no going back.

They hadn't decided what to do and they couldn't afford to be divorced.

They were just kind of trapped or felt trapped.

The two of them had an arrangement they would continue to live at the mobile home, both of them, with the children, but that they were informally separated.

Lisa slept in the bedroom, Dan slept on the couch.

They were not sexually intimate and according to Dan hadn't been intimate for 18 months.

So this was really a very

stressful relationship.

Dan says that the relationship became even more stressful when Lisa started seeing Dan's childhood friend, Sean McKilla.

He was initially Daniel's friend.

He developed a relationship with Lisa, a first platonic friendship relationship.

But the longer they were together and the more time they spent together, I think that the romance developed between Sean and Lisa.

While Dan is their immediate focus, Sean is now on the radar as a potential person of interest.

It's clear, Dan has to be ruled in or out.

The first thing police have to do is establish whether Dan actually has an alibi or not.

Police confirm that Dan was at work that day, that he was late arriving at work and left early.

The police decide fairly early on that Dan didn't have a big enough window of time

to have killed Lisa and staged the murder and ransacking the house before he left for work.

There just wasn't time to do all of that.

After speaking with Dan, detectives turn their attention to his wife's new flame, Sean McKilla.

They have to understand what motivations does he have?

What's his relationship with Lisa?

Was there a jealousy component?

Police want to know if there'd been some kind of lover's quarrel, perhaps, between Sean and Lisa.

Early the following morning, detectives arrive at Sean's apartment for a chat.

The police showed up at my front door at about six o'clock in the morning on the 19th of July.

They flashed their badges, and I was in shock.

Sean sits down with detectives and openly admits to his love for Lisa.

Lisa and I were friends almost immediately.

Dan did a lot of working, so I'd hang out with Lisa and the kids.

Lisa and I maintained a friendship.

And after they split up, and I'd known they'd split up, I absolutely fell in love with her.

It wasn't like we were planning it.

It just sort of happened.

She was waiting for the bankruptcy to hit.

That was why they were staying together still.

The bankruptcy was just coming to a close.

So once the bankruptcy was finalized, that would essentially have released Lisa from all of the debt that they had accumulated, and I think would have put her into a position to then file for divorce.

Although Sean sounds smitten with Lisa, detectives can't just take his word for it.

They said, well, can you account for your whereabouts in the last 24 hours?

So of course, I go to my computer.

I said, I can not only account for them, I can give you the chat logs.

My background is IT.

That afternoon, I spend several intervening hours on a number of bulletin board systems online.

After Sean is effectively cleared as a suspect, he tells investigators that he might be able to help shed some light on Lisa's final hours.

On July 18th, the morning that Lisa was killed, she'd spent the night at Sean's.

She'd come out the night before, and we'd spent time together.

And she looked at me and she says, This is it.

After Dan goes to work today, I'm leaving.

I'm going to pack up the kids and I'm out.

And then you and I are going to, we're going to go to your father's and we'll get out of here.

Sean had family in Arizona, and it seemed to be a place where they could relocate and start over.

I said, Great, let's go.

She told me she loved me.

The last thing I saw

was a smile on her face as she drove off.

Sean suspects that Dan would not have been happy to hear about Lisa's impending plans.

I'm begging her not to say anything to Dan.

Just wait for him to leave and leave.

Don't give any heads up.

Don't give any warning, because if you say anything, it's only going to cause a fight.

Sean explains that Dan had become uncharacteristically volatile in recent days.

Dan, according to Lisa, was becoming more and more violent.

According to her, he'd slam things or throw things.

He'd hit her a couple times.

He, of course, was verbally and emotionally abusive.

He had started going down a darker road.

Not only does Sean tell detectives about Dan's alleged abuse, but he also seems to have proof.

After Dan had put his hands on Lisa's neck, she decided to secretly tape record a conversation with him about it.

When Lisa came to me with this tape, she told me that if anything should happen to her, it needed to go to the police.

Apparently, he admitted hitting her.

During that conversation, Lisa asks Dan to never hurt her again.

He promises never to hurt the children, but he doesn't say anything about hurting her in the future.

Police are positive that Dan would not have had enough time to kill Lisa and stage the crime scene before leaving for work.

But Sean suspects that Dan didn't act alone.

My thoughts immediately went to Carolyn.

She ran that family with an iron fist.

I know

that

Dan would do and say

just about anything if Carol asked him to do it.

Coming up, detectives uncover a mother's deadly obsession.

She was looking through the windows and trying to spy on her.

She made a comment.

Everybody thinks that I'm this meek and mild, timid little lady, but I can be one real mean bitch if you cross me.

Less than a day after the death of 27-year-old Lisa Carlson, her boyfriend, Sean McKillop, tells police that Lisa's estranged husband, Dan, and his mother, Carol, are likely behind Lisa's murder.

Carol's relationship to Dan is unnaturally close.

Everything that Daniel did was through his mother.

She essentially controlled his life, ran his life,

told him what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

Carol had no respect for Lisa.

She thought that her son should never have married Lisa.

Lisa always thought Carol was pushy.

Once they moved out to Kapowson, the pushy became downright manipulative.

She complained that Carol was starting to spy on her, was starting to break into the house, was starting to rummage through her belongings.

According to Sean, things only got worse when the twins came along.

Carol would call the twins her babies.

Now, sometimes grandparents do that, but it seemed that Carol really looked on these three-year-olds as her children.

I do remember at one point when there was an argument, and Carol tries to pick up one of the kids and Lisa pulls the kid back and says, that's my child.

And Carol says, don't you dare touch my baby.

And Lisa goes, that's my child.

You are the grandparent.

You will touch them when I say you can touch them.

Sean tells police that Lisa became convinced that Carol was plotting against her.

Lisa knew that something was really getting bad and

she kept her curtains shut because she knew Carol was looking through the windows.

Sean says that if Carol found out that Lisa was planning on taking the kids to Arizona, she might have spurred Dan into murderous action.

Carol is absolutely a master manipulator.

She'd made a comment when I was like 17, 18 years old.

Everybody thinks that I'm this meek and mild, timid little lady, but I can be one real mean bitch if you cross me.

Based on Sean's statement, detectives execute a search warrant at Carol's house on July 22nd.

Although they don't find a murder weapon, they discover something of great interest in the investigation.

They do find a journal that Carol's been keeping.

She was

basically spying on Lisa.

They were almost almost like reconnaissance.

Times and dates, Lisa's doing this, Lisa's going here.

They were almost like surveillance.

Carol kept a record of Lisa's shortfalls and not cooking, not cleaning the house, not taking good care of the kids.

The purpose of Carol's journal seemed to be information that would eventually bolster Dan's arguments for custody for the children.

Reading from Carol's journal, police realize Carol wasn't just a passive observer.

Carol's notebook tells a lot about her relationship with her son.

She encourages Dan

to think poorly of his wife.

Her anger towards Lisa was down in black and white.

But it's the most recent entries that truly shock investigators.

After Lisa was murdered, she even made a note about if her son was arrested, how much time might he serve.

Although the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, investigators need something more concrete in order to make an arrest.

Detectives hope a conversation with Lisa's mother, Donna Dahm, might help.

On July 29th, Donna confirms that she too was aware of Lisa's tumultuous relationship with Carol and Dan.

Lisa, she told her that Dan was acting crazy and weird.

She was terrified that something was going to happen to her.

We were begging her to get out of there as quickly as possible, but Lisa said that she couldn't yet.

Lisa's mother tells police that she had been so worried that she called her daughter every afternoon.

But on the day of the murder, Lisa never picked up.

Lisa's mother called and left a message on the answering machine, wondering where Lisa was and trying to reach her.

Detectives pull the tape from the answering machine for evidence, hoping it might help narrow down Lisa's time of death.

But when they listen to the tape, they make a curious discovery.

When the police took the answering machine to study it, there were Carol's two messages, basically ranting at Lisa to wake up, but nothing from her mother.

Lisa, are you awake?

Answer the phone.

Your kids are up here.

They've been up here for a couple minutes.

Come on, wake up.

Lisa, wake up.

Come on.

There would have been no reason,

logical reason, for

the phone call that Lisa's mother had left to not have been on that recording with Carol's messages.

So that tape was sent off to the FBI lab.

The FBI lab determined that the message that Lisa's mother had left on the tape had been erased and the messages that Carol left had been recorded over the top.

The answering machine had been tampered with.

There is only one person who investigators suspect had the motive and opportunity to tamper with Lisa's answering machine.

Police believed it would have had to have been Carol had gone on and erased Donna's voicemails to Lisa and then had made sure her own voicemails were there.

I don't think Carol could take the chance that somebody else's message could be on there that could then essentially time-stamp her into a much, much tighter box.

This newfound evidence gives investigators a stronger sense as to the likely roles both Dan and Carol played in Lisa's murder.

In my view, Dan was probably the shooter in this case.

Dan admits to buying a 22 pistol, but the disposition of that pistol, it all becomes very fuzzy.

He said he traded it away to somebody.

Who did you trade it to?

I can't remember who it was.

When did you trade it?

Oh, it was a while ago.

I don't really remember the date.

I just think that's also curious police finally concluded that the mastermind of all this

was carol

i feel very confident that carol was the one involved in doing all the staging

she really hated lisa so she wanted to humiliate her and embarrass her even in death

Coming up, could this murderous pair get off scot-free?

Just because you have an arrest doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have a conviction.

My view this was essentially a travesty of justice.

Investigators strongly believe that Lisa Carlson was murdered by her estranged husband, Dan, and his mother, Carol.

However, investigators hold off on making any arrests for now.

We wanted to make sure that we had everything we needed before swearing out charges against them, and that took a fair amount of time.

After solidifying their case for nearly three years, prosecutors finally decide it's now or never.

What finally finally led to their arrest was a meeting with law enforcement where we sat down for several hours.

We couldn't think of anything outstanding that we thought at that time could build a stronger case.

We were ready to go and we should go for it.

And we did.

On July 20th, 2001, detectives arrive at the Rainier Rehabilitation Center in Tacoma to arrest Dan and Carol Carlson.

I found it hard to believe that he had done this.

It was so out of character for him with a person that I had known.

Both Dan and Carol Carlson are charged with first-degree murder and face the possibility of life in prison.

The emotions that were running through my mind at that point were hesitant elation.

Just because you have an arrest doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have a conviction.

On February 3rd, 2003, the joint trial begins.

In opening statements, prosecutors allege that Carol was the mastermind behind the plot to kill her daughter-in-law.

Lisa was going to take the boys, move out of state, and Carol would not see the babies again.

So, I think that's what put this whole thing in motion.

Prosecutors argue that Carol couldn't carry out the murder on her her own.

I think she involved Dan in the homicide.

You've got to do this part.

And the only way that you're going to be able to keep your boys is if we get rid of Lisa.

Prosecutors believe that on July 18th, 1998, Dan and Carol were ready to execute their plan.

Carol was there in the morning to visit Dan before Lisa ever ever got home.

When Lisa arrived to take care of the kids, Dan asked to have a chat about their impending divorce.

But the moment Lisa sat down on the couch, Dan pulled out a 22 and shot Lisa three times.

Then, Dan headed off to work while Carol came by to take over.

Dan committed the homicide, but everything else was Carol.

The staging of the the crime scene, the ransacking of the bedroom, of course, bringing the children up to her house.

I think that was all her.

Clearly, she's the mastermind.

The defense argues that investigators overlooked a key piece of evidence: a mysterious white car seen driving near the Carlsons' home on the day of the murder.

Whether or not there was a white vehicle in the neighborhood that afternoon is unproven.

There's never been a time, never really been any specific descriptions other than a white vehicle.

It's just one of those things that I think no one will ever really know.

After nearly two months of testimony, the prosecution finally rests its case.

The jury was out for a very long time

and they came back and convicted them both.

The court sentenced them to 37 years, which

for individuals who had not previously been convicted of any felony crimes at all was a high sentence.

I felt justice had been served.

I felt sad for the boys.

I felt

disgust for Carol.

But justice for Lisa is short-lived.

In May of 2006, the appeals court makes a critical decision.

The case is overturned, all on the basis of the search warrant of Carol's property, which turned up her journal.

The police at the time did not have the correct search warrant.

They didn't have the legal right to take her journal, which a lot of the case had been built on.

So the verdicts were thrown out.

The Pierce County District Attorney's Office was prepared to try them again, and I was prepared to testify again.

But before Dan and Carol step foot in front of a new jury, the case takes an unexpected turn.

It was very close to a second trial when

I was notified that there would be no trial, that their plea agreement had been reached.

Dan pled to second-degree murder and then received a reduced sentence of 23 years.

Carol pled guilty to second degree assault and sexually tampering with a body.

She was sentenced to nine years.

I was disgusted at how little Carol was going to receive.

I knew full well that with time served, it meant she was probably going to get out fairly soon.

That didn't feel right.

Carol basically got out with time served.

In my view, this was

essentially a travesty of justice.

Now, Lisa's family is forced to accept the disheartening reality that not only is Lisa gone, but one of her suspected killers is enjoying her freedom.

The situation is extremely sad.

It's not something that you can really wrap your head around and make sense of.

I think about Lisa all the time.

Her smile, her laugh, her infectious personality.

She was a wonderful person.

Lisa and Dan's twins were raised by Dan's sister.

Dan Carlson is still in prison.

He is scheduled to be released in 2022.

Carol Carlson was released from prison in 2008 after serving only seven years in prison.

Abuse is never okay.

If you or someone you love is in an abusive relationship, there is help available.

Call the domestic violence hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE.

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