BONUS: Father Knows Death (Accident, Suicide, or Murder)

Speaker 1 It's time.

Speaker 2 Streaming now only on Peacock. How to Train Your Dragon.

Speaker 3 Everything we know about dragons is wrong.

Speaker 2 Peacock brings the adventure of dragons home.

Speaker 4 Toothless, you ready?

Speaker 2 Experience one of the biggest movies of the year.

Speaker 6 You have something

Speaker 6 none of us have.

Speaker 7 It's you and me, bud.

Speaker 2 How to Train Your Dragon, rated PG. Streaming now only on Peacock.

Speaker 8 Let's go.

Speaker 4 Bravos, the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City are back.

Speaker 6 Here we are, ladies.

Speaker 8 I don't like it.

Speaker 4 And they're taking things to the next level.

Speaker 6 You know, some people just get on your nerves. You questioned every single thing I have.
You're supposed to be my sister. I am your sister.
No, you're not. We have to be honest about this.

Speaker 8 I'm afraid. You should pay the losses off.

Speaker 6 No one sues the bottom. They all go for the top.

Speaker 8 Can I have the crazy pill that y'all put?

Speaker 6 Apparently, you're already taking it.

Speaker 4 The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, all new Wednesdays. Watch Bravo on Peacock.

Speaker 6 Hi, Snap listeners. We are bringing you a special bonus episode today from Oxygen's hit series Accident, Suicide, or Murder.

Speaker 6 You can also watch full episodes live or on demand on the free Oxygen app or on Peacock by clicking the link in our description. Enjoy.

Speaker 6 A family suffers a tragic loss after a fire engulfs their home.

Speaker 11 Carl Carlson saved his three children from inside of the Birmingham home.

Speaker 9 But he wasn't able to get inside to save his wife, Christina.

Speaker 13 Oh, she couldn't get out.

Speaker 6 Loved ones look to make sense of the horrific event. That might be fingernails.

Speaker 14 Why is that window boarded up?

Speaker 6 Years pass without answers.

Speaker 15 It's down as an accident. And she said, you might want to look into that further.

Speaker 10 This is just all hearsa.

Speaker 9 There just wasn't enough hard evidence to prove otherwise.

Speaker 6 Until another grim incident brings to light the unthinkable.

Speaker 17 Do we want to say this is a coincidence, that these are accidents?

Speaker 19 What really happened?

Speaker 6 On New Year's Day, 1991, at 2:26 p.m., fire emergency services are called to a structure fire in Murphys, California.

Speaker 21 Murphys, California is a very rural area in the Redwood Forest region.

Speaker 9 It's very isolated from other towns in California. And when firefighters finally arrive at the house, they find a structure that's almost fully engulfed in flames.

Speaker 11 They're confronted by a frantic man who identifies himself as Carl Carlson. Carl said he just saved his three children from inside of the burning home.

Speaker 9 But he says that he wasn't able to get inside to save his wife, Christina.

Speaker 11 Fire crews aggressively attack the fire and after an hour they're able to extinguish it.

Speaker 23 They enter the home.

Speaker 20 They know that Christina Carlson is reportedly inside the house.

Speaker 9 They find a lifeless body in the bathroom.

Speaker 9 It's a woman and she is in a prone position in the shower.

Speaker 11 The woman appeared to be Christina Carlson, the wife of the man that they had spoken to outside of the home.

Speaker 6 First responders inform Carl of their fatal discovery.

Speaker 15 Carl was the man who just lost his wife. He appeared to be emotionally distraught over that, but he was able to give first responders a synopsis of events leading up to this fire.

Speaker 9 Carl said that a few hours prior to the fire, the children had been put down for a nap. Christina was taking a bath.
They were in a house that wasn't properly heated. It was pretty cold.

Speaker 11 The home is an old miner's bunkhouse dating back to the gold rush.

Speaker 22 There was a fan that carried heat from one part of the house to the other up in the attic.

Speaker 9 So Carl says he actually went up into the attic to redirect the heat for her because it wasn't warm enough.

Speaker 9 And while he was up there, he brought a work light so he could see up into the attic.

Speaker 22 Upon coming down from that attic, he placed his work light on this cabinet that was in the hallway just outside that bathroom where Christine was.

Speaker 27 And he went out to the garage to retrieve tools.

Speaker 9 And it was while he was in the garage that he heard his wife screaming, Carl, get the kids.

Speaker 9 He runs to the house, but by the time he gets there, the fire is already too advanced for him to make entry.

Speaker 9 So he runs around to the children's windows, then he breaks the windows, and he pulls out his two daughters, and then he runs and pulls out his son Levi.

Speaker 11 At that time, he tries to save Christina. but thickness of the fire stops him from being able to access the hallway where he could save his wife.

Speaker 9 He says he then went and tried to make entry from the outside.

Speaker 15 But he could not help her.

Speaker 15 So he watched helplessly as the fire continued.

Speaker 9 Without a phone. He had to leave his wife inside and put all the kids in the car and together they drove to a nearby house to call 911.

Speaker 6 Carl discloses to investigators he has suspicions about how how the fire began.

Speaker 15 According to Carl, the utility light that he had been using to do some work may have dropped down on the rug right in front of that bathroom area.

Speaker 15 And then the heat from the valve could have started the fire.

Speaker 6 By 4.30 p.m., the county sheriff's office and a fire investigator arrive on the scene.

Speaker 15 Fire officials found the deepest char appears to be near the door of the bathroom.

Speaker 14 From the burn patterns, it was pretty clear that the origin of the fire was directly outside of that bathroom where Christina Carlson was taking a bath.

Speaker 15 Also in the hallway was the work light that Carl mentioned may have started the fire

Speaker 15 that's laying on the floor.

Speaker 18 There was also some red flags that stood out.

Speaker 15 The window to the bathroom where Christina died was boarded up with plywood.

Speaker 15 It was nailed on from the inside.

Speaker 22 There's been enough nails in that plywood that it wasn't going to come off easily.

Speaker 20 And that's why Carl apparently couldn't get his wife out of that house.

Speaker 17 There was also a heavy odor of kerosene in that area.

Speaker 11 Kerosene is flammable. Kerosene will start fires.
If a light falls on kerosene and ignites, it can burn down your house.

Speaker 29 Why would kerosene spill?

Speaker 14 right outside the door where Christine is taking a bath.

Speaker 27 Why is that window boarded up?

Speaker 6 This dark convergence of events has investigators returning to Carl for answers.

Speaker 6 Starting with the boarded up window.

Speaker 10 Carl tells us that days prior, Christina broke the window, they couldn't afford to fix it.

Speaker 15 His wife was complaining about the window making the bathroom too cold, so he boarded it up with plywood.

Speaker 9 Another question they had for Carl was how had kerosene gotten spilled outside the bathroom door?

Speaker 11 Carl said, the house is so old that it's heated by kerosene.

Speaker 11 And because the pipes have been frozen in the dead of winter, Carl and Christina Carlson were bringing water in in order to use the facilities.

Speaker 9 Christina had mistaken a jug of kerosene for a jug of water and brought it into the house.

Speaker 15 One of the pets inadvertently knocked the kerosene over a few days before the fire.

Speaker 9 It had seeped into the carpet and the kerosene smell never really went away.

Speaker 15 On its face, it looks like it could be an accident. But when someone dies, the default is to consider it suspicious until you know better.

Speaker 15 The kerosene that was spilled in front of the door to the bathroom, the boarded up window, by themselves maybe didn't mean much, but when you put them together in context, it gave us some uncertainty whether this really was an accident.

Speaker 6 News of the blaze quickly travels through this small rural community, reaching Christina's nearby family.

Speaker 7 Chrissy's sister pulled up to the house and came in.

Speaker 13 And as soon as I saw her face, I started screaming because I knew then

Speaker 13 that I had lost a precious child.

Speaker 7 Arlene just went ballistic. It was, she couldn't believe what she was hearing.

Speaker 13 It's a time I'll never forget in my whole life.

Speaker 13 Christina was a very bright little child.

Speaker 13 She grew up in Oklahoma and she moved up to Murphy's, California,

Speaker 13 and finished growing up there.

Speaker 7 She could bake.

Speaker 13 She could cook. She could dance.
If you could watch her dance, it was awesome. It's just such a terrible thing.

Speaker 13 I lost a child. I lost a daughter.

Speaker 13 That's awful.

Speaker 6 As Christina's family begins to search for answers, The morning after the incident, investigators still have doubts regarding the cause of the fire.

Speaker 25 The investigators weren't going to just accept that this was an actual fire based upon Carl Carlson's story.

Speaker 22 So the autopsy was performed the following day and investigators are looking for leads on the cause of the fire.

Speaker 9 Christina had soot covering most of her body. She had soot inside of her lungs, but her hair wasn't charred.
Her body wasn't burned in any places.

Speaker 11 The physician found no evidence indicating she was injured or incapacitated in that bathroom.

Speaker 20 The autopsy report, it's telling us that Christina Carlson died from smoke inhalation.

Speaker 22 And it shows that we have a death caused by the results of a fire.

Speaker 20 But it doesn't give us clear direction whether this death is an accidental death or it is a homicide.

Speaker 15 What was the actual cause of this fire? And were we looking at an accident or something more sinister?

Speaker 13 Carl left that very next morning.

Speaker 22 It became kind of a shock.

Speaker 25 Why is this quick escape from this area?

Speaker 9 Carl's trying to move on, and he meets this new woman.

Speaker 24 But this guy had a lot of suspicious things that happened around him.

Speaker 22 911.

Speaker 16 I think I need an ambulance.

Speaker 6 Less than 24 hours after a house fire cost Christina Carlson her life, investigators in Northern California are dealing with a series of suspicious circumstances surrounding the inferno.

Speaker 22 Carl Carlson, the husband, basically comes out unscathed.

Speaker 10 He gives this horrific story about how light might have fallen.

Speaker 20 It probably ignited.

Speaker 10 He saves the three children, but ultimately, Carl could not rescue his wife from the burning house.

Speaker 19 Investigators wanted to know, where is the truth?

Speaker 18 Is this an accident? Could this be a murder?

Speaker 14 So they start to have conversation with neighbors, family members.

Speaker 6 Meanwhile, Christina's family meets with her husband, Carl, to hear his first-hand account of what happened.

Speaker 13 Carl said the house caught fire because the kerosene lantern fell over.

Speaker 13 Carl was talking about how the fire had burnt his face and he said look at these burns.

Speaker 7 We didn't see any burns on his face. Nothing added up.

Speaker 13 Kept saying no it was an accident, wasn't it?

Speaker 13 No it wasn't. I know it wasn't.
I for one was really letting it be known that I did not believe him.

Speaker 7 If you didn't know Carl the way we did,

Speaker 7 if you didn't know the circumstances of how he wanted to keep her under his thumb, then

Speaker 7 you could be easily surprised that this happened.

Speaker 9 Christina and Carl met when Carl was stationed with the Air Force and they met at a military dance.

Speaker 9 Christina and Carl got married in 1984 and moved to New York where they were close to Carl's family.

Speaker 7 The first child was Aaron and then there was Levi and then there was Katie.

Speaker 9 While they were living there together as a married couple, they were having really serious money problems. And so Christina wanted to move closer to her family in California.

Speaker 7 She was raised in the country and loved the country, and she thought that would be a better life for them.

Speaker 9 The family moved to Murphy's, where they started renting a decades-old house.

Speaker 11 Christina Carlson is taking care of the home and taking care of the children, but maintenance is constantly required on this home to make it habitable.

Speaker 13 We talked once in a while, and I was learning that Carl would not leave her alone at any time.

Speaker 13 We all began to notice that strangeness there.

Speaker 13 Last time that I got to see her, he made it extremely uncomfortable for me to be there

Speaker 13 and she wasn't being treated right

Speaker 13 and I knew right then that there was something bad, something real bad going on and

Speaker 13 unfortunately we didn't quite gather but it was starting to unravel.

Speaker 6 As concern mounts in Christina's family, Carl makes a surprise announcement on the day following the fire.

Speaker 13 Carl started letting everybody know he was taking the children back to New York and he left that very next morning.

Speaker 15 Carl moves 3,000 miles away, doesn't stay for any funeral services, doesn't purchase a headstone. He just packs up and leaves.

Speaker 27 It's still very early on in the investigation. It became kind of a shock to the people looking into this fire.

Speaker 22 What is he running from?

Speaker 25 Why is this quick escape from this area?

Speaker 13 And that was even more confirmation that there was something wrong.

Speaker 9 Christina's family was so suspicious that they decided to collect their own evidence.

Speaker 7 About a week after the incident, we went out to the property and shot a video of what the house looked like after the fire.

Speaker 13 This here is the bit, bathroom

Speaker 13 where Christina was found.

Speaker 6 Kerosene had got spilled here. That's where they presume it started.

Speaker 13 I could see what was left of that building and it was nothing except plywood and the window.

Speaker 13 Why he didn't knock this out.

Speaker 7 There's no reason he couldn't have got to that bathroom.

Speaker 13 No reason.

Speaker 9 There were indentations or scratch marks that could have indicated that Christina had possibly tried to pull the board off of the window.

Speaker 9 That might be fingernails.

Speaker 13 This is what's really hard for me. I knew that window was nailed shut, so she couldn't

Speaker 13 get out.

Speaker 6 The family turns over their video evidence and continues to voice their concern to the police. But investigators find following the Meltzer's lead is easier said than done.

Speaker 15 Investigators in Calaveras County felt that there was something to this, but it's an area that's rural and it doesn't have a lot of money. Carl's in New York now, and he had already made a statement.

Speaker 15 It's going to cost a lot to send people to New York. They don't have a lot of resources to build a case to charge Carl Carlson.

Speaker 9 On March 3rd, 1991, Christina's death was officially ruled an accident. There just wasn't enough hard evidence to prove otherwise.

Speaker 34 Unless you have a witness, It's hard to prove arson. It's basically a fire investigator's word

Speaker 14 against Carl's word.

Speaker 10 At that point, State Farm Insurance paid out a life insurance policy of approximately $215,000 to Carl Carlson.

Speaker 7 When we found out the insurance company had ruled that it was an accident with all the facts the way they were, with all the information that was available to them, we were flabrious. We were shocked.

Speaker 15 I've worked with insurance investigators. If an arrest is not made, insurance policies are not going to deny the claim.

Speaker 6 Investigators are left only with questions. Was the money the motive for this crime? Or is it a little solace to a man who just lost his wife and the mother of his three children?

Speaker 6 The answers aren't readily apparent in the years following the incident as Carl distances himself from the tragedy.

Speaker 9 Carl's living back in New York in his hometown, and he's trying to move on.

Speaker 7 We stayed in contact with grandkids but we never were able to visit them after they moved back there.

Speaker 15 Carl purchases a section of farm from his parents and he gets involved in different farming events.

Speaker 9 A year later he meets this new woman, her name's Cindy Best. They meet while they're lion dancing and their relationship just takes off.
Cindy just immediately falls head over heels for this guy.

Speaker 9 She sees a man who is a single father and a widower and he's doing the best he can for his three children.

Speaker 9 On November 20th, 2008, at 3.50 p.m., 17 years after Christina's death, the local sheriff's department gets a call from a very frantic Cindy.

Speaker 22 911.

Speaker 16 Yeah, Frank, I need an ambulance.

Speaker 22 Okay, what's going on?

Speaker 16 The truck's fell on my stepson.

Speaker 16 And I don't think he's alive.

Speaker 6 The things I learned while we were filming this shocked me to my core.

Speaker 35 From the New York Times best-selling author of Bad Mormon, a memoir, comes a new three-part limited docuseries.

Speaker 6 The real secret lives are much darker, deeper, and more tragic. My earliest memories are of abuse.

Speaker 22 Had they taken action, could it have saved me?

Speaker 6 I just feel overwhelmed and horrified.

Speaker 35 Surviving Mormonism with Heather Gay. Watch all episodes now on Peacock.

Speaker 3 Law and Order Thursday on NBC.

Speaker 6 Go.

Speaker 4 Police, please!

Speaker 3 First, on Law and Order, justice hangs in the balance.

Speaker 4 Are we gonna let a killer walk free?

Speaker 3 Then on SVU, Kelly Giddish is back as Sergeant Rollins. I'm ready to work.
And Benson means business. My job is taking care of victims.
And on organized crime, Staper infiltrates a dangerous gang.

Speaker 35 I'll do it needs to be done.

Speaker 3 Law and Order Thursday on NBC.

Speaker 6 17 years after Carl Carlson loses his first wife, Christina, in a freak house fire, tragedy strikes again, this time in Seneca County, New York.

Speaker 16 The trucks are on my stepson.

Speaker 18 Cindy, the second wife of Carl Carlson, calls 911 to say that their truck had fallen off the jack and their son, Levi, was pinned underneath it.

Speaker 1 He's not alive.

Speaker 18 Is he breathing?

Speaker 32 No.

Speaker 24 The 911 operator wanted them to start CPR. You could hear Carl actually in the background of the call.

Speaker 16 Carl, do you know a CPR?

Speaker 10 Both Carl and Cindy are just out of their mind, borderline hysterical at that point when she calls.

Speaker 16 Oh my God.

Speaker 18 Upon receiving this call, Seneca County Sheriffs and other emergency personnels respond to the scene.

Speaker 33 The house of Carl Carlson is a farmhouse located in a very rural area.

Speaker 9 When first responders arrived at the scene, Carl and Cindy showed them the body.

Speaker 17 Just off the main house in this garage-type barn was the body of Levi Carlson.

Speaker 22 Next to him was a half-ton pickup truck.

Speaker 18 that Levi had apparently been working on.

Speaker 27 His injuries were to one central area of his chest.

Speaker 20 He had a crushing compression type wound, two, three, four inches wide and deep.

Speaker 18 He was a very bluish, purplish color, all indication that he had perished hours ago.

Speaker 6 Sheriff's deputies questioned the grieving parents of the 23-year-old victim to find out what they know about the tragic scene.

Speaker 15 According to Carl and Cindy, Levi had been over that day. Carl asked Levi if he could help work on the brake lines underneath this farm truck that used to haul stuff around, used to plow.

Speaker 20 The vehicle had been jacked up by Carl Carlson with a single post railroad jack.

Speaker 15 Farmers around here use those, they're common around here. The bad part of them is they're pretty wobbly because they're tall.

Speaker 24 According to Carl, it was around noontime.

Speaker 21 Levi was alive and working on the truck, and Carl and Cindy went to attend a funeral. A relative of Cindy's had passed away.
They went to a reception after the funeral.

Speaker 21 They came back home approximately four hours later.

Speaker 15 When he went into the garage to check on Levi, the truck had come down off the jack.

Speaker 15 Levi was underneath it.

Speaker 15 He's cold to the touch. Carl said, he then jacks up the truck, pulls Levi out, and he yells to Cindy to call 911.

Speaker 15 A devastating turn of events.

Speaker 6 Levi's father and stepmother are left to mourn a life beset by tragedy.

Speaker 11 Levi Carlson was the son of Carl Carlson's former wife, Christina, who had died a decade and a half earlier.

Speaker 34 All the kids were less than five years old when Christina died and Carl rescued them from the house.

Speaker 6 Growing up without his mother took its toll on Levi's relationship with his father.

Speaker 14 They fought a lot.

Speaker 34 They were very different personalities. Levi, from everything I know, was introverted, was quiet, had trouble in school, had financial difficulties.

Speaker 9 Levi was a very young father, starting his own family and trying to move his life in another direction. And over the past couple years, it seemed he was doing just that.

Speaker 9 He had gotten a job and he overcame a lot of challenges that he'd had in his life so far.

Speaker 21 It clearly looked like an accident to everyone.

Speaker 24 A young man working underneath the truck and the truck fell off the jack on top of him.

Speaker 15 The family doctor signs off and the death is accidental. There's no autopsy done.

Speaker 27 Basically the case is closed.

Speaker 25 Any further investigation into the death of Levi Carlson is ended at that point.

Speaker 9 And the family just has to live with that reality that they've lost their brother and their son.

Speaker 6 Members of Carl's family reach out to Levi's grandparents 2,000 miles away in Northern California to inform them of the news.

Speaker 13 I felt really bad, but I didn't think it was an accident. I thought

Speaker 13 it's happened again.

Speaker 7 It looked like Carl could get away with murder a second time, but we couldn't do anything about it.

Speaker 7 We just had to roll the punches and believe that eventually Carl would have to pay for the crime that he committed.

Speaker 6 Four years pass, and Carl Carlson and his family continue to move on in New York until a call comes in to the Seneca County Sheriff's Office that could crack open the mysteries surrounding these accidental deaths once and for all.

Speaker 15 February 2012, I received a phone call.

Speaker 15 And it's a woman who said she has information about a death that occurred in our county. She asked me first, Did you investigate the death of Levi Carlson back in 2008?

Speaker 15 So I looked it up on the computer and I said, Yeah, I see it here. It was never turned over to investigations.
It's down as an accident.

Speaker 15 And she said, You might want to look into that further because there's a good chance he was murdered by his father.

Speaker 6 In February 2012, investigators in Seneca County, New York are blindsided by a huge lead claiming that Carl Carlson had a hand in the tragic death of his 23-year-old son, Levi, four years prior.

Speaker 15 She says her name is Jackie Haimau, and she's actually Levi's cousin. I asked her why she felt that this was more than an accident.
She said she had some reasons.

Speaker 9 She had been in touch with Cindy and the Carlson kids over the past couple years. Based on conversations with them, she had heard some things that had raised her suspicions.

Speaker 24 According to Jackie, this guy had a lot of accidents.

Speaker 24 There's a lot of suspicious things that happened around him.

Speaker 15 She goes on to explain that there was a suspicious fire in California where his first wife died.

Speaker 9 She talks about the fact that Carl had made money off of Christina's death. and that Christina's children had never seen any of that money.

Speaker 24 No one in Seneca County had any idea about Carl Carlson's past while he was living here after he had moved here from California.

Speaker 6 But the biggest revelation from Jackie involves her cousin Levi.

Speaker 15 Jackie had told us, Cindy had told her that she believed Carl had killed Levi for insurance money by dropping a truck on him.

Speaker 15 So Cindy and Carl were estranged, and Cindy had moved out a month before. At that point, I promised her I'd look into it, so we did.

Speaker 28 At this point, this is just all hearsay.

Speaker 22 We as investigators now, this is where we step in, and we want to investigate every aspect of Carl's life.

Speaker 15 We started collecting data.

Speaker 15 What really broke it open for us was when we got some of the insurance information.

Speaker 24 Everything Jackie said to Lieutenant Clear, we found out to be accurate.

Speaker 20 We We find life insurance policies that were taken out a short time prior to the death of both Christina and a short time prior to the death of Levi Carlson for hundreds of thousands of dollars in both cases.

Speaker 28 The recipient of this big cash award is Carl Carlson.

Speaker 15 There was something going on here.

Speaker 6 The unthinkable question remained, could Levi's accidental death truly be a cold and calculated murder for money?

Speaker 15 I make the decision to reopen the case into Levi Carlson's death. What are we going to do with this, right? We've got some circumstantial evidence here, but we still don't have anything concrete.

Speaker 15 We need somebody on the inside that knows Carl.

Speaker 15 So on April 9th, 2012, we took a chance and we made a cold call to Cindy Carlson. It was a little bit of a risk.

Speaker 15 We knew from Jackie that she was estranged from Carl, but we weren't sure what the relationship actually was, what state it was in.

Speaker 15 And after I introduced myself, I said I had reopened the investigation into her stepson's death, Levi. She said, thank God you called.

Speaker 15 She agreed to come down, and that began a series of many interviews with Cindy that occurred over the coming months.

Speaker 15 Cindy starts describing to us a person who was extremely narcissistic.

Speaker 15 She said, I was more like a mother to him than a wife. Carl would want me to take care of him, and that he was very emotionally abusive.

Speaker 6 Given Cindy's level of cooperation, investigators zero in on the events surrounding Levi's death and what would possibly drive Carl to murder his son.

Speaker 15 According to Cindy, Levi and Carl had been at odds for quite a while. Carl did not approve of the woman he married or the house that he bought.

Speaker 15 She said recently, though, they had started to get along. That it seemed that Carl was making some overtures to Levi to fix the relationship.

Speaker 24 It was Carl's idea to get the life insurance policy and he kind of dragged Levi there to go along with it. Levi didn't make much money.
Carl took him to the insurance agent.

Speaker 24 Carl paid cash for the policy and Carl was the sole beneficiary of that policy.

Speaker 15 The policy was taken out 17 days before Levi's death and he got over $700,000.

Speaker 15 She said she didn't find out about it until after Levi was dead and that Carl had pretty much blown most of the money on a get-rich quick scheme.

Speaker 6 Cindy reveals how her relationship with Carl spiraled in the days prior to leaving him.

Speaker 15 So Cindy Carlson has become suspicious of her husband so she hires a private investigator. The private investigator looks into

Speaker 15 the insurance matters, calls her back, and drops a bombshell on her.

Speaker 15 There's an insurance policy on her for over a million dollars.

Speaker 15 The private investigator says, I think you might be next.

Speaker 6 Cindy Carlson claims her estranged husband, Carl, killed his son, Levi, and his first wife, Christina, for insurance money, and she fears she may be next.

Speaker 6 But outside of damning allegations, police in Seneca County, New York have little proof that this is true.

Speaker 18 We have filled our files with information, but not of the truth of what happened.

Speaker 6 Lacking jurisdiction in California, where Carl's first wife, Christina, died in a suspicious house fire, investigators in New York focus on the accident that took the life of Levi Carlson.

Speaker 25 This was a four-year-old case that most of it had been expunged, destroyed.

Speaker 18 And Cindy Carlson was now working with us on a daily basis.

Speaker 15 Cindy came to one day and says, I can't believe it.

Speaker 10 He told me he killed Levi.

Speaker 15 He said he pushed the truck over on him because Levi was a burden to the family.

Speaker 15 Before we heard lots of rumors, but nothing substantiated. But now Carl's admitting he killed Levi.

Speaker 15 I asked her why Carl couldn't admit to killing anybody. And she said, well, he's trying to get back together with me.
He wants to meet with me. I felt that this is an opportunity that we should take.

Speaker 34 We have a weakness that can be exploited.

Speaker 15 He wants her back.

Speaker 15 What we decide to do is wire her up with professional equipment. She meets Carl at a restaurant.

Speaker 29 There's several investigators inside acting as customers.

Speaker 19 And we just let it play out and we let Cindy have that conversation.

Speaker 36 When you just tell me how things went that day,

Speaker 36 part of me feels like I'm walking into a

Speaker 1 booby trap.

Speaker 15 Carl is suspicious right off the bat. He comes right out and tells her he feels like he's getting set up.

Speaker 36 A trap? Like, what kind of trap?

Speaker 36 I get so irritated because I want this to work.

Speaker 37 Just tell me. I just said, all right, I'll drag it up.
And it was wild.

Speaker 36 When was this? Before we left. And then one one thing just led to another.

Speaker 36 That's not what you told me, Carl. No, it didn't.

Speaker 36 I asked you if you pushed the truck and you said yes.

Speaker 36 I did push the truck after it had happened. Then I panicked and saw the opportunity.

Speaker 36 I took advantage of the situation once it happened.

Speaker 15 What parent considers the death of their child an opportunity?

Speaker 15 At that point, I knew he was what we thought he was.

Speaker 18 Ultimately, Carl doesn't come out and give us the direct confession that we want, but he gives us enough of an admission that it is time that we now pick up Carl Carlson and we bring him to the Seneca County Sheriff's Office for an interview.

Speaker 38 I think part of you knew that you found out that this day was going going to come.

Speaker 6 No, because I never, I didn't have anything to do with it.

Speaker 6 I really did not.

Speaker 26 Carl

Speaker 15 is an interesting individual with a lot of issues, but one issue he does not have is a reluctance to talk. He likes to talk.
What we know to be true is you pushed that car over.

Speaker 38 I did not. Well, you confessed to your wife.
And you never wired her? Yes, we do. I thought you did.
I'll record it.

Speaker 37 I lied to my wife.

Speaker 9 Okay.

Speaker 15 You guys don't know what happened that day. He's pretty confident at the beginning of that interview.
And Carl tells his first version of what happened with Levi.

Speaker 38 The day that my son died, we had a funeral, come back a little after four,

Speaker 38 and went out there, and I found him dead.

Speaker 15 Carl sticks with that for a while.

Speaker 38 I think there's no way I could kill a son. There's no way.
I stuck up for him and did everything.

Speaker 38 What did you mean when you told Cindy that one of the reasons that you took the opportunity to do it was because he was a bird.

Speaker 38 I don't know.

Speaker 38 I did not kill Levi.

Speaker 6 There's no way I could have.

Speaker 38 But he was dead when I went in there.

Speaker 15 Carl switches gears at one point and says, okay,

Speaker 15 he was dead before I left.

Speaker 38 When I walked out there and seen that, it was like disbelief. Disbelief.

Speaker 32 And I walked out and

Speaker 38 went to the funeral

Speaker 22 he said he sees levi underneath there and he walks out on his son who's being crushed and walks out of the garage gets in the car where his wife is sitting in the passenger seat goes to his wife's aunt's funeral

Speaker 7 she was dead

Speaker 7 and i freaked i just like

Speaker 1 i mean it was the next

Speaker 15 Now that's a bombshell for us, right? Because right away we know that

Speaker 15 nobody is just going to walk away and leave their son dead, lying on the floor, and then go to dinner and go to a funeral.

Speaker 15 So I would say that metaphorically the gloves kind of come off in the interview. It gets a little more intense.

Speaker 32 No, stop the, well, stop the

Speaker 26 please.

Speaker 38 It doesn't make sense.

Speaker 32 What you're telling me, I know what it looks like. Yeah, you do know.

Speaker 15 At this point, he breaks down,

Speaker 18 starts version three.

Speaker 32 I open the truck door.

Speaker 15 he says that he stepped into the truck and caused it to fall

Speaker 24 and then he freaked out and he left and i just

Speaker 24 like

Speaker 38 yeah

Speaker 15 now i don't believe it for a second that he accidentally dropped the truck on his son but for legal purposes it doesn't really matter at that point.

Speaker 15 Because under New York state law, that's depraved indifference murder.

Speaker 34 That's murder second degree.

Speaker 38 So the truck fell on your son, and instead of jacking it back up, you ran.

Speaker 30 Had he lifted the truck off, Levi, the likelihood is Levi would have lived and been fine.

Speaker 39 Great, so your son was still very much alive, and you could have saved him.

Speaker 15 Carl didn't really stop the interview. We did.
It had gone nine and a half hours, so we felt it was time to call it.

Speaker 18 Well, come with me. You're under arrest.

Speaker 24 After the interview of Carl Carlson, within days, I indicted him on two counts of murder in the second degree and insurance fraud.

Speaker 9 At that time, Carl realized that he had been caught and that he had no other choice but to take a plea deal for second degree murder.

Speaker 10 As a consequence, Carl Carlson was sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 15 years to life.

Speaker 7 When Carl pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and showed who he really was, we were very, very happy and thankful he would be convicted and he would go to jail.

Speaker 21 I cried.

Speaker 13 How he could do such things

Speaker 13 to his own children.

Speaker 6 New York investigators have revealed Carl's role in the murder of his son Levi, but but questions still remain regarding his involvement in the fire death of his first wife, Christina.

Speaker 15 This is someone who is a killer and a planner and a very greedy man. We need to use what we now know from New York to charge and convict Carl Carlson of killing Christina Carlson in 1991.

Speaker 6 Investigators in New York have successfully convicted Carl Carlson for the death of his son Levi.

Speaker 6 But justice proves more elusive when it comes to his involvement in his first wife, Christina's mysterious fire death in 1991.

Speaker 15 At this point, investigator Jeff Finer from the state police is really digging into the information out in California.

Speaker 18 All the evidentiary material, all the documents had been pretty much expunged in California.

Speaker 31 But I learned of this.

Speaker 29 One investigator was hired to do a forensic investigation.

Speaker 18 So I called and I got this man on the other end of the line.

Speaker 28 He said, I can't believe this day has finally come.

Speaker 14 It was like this praise God moment. He was just almost in tears, elated.

Speaker 24 The original arson investigators didn't view it as an accident.

Speaker 24 However, Carl left the state within three days of his wife dying and the investigation kind of didn't go anywhere out there because of that.

Speaker 22 Thankfully, this miracle investigator had photocopied every document of that investigation and he had it in a box in his basement.

Speaker 20 Now we can rebuild the California investigation.

Speaker 6 As authorities piece together the information and missing reports, the true cause of the fire finally becomes clear.

Speaker 29 We learn at that point that there's clearly evidence that there was a second fresh pour of kerosene poured just moments before the fire was lit.

Speaker 15 They determined that by testing the carpet for how far the kerosene had spread.

Speaker 15 There was also a U pattern in the hallway indicating that it had been deliberately poured shortly before the fire and not accidentally spilled.

Speaker 15 The fire investigator was able to test the work light that Carl mentioned may have started the fire.

Speaker 18 There wasn't even power to the light, light, nor was the filament broken that could even cause the fire.

Speaker 30 So a person clearly lit the fresh kerosene.

Speaker 24 It wasn't accidental. What's the alternative?

Speaker 26 Carl said it.

Speaker 15 At the time, back in 1991, Calaveras County didn't believe that they had enough evidence in this case to get a conviction.

Speaker 10 But now through the lens of what we now knew in New York, we felt we could get this case into a courtroom in in front of a jury.

Speaker 18 I took it upon myself to write a basically a hundred-page document and put together the piece of the investigation and I emailed the district attorney in Murphy's County to say, please, please don't let this guy get away.

Speaker 9 On December 8th, 2012, the Calvaris County District Attorney's Office officially reopens the investigation into Christina Carlson's death.

Speaker 9 After eight years of building their case against Carl Carlson, he was charged in the death of his wife Christina.

Speaker 7 Carlene and I looked at each other and said, you know, it's about time, but thank God that it is happening.

Speaker 13 We're going to take care of this.

Speaker 9 The trial finally comes to fruition in 2020, nearly 29 years to the day after Christina Carlson's death. They decided to extradite Carl back to Calaveras County to face judgment for her murder.

Speaker 9 And on February 3rd, 2020, a jury finds Carl Carlson guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Christina Carlson.

Speaker 11 Carl Carlson is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder of his wife, Christina.

Speaker 13 A heaviness. I felt it lifting off of me.

Speaker 7 Arlene just started crying with with jubilation

Speaker 7 uncontrollably. We had to hold her up, she was about to collapse when she heard it.
It was finally the end of a journey. It took 30 years to accomplish, but we got the result we wanted.

Speaker 7 Had they investigated and done what their job would have been done, Levi would be alive today.

Speaker 7 That's the hard part.

Speaker 13 I carried that pain in my heart, oh, all those years.

Speaker 13 I miss you, baby.

Speaker 13 Mama misses you.

Speaker 7 Christina did not deserve what she received. Levi did not deserve what he got.
Carl Carlson was an evil man doing evil deeds.

Speaker 6 Ever see an idea so clearly in your head but struggle to find the time to get it all done? Wix helps you go from, eh, I'll get to it, to done.

Speaker 6 Build a full site just by describing your idea.

Speaker 6 Let an AI agent handle daily tasks, plan your next marketing campaign, or help out customers so you can grow your business the way you want without it taking over your life. Try it out at Wix.com.