Episode 198 - Karl Karlsen - A Series Of Unfortunate Accidents
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The opinions expressed in the following episode do not necessarily reflect those of the Minds of Madness podcast. Listener discretion is advised.

There's something just a little extra special about having a real Christmas tree inside your home for the holidays. The fresh evergreen scent that fills the air, evoking a sense of tradition and timelessness, instantly transporting you back to cherished memories.

For many families, selecting the perfect tree, cutting it down, and bringing it home is a cherished holiday tradition. But there's a downside to real trees as well. The mess they create by the continuous supply of dead pine needles dropping on the floor and disposing of the tree can also be a hassle. But for some families, it can become part of a tradition in itself.

On New Year's Day 1991, Carl Carlson had a special new tradition he wanted to share with his three young children. A tradition he had with his own father as a boy, lighting the old Christmas tree on fire.

That morning, Carl takes his three children out to an area where the Christmas tree is in a field and he pours gasoline all over it because he says, I want to show you how fast something can burn. And he lights the tree on fire and it's going up in smoke. The kids are scared and ultimately they ran away from the smoke. What a strange thing to do.

Seeing his children were frightened by the experience, Carl took the opportunity to look them all squarely in the eyes and give them a lesson on fire safety. Telling the kids that if a fire started inside their home, the entire house would have gone up in flames in an instant. Even snapping his fingers to drive the point home.

His point was to show just how fast a fire could get out of hand. And a few hours later, that's exactly what happened.

Join me now as renowned true crime investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author Aphrodite Jones takes us on a chilling journey of the decades-long saga of Carl Carlson, a man whose life was filled with a series of strange and unfortunate accidents that seemed to follow him and his family wherever they went.

After their house burned down on New Year's Day 1991, the Carlson family was forever changed. Their home in Murphys, California had been reduced to ashes, including all their possessions and new Christmas gifts. But the most devastating loss was the tragic death of Christina Carlson, Carl's wife and mother of their three children, Katie, Aaron, and Levi.

Although Carl managed to rescue the children from the burning home, Christina was trapped inside and tragically unable to escape. In the aftermath of the fire, the Carlson family left California and headed to Romulus, New York, to live with Carl's parents.

Romulus, a quaint pastoral town, seemed like the perfect place for a family to start over. Where they'd be surrounded by Carl's family, pitching in to help the children cope. But no amount of love and support could possibly fill the void left by the loss of their mother.

To help us tell this story, we're joined by Aphrodite Jones, who literally wrote the book on this case. Just released in September of 2023, her book titled Levi's Eyes is the end result of years of meticulous research into the case. During her research, Aphrodite collected more than 3,000 pages of documents and spent two years interviewing Carl Carlson, speaking with him on the phone,

five days a week and here she is now taking us back to the aftermath of the fire the kids were too young to really understand what had happened they don't quite understand that they'll never see their mother again at the same time they can't adjust to this new york life i mean it's cold it's completely different than california yeah they like the snow but at the end of the day

They got grandparents taking care of them. Carl's working. He's not around. And they are traumatized, especially Levi, who was a mama's boy. He is particularly traumatized by that fire and starts having nightmares and starts being very quiet and shut down. And eventually Carl takes him for therapy because he's trying to help his son get through this. But that therapy doesn't work.

And it became a theme in Levi's life to be very sad and sullen or, if not sullen, quiet, like he bottled everything up.

As the Carlson family tried to recover from their loss, it became clear they were missing a vital component. A guiding presence, a source of warmth, and pillar of support. The children needed a mother, and Carl needed a wife. Someone who could step in and be that perfect fit.

Nearly two years after the fire, in 1992, it looked like Carl had met just the right woman. Cindy Best had been line dancing at a local bar when Carl first spotted her. That year, line dancing was all the rage, with the undisputed line dancing banger of the year, Billy Ray Cyrus' achy-breaky heart.

But despite being lampooned for the past 20-some years as one of the most goofiest country songs ever released, for both Carl and Cindy, the theme of an achy-breaky heart was rather poignant. When Cindy got off the dance floor and stepped up to the bar, Carl immediately offered to buy her a drink before laying out his sob story to her.

He's a widower. He's a single parent. He's had this tragedy. He's lost the love of his life. And he comes off as a hero to her.

And Cindy had been married and was going through divorce herself, and part of the reason she was going through divorce is because she discovered she was unable to bear children. So in her mind, this is a perfect match. She can have three children who are still very young that she can be the mother to, the stepmother to, and the mother they need. Carl and Cindy found in each other what they were missing, and their relationship became serious rather quickly.

Only a year after meeting, they married and Cindy became a full-time caregiver to Carl's three children. Carl had also bought his brother's old farmhouse, giving the Carlson family a fresh start. And surprisingly, Cindy became pregnant, despite being told it would be nearly impossible. And in 1995, she gave birth to a baby boy they named Alex.

It seemed all the missing pieces in their lives had finally come together. But as time went on, their mutually beneficial relationship became a little too one-sided, with Carl taking more than he was giving.

I think he looked at Cindy as a babysitter, as a free babysitter. And I think Cindy came to realize that many years later. She certainly didn't know it when they first met. But one of the funny things he did is once she got into the house and became familiar with the children, soon thereafter, he took a trip to Ohio with his father and just left her there with the kids and never called to check in with her.

Like, this is perfect for him. He can just dump his kids with her. She's going to take care of everything from soup to nuts. And he doesn't need to check in. He's got the permanent babysitter now for free. Eventually, the household dynamics became strained as Cindy took on most of the parenting responsibilities.

While the teenage children rebelled in their own ways, Levi in particular seemed to cause most of the trouble, stealing money and experimenting with drugs. And when Carl used harsh physical discipline to try and keep him in line, it only seemed to push Levi to rebel even more. He was hiding the fact that he was being physically abused by his father. Cindy never knew that.

At one point, Levi called CPS to make a formal complaint, and CPS came to the house and discovered that Levi was telling a fib. He seemed to be unable to get his facts straight. He was also blaming Cindy, and she was in Canada at the time of this, quote, incident. At the end of the day, CPS didn't do anything about this, and Levi's answer to that was, I'm moving out.

I'm moving in with one of my uncles and my aunt, and I'm done with you. Tensions between Levi and Carl came to a head the following Thanksgiving, the first time Levi had been back at the family farm in a while. But instead of taking the opportunity to enjoy some turkey with the family, Levi used it to make a startling accusation about the house fire his mother died in years ago. He confronts Carl, telling Carl that you killed my mother.

that that was deliberate, that he did not try to save her. They witnessed him making a feeble attempt at trying to save her, and instead of getting to the window, he just kicked the cement foundation of that house in Murphys. On the surface, it appeared the rebellious teen was trying to say the most hurtful and damaging things he could to his father, and it worked.

At that point, they get into a fistfight, a wrestling match. Carl is furious. And ultimately, Cindy had to pull the two of them apart. Levi escapes. But Carl follows him down the road and tries to run him off the road. So he's already in the mode of, I'm going to kill this kid because this kid now is going to destroy me.

As it turned out, Levi made it into his aunt and uncle's house just in time. And Carl was outside banging on the doors and screaming, holy hell. But Levi had escaped. After this incident, the rift between father and son appeared impossible to mend. When Levi left, he basically left for good. Because soon thereafter, he met Cassie Rude, who was into the gothic scene. And he...

quickly falls in love with Cassie. Next thing you know, she's pregnant. And these are kids, they're 18 years old. He's moved in with Cassie and her mother in a trailer park. It's a small trailer, he really can't even fit in there, but he does, and he's happy there. But Cassie's mother, Terri, is thrilled about this, and she starts planning a wedding.

And they want to have the wedding before her due date. And Cassie's due in October. And so they want to have the wedding that summer. At first, both Carl and Cindy were opposed to the wedding and doubted the longevity of the teenage couple's relationship. Ultimately, not only do they get married and have not one but two girls, Electra and Ivy, but they also managed to buy a house through the HUD program. And now they're living in their own home, a large home.

Levi's newfound sense of maturity seemed to impress Carl, and slowly they began spending more time together, repairing their fractured relationship.

Once Levi was a father, Carl started feeling a responsibility. He felt closer to Levi. So now that Levi's a father, he wants to help him get a job. And he manages to get Levi a job at Guardian Glass, where Carl works. And it's a good-paying job with benefits.

and life insurance involved there. And Levi's now an adult and he's making it. And he and Carl are spending more time together and their relationship is blossoming for the first time. Levi has taken away all the Gothic stuff. He's a regular guy now. He's the good dad and the provider. And Carl's thrilled about this. So he is coaching his son, he's encouraging his son, and they get close.

But at the same time Levi and his father were becoming closer, Levi and Cassie started drifting apart. Ultimately, Cassie filed for divorce, taking custody of their two daughters. Now Levi is clinging on to his father even more, who's giving him advice about marriage, about kids, about child support, about alimony, about all these things. And he's going to help his son get through this.

And Levi, who always wanted a relationship with his father, gets very tight with Carl. Levi was fighting to get visitation with his children. Cassie had them full time. And the only way he could see them was with a guardian or somebody there overseeing the visitation, which ultimately became Cindy. OK, but he was not allowed to see the girls on his own. He was not allowed to take them anywhere.

And the reason that they wouldn't allow Levi to see his kids alone is because Cassie went to the court and told them that Levi was a drug addict, that he was a pothead, and he was irresponsible. And the court believed her. Levi's daughters meant the world to him, and he was determined to do whatever he could to prove he was a responsible parent to the court. That's when Carl offered his son some advice.

You know what you should do? You should get life insurance on yourself because that's going to show that you're able and interested in providing for your daughters even after you're gone. And if it's a large life insurance policy, they will be provided for and you'll have taken care of their colleges, whatever are the needs they have. And this will make the courts feel that you are serious about wanting to financially keep your kids safe and secure.

It's not bad advice. It's not the worst advice to say, look, do something that's going to show the court that, you know, you're trying to provide for your kids. You're planning to provide for them forevermore.

After following the advice of his father, Levi met with an insurance agent and procured a $300,000 life insurance policy on November 3rd, 2008, when he was 23. The policy also came with a $400,000 rider, which paid out additional benefits if Levi was killed in an accident. Just 17 days later, that accident would happen.

Levi was still short on money, even though he had a decent job. And so occasionally Carl would ask him to do something around the farm. But Carl offered Levi 50 bucks to just come to the house and do a quick fix on my old farm truck. And Levi agreed to do that.

It was November 20th, 2008, when Levi arrived around 11am at the farm to help Carl fix his truck. Carl himself wouldn't be sticking around to help though, because he and Cindy needed to head out to a funeral. But when they came back to the farm, a little after 4pm, tragedy awaited them.

Okay.

When Carl and Cindy got home from the funeral, they were surprised to see Levi's truck still in the driveway. As Carl headed to the garage to check on Levi, Cindy went inside. Moments later, Carl was screaming for Cindy to call 911. The old farm truck Levi had been fixing had fallen off its jack, and Levi had been crushed underneath.

All right. What is your, what is your, ma'am, what is your first name? Cindy.

The scene was horrible and chaotic, loud country music blaring from the garage radio as Carl frantically jacked up the truck to pull his son out from underneath it. Both Cindy and Carl knew right away there was no hope of reviving him. Levi was cold to the touch and his chest completely caved in.

At the local hospital, Levi was pronounced dead on arrival. And because Levi had signed up to be an organ donor, doctors worked quickly to ensure they honored his wish. Even in death, Levi had wanted to give something valuable to others. And only a few days later, Cindy would discover Levi had done even more than that. Much more.

The first check that arrived in the mail was for $300,000, the life insurance benefit from the policy Levi had purchased, naming Carl as the beneficiary, which Carl claimed was a surprise. A week later, an additional $400,000 check arrived because Levi's death was ruled accidental.

When Cindy questioned why Levi hadn't named his daughters as the beneficiaries, Carl explained that Levi didn't want to risk his ex-wife Cassie gaining control over the money. They also found out Levi had created a will and had it notarized the morning of his death, naming Carl as the power of attorney and executor.

Levi left all his assets to Carl to distribute to his daughters as he wished. Both Carl and Cindy agreed to keep the insurance money a secret from Cassie. Once Levi died, they had gone back to the insurance company where they now take out various accounts, annuities and other accounts that...

Carl has assured her we'll provide for the girls just as Levi wanted. And Carl has assured her that, you know, these are all legitimate accounts and so has the insurance agent. And now she has no idea what she signed. I've looked at those papers myself. It's hard to get through them and understand what the heck. They're all in worlds with each other. Roll over this money into that money. But Carl had taken the $700,000 and put it into these accounts.

And so that was the money he got from Levi's death.

But that isn't what happened, and it all started with a little plastic surgery. A little over two years after Levi's death, Cindy was diagnosed with a condition that affected her eyesight. If she wanted to fix it, it meant she needed surgery on her eyelids. According to Cindy, the surgeon suggested she spend an additional $8,000 and get a complete facelift while she was at it.

And she doesn't want to do it. She's hemming and hawing. Where are you going to get the money from? Carl says, just borrow it from Levi's money. It's OK. Just take the money. We will pay it back. It's fine. Do the facelift. She hesitantly goes ahead with that, borrows $8,000, which Carl has to sign for along with Cindy. And that was the doorway that opened now Carl's ability to say, well, you took that money out for that. Now I need a truck.

Now I need $25,000 for this. Now I need money for that. And so that came the snowball and it became the impetus. And the reason was once I get her to take any of that money, now it's your fault. Now you can't take money without me wanting to take money. And that's how it snowballed.

Carl started withdrawing large sums of money from the accounts to start up a duck farming business. And pretty much everything started to take a nosedive from there. He's opened a duck farm. He's mismanaging the duck farm. And Carl needs more money. And in order to get that money, he needs Cindy to sign off to get that money from those annuity accounts.

Eventually, Cindy stopped agreeing to sign for Carl to take out more money, fearing there would be nothing left for Levi's daughters. That's when a disturbing thought entered into her mind. Had Carl planned this all along? The thought haunted her, especially considering this wasn't the first time Carl had collected a large sum from an insurance policy.

In 2002, their horse barn had caught fire, killing three horses. Coincidentally, Carl had increased the insurance on the barn and horses just three weeks before the fire, resulting in a $115,000 payout.

Cindy also discovered Carl had been with Levi the day he purchased his life insurance policy. The timing of the policy seemed odd to Cindy, considering it had just been bought 17 days before. What she now seriously doubted was an accident at all. Cindy is starting to have an awakening that Carl may have killed his son.

and that Carl may have killed the horses. She doesn't want to admit to this to herself because she has had a child with Carl, Alex. And Carl's been a great father to Alex, as far as she knows. So for her to have to come to the realization that she's living with a psychopath, that he is the actual killer, takes her some time because she's drowned all that out of her mind. But

But ultimately, something is nagging at her. What's nagging at her is that there was country music playing in the garage the day that Levi was killed. And Levi, again, having been a goth, was the last thing he would ever listen to was country music. So in her mind, it's nagging at her. And she starts thinking about why would that country music be on there unless Carl or somebody put it on?

As Cindy began suspecting Carl of being a cold-blooded killer, she turned to excessive drinking. Cindy was hesitant to go to the police with her suspicions, fearing Carl's well-connected family and local politics. Instead, she decided to hire an out-of-town private investigator. Now, Cindy starts realizing this guy's a nut.

And she's afraid. She gets afraid of him. So she goes outside of Seneca County and finds a PI, Steve Brown. She goes to the PI, hands him the Manila envelope with all of these various accounts in it and asks him, please figure this out. I don't even know what's going on. It turns out that Steve Brown discovers that not only has he taken out an insurance policy on his granddaughters, Levi's daughters, Electra and Ivy Carlson, but he's also taken out an insurance policy

on Cindy Carlson. At the end of the day, she was told, you're going to be worth $1.2 million to him.

Cindy now believed she might be sleeping with the killer, who'd already chosen her as his next target. Even so, she still questioned if Carl really had it in him to kill his own wife for insurance money. Then she remembered the accusations Levi had made against Carl on that horrible Thanksgiving, accusing his father of murdering his mother, Christina.

Cindy now started to think that maybe even that hadn't been an accident. Carl had met Christina back in the early 80s while stationed at an Air Force base in North Dakota. At the time, she was married, then went through a divorce, and he kind of helped her with the divorce, if you will.

And they fell in love, madly in love. And the next thing you know, she's pregnant. So they got married and had their first two children in North Dakota. And eventually, Carl left the Air Force and they moved back to New York, where he's from. And they had their third child, Katie, there in New York.

Christina was a happy homemaker. She loved her kids. She did whatever she could for the house, for the kids, making homemade clothes, sewing clothes, cookies, baking with the kids, making the house, the nest, the home, sewing curtains, putting up wallpaper. She did all that. She was the perfect housekeeper and she was the perfect wife, the perfect mother. That's how Carl described her.

But behind the scenes, not everything was quite as rosy as Carl wanted to portray. Christina was being emotionally twisted by Carl. He was controlling. He was jealous. He was an angry man at times. She hid that from her family. But things were getting bad eventually.

in New York because he couldn't make ends meet. He filed for bankruptcy. And this is why they moved to Murphys, California, is because her father was able to offer him a job with his company. And so she was hopeful that that would turn things around.

But as it happened, it didn't turn things around. Carl was unhappy there. He wanted to go back to New York. And he spent a couple of years working for her father, Art, and really didn't make much money. And so, again, they couldn't make ends meet.

Carl was hiding his dissatisfaction with the area. He pretended to like it. He perhaps gave it a good shot in the beginning, but Art, her father, had sold him a pipe dream. He had told Carl that they'd go into business together and they'd make lots of money and he'd be great. Well, that did not happen.

Carl tried convincing Christina to move their family back to New York, but Christina was determined to stay in California. They just couldn't seem to agree. And then, tragedy struck. New Year's Day, everybody wakes up, it's going to be a beautiful day, they have plans to meet with their friends, they're going to watch movies and eat popcorn and nest in a house, it's snowing, and then something horrible happens.

Shortly after Carl took the kids out to watch him set the Christmas tree on fire, he claimed he started working on an electrical wiring problem inside the house. According to Carl, he went to the garage to get some wire when he heard Christina screaming for him to get the kids out of the house.

When the fire started, Christina had been enjoying a bubble bath with her headphones on. Initially, Carl didn't react when he heard her yelling, but finally ran out of the garage when he heard her again. He then saw smoke coming from the roof of their home.

Carl manages to get their three kids out, but she's trapped in the bathroom. He can't get her out, and he and his kids are watching the house go up in flames. He's put the kids in the truck. He's put the dog in the truck. He runs back to the house to try to get Christina and makes whatever attempt he can, but he's unable to rescue her. As it turned out,

They had a special pocket door for their windows in the bathroom, and it broke. The bathroom window broke. So he boarded up the window just to keep the cold out, and Christina helped him, actually. And I think 17 nails went into that board. So when the fire happened and she was in the bathroom, she couldn't get out the window because it was nailed shut, and Carl could not push his way through that window. Or so he claimed.

When Christina's sister Colette heard about the fire, she rushed to the hospital. There, Carl made an incredibly off-putting remark to her that would stay permanently ingrained in her memory forever. Colette was on her sister. She asked him, she said, I want to see my sister. And his answer to her was, you can't because she's a crispy critter. Think about that one for a minute.

Christina's family was beyond devastated by the loss and on January 4th held a memorial service for Christina. So Carl attended Christina's memorial but stayed in the background and he chose to not have the children present because quote, "he didn't want to re-traumatize them." So the kids were not there at their mom's memorial.

Instead, he whisked them off immediately after that memorial to New York. And that was the end for them of knowing anything about their mother. In the aftermath of the fire, the insurance company hired fire investigators to determine the cause. Carl theorized it might have started from a drop light he'd left on the floor when he went out to the garage to get wire for the attic wiring problem. And then some more information came to light.

They had a kerosene spill a few days after Christmas, and it was because a dog and cat knocked over a jug of kerosene that was in the house. It shouldn't have been in the house, and Carl claimed that Christina had mistaken it for water and had left it in the hallway. This spill was immense, and Carl and Christina did what they could to soak up the kerosene and clean it as well as they could.

Carl then told investigators the same thing he told Aphrodite on the phone more than two decades later.

Carl starts telling me that in order to clean the kerosene, they wanted to do it really quickly. And so what they did is they took whatever clothes that was the summer clothes that she was about to switch out for the winter clothes and use their clothing to soak up this kerosene. Eh!

And they used brand new sweaters that were gifts to Carl from Christina as well to soak it all up because, you know, I want to get to it very quickly. Needless to say, these actions appeared unusual for a meticulous homemaker like Christina. Fire investigators later confirmed a large pile of clothing had been in the hallway during the fire, but they also concluded a few other things.

The fire investigators figured out that there was a second pour of kerosene in a U-shaped pattern just outside the bathroom door. And it was determined that that second pour happened minutes before the fire. Because of that, the insurance company, State Farm, hired their insurance investigators. And eventually, Ken Buskey, who's one of the leading fire investigators in the country,

was hired to go in there and determine exactly what caused this fire. And the expert, Ken Buskey, was able to testify this was not caused by the trouble light, this was caused by a human hand. Despite doubts from the fire investigators and insurance experts about the origin of the fire, Carl was never charged with a crime.

Although a State Farm representative recommended denying the insurance claims, Carl received a full payout of Christina's life insurance within two years, totaling $200,000, equivalent to about half a million in today's currency. When Carl went into the State Farm agency in Murphys, he had gone there to particularly ask for insurance on Christina, not on himself.

And the agent said, she's got to be present in order for me to write a policy on her. And by the way, do you have insurance on yourself? Because she's not the breadwinner and this is unusual. Ultimately, there was insurance purchased on Christina, on Carl and the three children.

What a wonderful, fortuitous thing for Carl, who was looking to collect the $200,000 plus from her life insurance policy. Christina's life insurance had been purchased on December 19th, 1990, just 13 days before the fire. But this wasn't the first time Carl had collected insurance money after a fire.

One of the things that's later discovered is that Carl was a firefighter, a volunteer firefighter when he was 17 years old. So this guy knew all about how fires started because he learned all that. That backdrop is important since the car that he had purchased in 1986, he couldn't afford the payments. And suddenly that car goes up in flames in their driveway. But

But what's missing from the car? The car seats and any other valuables, his tools, are not in the car. And that insurance company was questioning whether or not they would pay it out. So that's fire number one.

Eventually, the insurance company paid Carl the money. In hindsight, Carl's modus operandi seemed obvious, given the countless hours of research by investigators like Aphrodite. At the time of the fires, Carl likely knew the available technology would make it difficult for insurance companies to connect the dots, especially with him moving between claims.

With no one catching on, it appeared Carl kept using the same playbook.

First in 1986, when his car mysteriously caught fire. Then in 1990, when he took out an insurance policy on Christina, who died in the house fire 13 days later. Then in 2002, when Carl increased the insurance on his barn and horses, only for it all to be destroyed. Three weeks later, in yet another fire.

Then, there was the life insurance policy with the accident rider he'd convinced Levi to get in 2008, a meeting he'd joined him for. Seventeen days later, Levi died in a farm accident. Over the course of two decades, these last-minute insurance payouts wound up totaling more than a million dollars, with Carl as the sole beneficiary.

By the time Cindy realized, Carl stood to gain another $1.2 million if she died. She hadn't quite put all the pieces of the puzzle together, but the private investigator she'd hired uncovered enough to scare her out of her wits. And Cindy realized she needed to do something. What is she going to do? First of all, she leaves Carl.

She tells him it's just a separation, it's just for now. She couldn't stand it anymore. She couldn't be there anymore, sleeping with a killer. And she moves down the road, you know, rental. But now she's got to figure out, how do I get Carl? How do I trap him?

There's a little moment in there that changed the equation for Cindy, and that is when she went to that PI and she asked him to investigate this because she's afraid that he is a killer. He tells her, you can't go to the police yet. Don't go to the police yet. I'm looking for evidence. But he's bilking her. That's what's going on there.

Instead of going to police, the PI convinced Cindy she needed to persuade Carl to split Levi's remaining insurance money with her. That way, Carl wouldn't end up with all the money. And because Carl had already been harassing Cindy to take out more money for some time, that wasn't going to be a problem.

Sure enough, Carl happily took his half and kept dumping it into his failing duck business. Cindy, on the other hand, secretly purchased a house for around $100,000.

In that time period, Cindy's getting more and more scared, and she's confiding in her cousin, Jackie Heimel, who lives in Kentucky. And they're talking on the phone. Cindy's a drinker. She's drinking even more now. She's trying to drown her truth out. She had been an alcoholic. She's back to her alcoholism. And now she confesses to Jackie Heimel that she thinks Carl killed Levi for the insurance money.

Initially, Jackie didn't take her cousin's accusations seriously, as Cindy was intoxicated during their conversation. But after a while, Jackie started doing a little digging on her own. That's when she called Levi's insurance company and discovered Carl had not only accompanied Levi when he bought the life insurance policy, but he'd also made the first payment. Jackie decides she's going to make an anonymous call to the police.

And she does. Ultimately, they get a hold of her and Jackie starts to explain what it is that Cindy has told her. So it looks like Cindy was never going to report this because she was in this limbo with the private investigator. But the truth of the matter is, Cindy would ultimately have reported this.

In March 2012, Jackie began talking to the police, and a few days later, they contacted Cindy, who was relieved to finally tell authorities what she believed Carl had done to his son, and to prevent him from doing the same to her, or anyone else for that matter. By that point, Carl's duck business had collapsed, and he was on the verge of financial ruin.

Cindy had already moved out of the house and there was nobody to help him and he was on his own and he couldn't afford the feed and he couldn't afford to pay the Amish anymore for processing. And he was desperate and he couldn't get any more money out of Cindy and the annuity accounts. And he then admitted to me

that he had so many ducks on the property, upwards of 8,000 ducks on the property, that he couldn't feed. And the way Carl explained it was that it would be inhumane to let them just suffer from starvation. So his way of being humane to his ducks, his ducklings, was to kill each one of them individually by hand, breaking their neck.

snap the neck, and then throw them in a wheelbarrow and by the hundreds, take those dead ducks to a burn pile and let them burn up. And when he told me this, that he actually killed 8,000 ducks with his hands, with his bare hands, there was, I don't want to say a satisfaction in his voice, but there was a matter-of-factness about it.

Despite Carl's business being funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars intended for his grandchildren, it completely failed. With his slush fund depleted and desperate for money, Carl's pattern of seeking financial gain through nefarious means, in hindsight, seems quite evident.

Cindy, who was now worth over a million dollars to him dad, also learned Carl had taken out policies on his granddaughters, with him standing to gain an additional $300,000 for each of the children if something were ever to happen to them. It seemed inevitable Carl would strike again.

Police were in a race against time to gather evidence to arrest Carl before another accident occurred. But as time passed without any progress, in October 2021, Cindy devised a plan of her own. She decides, "I know. I'm going to get a tape recorder." She goes to a Staples store, gets a little tape recorder, puts it in her bra, and agrees to meet Carl so that they can "get back together."

Cindy knew exactly how to play to Carl's inflated ego by telling him she wanted to become Mrs. Carlson again. Her only requirement was that Carl would be completely honest with her. There are four separate meetings that Cindy has with Carl, each of which she tapes.

In each of those meetings, there's more and more admission by Carl as to what happened to Levi. The first major detail Carl revealed to Cindy was that he'd been the one to jack up the truck before Levi crawled under it to do some work.

But then he did something unforgivable. He claimed he never put the safety blocks in place. A safety measure that anyone who's ever worked on vehicles knows is crucial in preventing accidents.

It was a sob story designed to elicit sympathy from Cindy, stating he'd been blaming himself for Levi's quote-unquote accident, keeping it bottled up for all these years. But for Cindy, it only made her more determined to uncover the truth. So she arranged for another meeting with Carl, recording their conversation. And then Cindy gets it. She's got it on tape that he says to her,

I tipped the truck over on Levi. It was an accident, but the car tipped over. It just tipped over and I freaked out.

And so she gets him to admit that, what do you mean? You just left him there and we went to the funeral, my aunt's funeral, and you left Levi there under the truck? And he says, well, Levi had lived a full life. He had kids. He had done everything he could do. He was causing you so much trouble, causing us so much trouble. And so I took the opportunity once the truck fell on him.

And of course, Cindy's listening to this with the recorder going and she can't believe her ears. She can't believe that she's gotten him to confess to this. Even in this version of events, Cindy realized Carl must be a complete psychopath. After witnessing Levi's death, Carl behaved completely normal for the next four hours at the funeral before pretending to find him dead when they got home. She runs to the police with the tape.

And unfortunately, the tape is inaudible. His admission is inaudible because he picked a table in the busier area of the restaurant so that in case she was taping him, because remember, now he's suspicious because she's meeting over and over again and asking the same questions over and over again and saying, look, I need you to come clean. I need you to tell me everything or else I can't get back together with you. The audio is unintelligible.

And they can't pump up the volume. They can't get past the background noise. Hoping that lightning might strike twice, Seneca County Police asked Cindy if she'd be willing to try again, but this time tell her. I want you to wear a wire.

I want you to meet Carl, have another meeting with him about getting back together. We're going to choose the restaurant. You tell him a time that you'll be there. We'll make sure you're there hours before. We will have plainclothes police detectives around you and you will be safe. But we need you to wear this wire and get him to say that same confession that you just told us.

And that's what happened. Cindy wore a wire. She went in there. She was able to be cool as a cucumber, which is amazing to me.

And you can hear on that tape her asking Carl these very same questions. And he's saying, I never said I tipped the truck over. I never said that. And she's saying, yes, you told me that you tipped the truck over. You told me that you did that. No, no, no, no. I never said that. What I said was I took the opportunity. Well, that's all the police needed to hear.

Because once they had that on wire, now they can arrest him and they can start to question him because he's admitted to at least, if nothing else, leaving his son there to die. Okay? If not causing the truck to fall on his son. Knowing that Levi would die having been crushed under the truck, he's therefore responsible in some way for Levi's death. And that's all they needed.

In November 2012, the day after Thanksgiving, police approached Carl and asked him if he'd be willing to go to the station for an interview. He agreed, even waiving his right to a lawyer. Then, over the course of nine hours, Carl told detectives the same story he'd shared with Cindy about what happened to Levi had been a lie.

He claimed he only told her what he thought she wanted to hear in an attempt to win her back, or as he put it, to feed the furnace. I'm not asking you. I'm telling you what we know to be true that came out of your own words. You pushed the car over on your son. You said it. We've heard it. It's a matter of evidence, along with several other things that will prove the same thing. Something's wrong. She's setting me up. She's just setting me up.

I mean, how else can you describe it? I know you guys want me to just spill my guts saying, oh, I pushed it over, I killed him. And I can't say that because I didn't. Although you have said that. I played the game with her. What's that game? The game that I wanted. The game that I didn't understand. How did this game work out? You say it was a game. Tell me what's the game.

Detectives then told Carl they had proof Levi was dead before he and Cindy left to the funeral. Three and a half hours into the interrogation, Carl admitted to finding Levi deceased before he left to the funeral. I did not kill Levi. There's no way I could have.

But he was dead when I went in there. Okay. Tell us about that. Let's talk about what happened. I walked in there and... I walked in there to, you know, give him his money and... And I just... Blank. Just... How did it stay in your life? Why did you keep it a secret for so long? I mean, it was an accident. And it's... I blame myself every day. Just like you said. That... So when you went back in, he was... He was dead.

The way Carl framed it was that Levi was already dead when he found him, with no chance of saving him. But detectives weren't buying it. In the following hours, the detectives presented a multitude of circumstantial evidence concerning Levi, the barn fire, and the death of his first wife, Christina. Let's think of the house fire, where your wife was wrecked, she dies, and the windows are boarded up days beforehand.

You told the investigators earlier that it was eight months ago that you boarded that window up in that bathroom prior to the fire. Eight months, you said. I don't know if a word from you told you told me a month and a half. I thought it was like a month. And you tell the investigators and the California Police Department back then that it was two to three days prior to the fire. Another discrepancy the detectives brought up was Carl's story about how kerosene wound up in the house.

You tell me that the kerosene was brought in to the house to fuel the kerosene furnace. Yet you tell investigators back then in 1991 that it was mistakenly you thought it was water. You brought in the house with a 5-gallon jug of water to fuel, to put in the toilet, to flush the toilet because your pipes were frozen. And mistakenly kerosene was brought in and knocked on the floor.

They also confronted him about how he and Cindy completely blew through the life insurance money intended for Levi's children.

These girls got to be raised from the time they're two and four years old, and they get nothing. He wanted the grandkids to grow up in squalor, didn't he? He wanted them to grow up living like posters when their dad had $715,000 in life insurance. You took the money for yourself and put little to nothing in the girl's name, and ultimately, that money was in the girl's name? He had total disregard for that, too, because you had no problem taking that money out of it and putting it right back in your pocket. No, I had a problem with it. Oh, really? Where is it?

After more than eight hours of intense interrogation, Carl finally admitted he'd caused the truck to fall on Levi. Yeah, tell me the f***ing truth, Carl. I can't tell you something I didn't do. You know, I'll walk down the road with you. I will. I'll stand by you on this, if you are honest about it. Because everybody else that's working this case has pretty much given up on you. Yeah, but look what happens to me. I'm going to go to jail. I don't know what's going to happen to you yet. There's something I didn't do.

You know, for some I didn't do. I let him down, I walked away. And I lived with that for four years. You know, you guys somehow, you know, pulled that out of me. And in a way it's been a relief. Good. It should be relief. Never hurt him. It's good. You did. It's all right. I'll stand up for you. What are you going to do for me? I'm going to stand up and say this wasn't premeditated cold-blooded murder. That it was just something that happened. That's what I'll do for you. It was an accident.

According to Carl, the truck fell on Levi after he opened the door to get inside to do something. The detective continues to press him. Carl, what was the accent of what you're trying to hide? You're very close, Carl. I didn't do it. I think part of you did. No way, I didn't do it.

But if Carl thought this explanation would let him off the hook, he was sorely mistaken. Even in this new version of events, Carl was admitting to second-degree murder. He'd caused the truck to fall and crush his son, and then just left him there without attempting to save him. But the detectives didn't believe this new version of events either, just that it was all Carl was willing to confess to.

Did you know he died of suffocation because his lung was collapsed and if the truck was lifted off him, he would have been able to breathe? I don't know what I was thinking. So the truck fell on your son and instead of jacking it back up, you ran? I don't know why. So I just got the hell out of there like a kid that threw a window through a glass or something and didn't want to get caught. So your son was still very much alive and you could have saved him and you could have brought him to life, but you ran and let him die?

Do you think that I believe that? I don't care what anybody believes. I really don't anymore. I didn't kill him. You did kill him. You did kill him. Yeah, I did. Intentionally. No. Accidentally. Yeah, it was an accident. Just when I fell over on him, instead of going to his aid, his rescue, of your son, you said, nah, he's going to die if I don't help him, so I'm not going to help him.

We're talking about the situations of all these fires, all these deaths, of all these alleged coincidences that happen to be fully insured, each one of them, to the max. I'm not going to call you a liar. I'm going to tell you that you're as untruthful as any person I've ever met and attempt to be more manipulative. And to do what you did to your son and try to tell us three different versions of it without still telling us the truth shows me who you really are.

After a solid nine-hour interrogation, Carl was placed under arrest for the murder of his son, Levi Carlson. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges, but the day before his trial, decided to accept a deal. Carl copped a plea deal in which he stated that he knowingly left his son there to die under a truck. That's what he copped to.

At the time of Carl's sentencing in 2013, he was 52 years old. From his perspective, this was an arrangement he could live with, and one of the reasons he'd decided to plead guilty at all.

But what he'd failed to realize was that his guilty plea opened the door for a brand new investigation in California. Now, everything that Carl had done in New York was fair game for California prosecutors to enter into evidence in order to demonstrate Carl's distinctive modus operandi.

All along, Christina's family believed that Carl had set that fire, that he killed Christina, that she trapped her in the bathroom, and now they had something to go to with the DA of Calaveras County, and indeed,

They opened the case, and with all the reinvestigation of Carl, now you have two police departments working in tandem, the New York police supplying the California DA and their investigators with whatever they've had on the barn fire, on the house fire, on the car fire, on everything. And so now they're able to charge Carl with murder, and he's going to face a murder trial and be extradited to California for the murder of Christina Carlson.

Through physical evidence, witness testimonies, and evidence of Carl's consistent M.O. of purchasing large insurance policies before catastrophic events, the prosecution was able to demonstrate Carl had intentionally started that fire inside his house that day. The jury agreed and found Carl guilty of first-degree murder. He was then sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The day that Carl was sentenced and found guilty by the jury was March 17th, which, as you know, soon thereafter, the world shut down. But one of the things that struck me as horrific was that Carl admitted to me that he pretended that he had a fever.

So that he would not have to be there for the impact statements of his daughter, Katie, and his daughter, Erin, who are going to make statements about not only him having killed their mother, but having killed their brother and destroying their lives and their sanity. And Carl, like a sniveling snake that he is,

claimed to have a fever. And at that time, all we knew about coronavirus was that people get a fever and it's contagious. So he deliberately did that so that he could sit behind the courthouse in the holding room and he just listened to them talk over the intercom and told me I didn't really pay attention to what they were saying.

To this day, Carl denies having anything to do with Christina's murder and is attempting to appeal. He also asserts that the confession he gave to the Seneca County Police during the investigation into Levi's murder was false and given under extreme duress.

According to Carl, he's completely innocent of both crimes. He's also taken numerous opportunities to tell his version of events to the media, hoping to clear his name. Remember how we told you Aphrodite Jones spent two years talking with Carl over the phone? Well, the entire time, he was behind bars. I talked to Carl for two solid years on the phone five days a week.

I had a relationship with him where he was telling me everything and anything about his childhood, about his time in the military, about all the different issues that he had in his life. I spent two years talking to this psychopath, which is unfettered access to a killer I've never had in 30 years. Aphrodite invested significant time discussing the case with investigators and Carl's family, including Cindy, who wanted her perspective included in Aphrodite's book.

As it became known Cindy had played a role in misappropriating Levi's insurance money, she faced severe backlash from Christina's family and her stepdaughters, Aaron and Katie.

During Carl's California sentencing, Aaron openly criticized Cindy, stating that she and Carl had deprived Levi's daughters of essential resources like braces, first cars, and a college education. In contrast, Aphrodite's book portrays Cindy in a more empathetic light.

Cindy was vilified by everyone in Christina's family and by her stepdaughters for having, quote, taken the money from her granddaughter's mouths. The truth of the matter is that had she not safeguarded that money for her own sake and her son's sake so they could survive, Carl would have spent it all.

Carl was ready to blow every penny on that duck farm. He was ready to blow every penny on whatever he could. And she saw that. She knew it was coming. And that's why he took the insurance policy out on her. Because when he was running out of that money, she was going to be next. The reason I'm sympathetic to Cindy in the book is because Cindy has not gotten the correct credit for having trapped Carl. For some reason, with all the coverage there's been on this case, nobody realizes that Cindy

was the one, if not for her, we would not have justice for Levi nor justice for Christina. I'm sympathetic to any of the book because I feel she has been robbed, not only by the family, but by also a lot of the media, which portrays her as this less than ideal character. Now, that said, I do leave it open for readers to make their own determination because I can't say whether or not her holding onto certain monies is right or wrong.

I believe that she needed that SNES egg. I believe that if I were in that situation, I would run. And I do know that she saved certain monies for her granddaughters in the amount of $40,000. And she has already paid the 20 plus to her one granddaughter when she turned 18 and has the other money for Ivy as well. Could it have been more? Again, it's not for me to judge her.

I don't feel that it's for any of those family members to judge her either, because again, they would have had no justice whatsoever without her. And she also had to find a way to save herself from Carl.

Today, Levi's ashes are buried next to his mother's in a cemetery in Murphys, California. The side-by-side gravestones serve as a reminder of the bond between a mother and her child, tragically cut short by the actions of a man they both trusted.

We can't thank Aphrodite Jones enough for taking the time to speak with us about a case she's been painstakingly researching for several years. If you haven't read her book, Levi's Eyes, what we've covered in today's episode is only a fraction of what she reveals in her in-depth coverage of the case. To get your copy of Aphrodite's book, check out the links in our show notes.

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