![]() “My mom used to take us on walks all the time and we would collect like leaves or acorns or whatever and press them into little books. The accommodations may have been rustic, but Christina found a way to make the wooded setting magical for the couple’s three children during long days home alone on the property. “It was pretty much like an old miner’s shack,” Alexander said. When Christina’s father, Art Alexander, offered Karl a job at his sheet metal business in in the Sierra Nevada foothills of central California, Karl took him up on the offer and moved the family to Murphys, California in the late 1980s.Īlexander offered to let the young family stay for free in a home he was renting out, but Karl wanted to pave his own way and purchased a run-down home deep in the woods. The couple had three children together and settled in New York where Karl worked at a local stone quarry, but money was tight. “The sun was always shining in her world.” Great kid,” Karl’s brother Michael Karlsen told producers. The couple met while Karl was a cadet in the Air Force stationed in North Dakota.Ĭhristina was married at the time to another cadet, but the pair couldn’t deny the electric charge between them and soon began a new life together. The romance between Christina and Karl had been filled with promise when it began in the early 1980s. “That was our life growing up,” the couple’s daughter Kati Reynolds recalled in Monday’s season finale of “American Greed.” “One bad incident after another.” It appeared at first to be another tragic accident, but investigators would later discover that both deaths had more sinister roots and a member of the Karlsen family was slowly killing off those closest to him for financial gain. More than a decade later, Christina and Karl’s son, Levi, died after being pinned under a pickup truck on his father’s farm. “I couldn’t even stop.”īut it wouldn’t be the only tragedy to impact the family. “I started screaming,” Christina’s mother, Arlene Meltzer, told CNBC's “American Greed” of learning of her daughter’s demise. On New Year’s Day in 1991, the Karlsen family was enjoying a relaxing day at home when a fire broke out that quickly consumed their small, rural California home.Ĭhristina Karlsen-who had been taking a bath-got trapped in the bathroom of the home and died in the blaze, leaving behind her husband Karl and three small children, who had all managed to safely escape the flames.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |