WATERLOO, N.Y. -- The more Cindy Ka

WATERLOO, N.Y. -- The more Cindy Karlsen learned about her husband, Karl, the more suspicious she became.

There was the $700,000 life insurance payout he received after the 2008 death of his grown son, who was crushed when the pickup truck he was working under suddenly slipped off its jack. There was the $200,000 life insurance payout he received when his first wife died in a house fire nearly two decades earlier. And finally for Cindy Karlsen, there was the $1.2 million policy that her husband had now taken out on her life.

That's what prompted her to work with police, leading to second-degree murder and insurance fraud charges against Karl Karlsen in the death of his 23-year-old son, Levi. And New York and California authorities are now taking a new look at the circumstances of the 1991 death of his former wife, Christina Karlsen.

Cindy Karlsen's cooperation evolved from an unnerving revelation a year before she came forward. She learned Karlsen had invested some of the insurance money from his son's death into a life insurance policy on her.

"I would be worth $1.2 million dead to Karl," she testified during a pretrial proceeding.

After speaking to sheriff's investigators last year, she agreed to wear a wire and sit down with her husband in a crowded restaurant in New York's picturesque Finger Lakes region in hopes of getting him to confirm her suspicions about the death of his son.

"I led him to believe our marriage had a chance if he came clean," Cindy Karlsen said in a recent hearing, the husband she is now in the process of divorcing sitting in prison orange just a few feet away. "I told him he could trust me."

The wire picked up Karl Karlsen telling Cindy how he'd removed his truck's front tires and raised it on a single jack before asking Levi to repair the brake and transmission lines.

"It was so wobbly," Karlsen said, according to a recording of the conversation, heard against the backdrop of restaurant noise, played recently in court.