Days before Karen Mason's fiery death, there was a Glens Falls car crash and a mess
NEW LIGHT: THE LIFE, DEATH AND REOPENED CASE OF KAREN MASON
Chapter 2
QUEENSBURY, New York — There's a small patch of woods at the intersection of Veterans Road and Upper Sherman Avenue, no bigger than a few football fields. The kind of woods you couldn't get lost in if you tried.
The chirps of birds and bugs are drowned out by the incessant hum of traffic, a constant reminder of the Adirondack Northway, Interstate 87, just to the west. A dirt road runs along the southern edge and loops around to a strip of well-worn grass in the middle of the trees. In the winter, town crews dump excess snow here.
Police discovered a yellow 1977 Buick Regal on this very patch of land at 2:40 p.m. May 8, 1988. Two days earlier, its owner — Karen Rew Mason, a 32-year-old schoolteacher — had reported it stolen.
Ten hours later, Karen's estranged husband would find her lifeless, burned body at the doorstep of her father's Adirondack home, in a small Hamilton County town called Hope.
State Police investigators back then were unwilling to tie Mason's death to a strange car crash a few days before. It was coincidental, they believed. Records show Karen's new boyfriend's roommate quickly confessed to ditching the car in the woods after someone — maybe Mason, maybe someone else — crashed it into a small residential garage in the city of Glens Falls.
But now, a new line of investigators isn't so sure. To them, it's an anomaly, a major red flag; Karen wasn't the type to hit and run. She was deeply upset by the situation.
And within a few days, she was dead.
'Those events probably are related'
Police want to find somebody — anybody — who might know something about the wreck at 22 Sherman Ave. on May 5, 1988. Or, better yet, someone who witnessed the aftermath.
Solving the case of the suspicious crash, they hope, could help connect some dots in the case of the suspicious death.
"Anytime there's an anomaly, that's what we focus on and try to explain why all this stuff occurred in close proximity to the other things," State Police Investigator Samuel Lizzio said. "There is nothing like this (crash) prior to (Karen's death)."
He continued: "I think those events (of the crash) probably are related to the rest of the weekend. So if anybody had any information about that, it would be — I think it could be helpful."
The following recounting of the crash is based on interviews with State Police and Karen's surviving friends, including Keith Gaulin, her boyfriend at the time of her death. Her estranged husband, Kearney Mason, has also been re-interviewed.
Perhaps most crucially, it also relies on a pair of sworn statements from 1988 by Keith Gaulin and Michael Dickinson, his roommate, who admitted abandoning the car in the woods.
The statements were obtained under the Freedom of Information Law from the City of Glens Falls, whose police department first investigated the crash, along with the Warren County Sheriff's Department.
Together, they paint a picture of a 32-year-old schoolteacher left upset over a scramble to cover up a late-night wreck, a plan that was foiled by police within days, hours before Karen's body was found.
Thursday, May 5, 1988
In some ways, Karen Mason's life was stable.
She had two months left in her third year teaching health at Hadley-Luzerne Central School, a job that combined her master's degree in nursing with her lifelong yearning to please her father, a state education official. She had settled in to a small apartment in Queensbury, where she rode her yellow Schwinn bicycle all around town.
But in other ways, she was starting over.
Her marriage to her husband, Kearney, had disintegrated in 1987, the final straw being a disagreement over their living situation at their home on the Great Sacandaga Lake in the town of Hadley, according to friends.
On Sept. 24, 1987, Karen filed a separation agreement with the Saratoga County clerk. The next month, she moved out, getting herself a basement apartment in the Robert Gardens apartment complex in the town of Queensbury.
Early the next year, she started seeing someone new: a 36-year-old named Keith Gaulin, whom she met at a bar on Bay Road in the city of Glens Falls.
They connected over their shared experience: Keith, too, was going through a divorce. By chance, they had the same divorce attorney, a woman named Jennifer Jensen.
"(Karen) was ending one chapter of her life and starting a new chapter in her life, and she seemed very happy with that," Keith said in a November 2021 telephone interview.
Keith worked at the Sandy Hill Corp. plant in nearby Hudson Falls. He and Michael Dickinson, his longtime friend, were living in a one-story house at the border of Glens Falls and Queensbury, a 10-minute ride from Karen's apartment.
Karen's fresh start extended to a new set of wheels.
She had meticulously maintained her trusted yellow Buick Regal, police say. Keith said she would change the oil herself. Even after their split, Kearney said, he would drive down from Hadley if her car needed repair.
But she was moving on from Kearney and from the Regal, and had arranged to buy a brand-new car: a gray, four-door 1988 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale, a boxy sedan with silver, spoked wheels that would have retailed for nearly $15,000 back then.
Three days after buying the new car, she'd be fighting for her life in its back seat, choking back black smoke, kicking furiously at the rear passenger window until it finally gave way, letting in cold early spring Adirondack air.
Karen would make it out of the car, but she didn't have long to live.
Keith would be the last person to see her alive; Kearney, the first to see her dead. Both have consistently denied involvement in her death.
A troubling history
On May 5, a Thursday, Keith and Karen had been at her friend Connie Lavery's apartment. Connie had been there the night he and Karen had met, Keith said. She lived in the same Robert Gardens complex as Karen.
That night, they'd been "visiting and drinking," Keith said in his sworn statement in 1988. In a phone interview, Keith said Karen had a "glass or two of wine."
(Reached by phone, Connie, who now goes by a different surname, declined comment.)
Around 11 p.m., they decided to leave for Keith's ranch home on Western Avenue, a block from Glens Falls High School. It was a quick drive — right on Route 9, right on Sherman Avenue. Less than three miles, no more than 10 minutes.
Keith says they chose to drive separately — he alone in his 1984 Chrysler, she alone in the Regal. Karen hadn't yet picked up her new Oldsmobile.
That Keith was driving at all was notable. Court records show — and Keith himself acknowledges — he shouldn't have been behind the wheel.
Five months earlier, on New Year's Day, he was arrested on a drunken-driving charge after a Glens Falls police officer pulled him over for blowing through a blinking red light and failing to keep right. Court records and news articles from the time show it was his second drunken-driving arrest.
On Jan. 12, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of driving while ability impaired. He was fined $350 and ordered to complete the state's Drinking Driver Program, court records show. Most crucial was this: Glens Falls Judge David B. Krogmann ordered Keith's driver's license suspended for six months, meaning it still would have been suspended at the time of the May 5 wreck.
"I had a restricted driver's license," Keith said in the phone interview. "I could drive back and forth to work, and I had a limited amount of time during the week that I could drive."
But driving to and from his girlfriend's house?
"It probably wouldn't have fallen in the category of what I was capable of doing legally," Keith said in the phone interview.
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A few months after the DWI case came more trouble for Keith. He was arrested at 1:30 a.m. April 17 for criminal possession of a controlled substance after a police officer found him and two friends with a small amount of cocaine in his 1984 Chrysler, which was parked in a South Street parking lot in Glens Falls.
Today, Keith says the cocaine arrest was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He claims he was out with Karen at a bar when a friend asked him for a ride somewhere.
Keith says he agreed and told them to go out to the car. He stayed back to tell Karen where he was going. When he joined them, he realized they were snorting cocaine.
Suddenly, police surrounded the car. All three were charged with cocaine possession and would plead guilty.
What happened next, however, is in dispute.
Confiding in a friend
By Keith's interpretation, Karen's reaction to his cocaine arrest was largely one of understanding.
"I didn't take it as such, no," Keith said when asked if Karen was upset. "She was trusting enough in me to understand that I was basically a victim of circumstances, that I wasn't out in the car with them snorting lines of cocaine. She wasn't happy, but she understood."
Karen's best friend has a different perspective.
About a week or so before her death, Karen had to return a cable box. Along the way, she met up with Pam Driscoll, her lifelong friend, for ice cream in Glens Falls.
Pam recalls that's when Karen first told her about her new boyfriend, Keith: how she recently learned he was involved with drugs; how she was worried that it could affect her teaching job; how she was planning to break up with him.
"She was worried about her teaching license," Pam said. "That's what she said to me. She didn't say anything about an arrest. She just didn't want to be involved with (drugs) at all."
'Your girlfriend has been in an accident'
After taking separate cars from Connie Lavery's apartment the night of May 5, Karen and Keith stopped at a Stewart's convenience store at the corner of Sherman and Glen, just up the road from his house, Keith said.
When they left, Karen was to follow him home.
Keith got there; Karen didn't.
He waited about 15 minutes, then "the next thing I know is some guy is knocking on the door," Keith wrote in his 1988 statement.
"I answered the door and some guy told me, 'Your girlfriend has been in an accident down the street.'"
Keith climbed into the man's small white pickup truck and went to the scene — 22 Sherman Ave., across the street from the Glens Falls Inn. The Good Samaritan — who wasn't identified — dropped him off and left, Keith said.
As it stands today, the house at Sherman Avenue is a Frankenhome: a gray duplex on a corner lot with the look of two small homes fused together, each with their own address on separate streets. One unit has a metal roof with a door facing Sherman and a few pine trees in the yard; the other has shingles and faces Elm Street with some simple green shrubbery out front. Two old antennae stand on the roof.
A small garage is attached to the Sherman home's western end. Calling it a one-car garage is being literal: If a small sedan were parked inside, there wouldn't be much room for anything else.
It's not clear if the house had the same layout in 1988. Police say there are no known photos of the wreckage, but they know there was damage caused when Karen's Buick crashed into the garage.
The wreck "knocked out one of the support pillars" and pushed the garage door in, Keith said in the phone interview.
"Structurally, it looked kind of bad," he said. "But in reality, there wasn't that much damage. You probably would have had to put a new support in and a new track in for the garage door, and maybe a new door."
With Karen's car heading west on Sherman Avenue, the driver would have had to have swerved hard to the left, across any potential oncoming traffic, and up over the curb. Police say it's also possible the driver might have been navigating a turn — the home is on a corner of Elm Street and kitty-corner from Holman Street — and misjudged it.
Somehow, some way, nobody inside the home at 22 Sherman Ave. was shaken awake by the sound of the Buick crashing into the garage.
"How they didn't wake up, I'm not sure," State Police investigator Lizzio said.
Keith said he arrived at the scene to find Mason upset. They had been drinking, after all, and she was a schoolteacher. She couldn't risk getting a DWI, he said.
"She was afraid she was going to get DWIed," he wrote in his 1988 statement. "So she got in the car and backed it out."
Keith got in, and together they headed back to his house, he wrote.
Have a tip?
If you have insight or information about the Karen Mason case, call New York State Police Troop G in Latham at 518-783-3211 or email crimetip@troopers.ny.gov.
Who was driving?
To Karen's friends and colleagues, even all these years later, that version of events is incomprehensible.
Karen was nothing if not responsible; she was the prototypical class salutatorian, not the type to hit and run.
How could she just leave?
"If something happened, whether she was responsible for it or not, she would have gone to someone about it," said Diane Matthews, a now-retired French teacher at Hadley-Luzerne who once chaperoned a class trip to Martinique alongside Karen and Kearney.
"Called up immediately, have police come over, go to a neighbor — whatever. She wouldn't leave. That was not in her nature."
It leads to the question: Was Mason the driver of the car?
Today, State Police won't say that with certainty.
The police agency rebuffed efforts to obtain documents related to the case. The state Freedom of Information Law allows police to reject requests for records if the documents are created for law enforcement purposes and could harm an ongoing investigation.
But Lizzio will say this: Over the years, some people's stories have changed regarding the night of the crash. Interviews conducted after the case was reopened in 2011 don't line up with interviews shortly after Mason's death. That's part of the reason the case remains open.
But whose stories have changed? And how did they change? Lizzio won't say.
"I can just say that we've continued interviews, and discrepancies that we've been unable to reconcile have come up with the same individuals that were interviewed at the time," Lizzio said.
Lizzio didn't mention anyone by name. It's clear, though, he has at least some doubt that Mason was behind the wheel.
"I didn't say she crashed it," he said in April after a reporter, in recounting the crash, said Karen was the driver. "I’m going to be vague, but I didn’t say she crashes — the vehicle is crashed."
Michael Cote, a fellow State Police investigator, chimed in, in an even tone: "The vehicle was involved in a crash."
Ditching the car
Keith Gaulin's 1988 statement, delivered a few hours after Karen's body was discovered, was supplemented by a separate sworn statement from his friend Michael Dickinson, who said he returned home the night of May 5 to find Keith and Karen in the kitchen.
"They both were upset," Michael said in his statement. "Karen was really upset about something. She was bouncing up and down, and shaking her hands."
Michael asked what was wrong.
They told him about the Buick. They told him about the hit-and-run. They told him the car was now parked behind his and Keith's house.
That's when they came up with their plan: Michael would find a place to ditch the car, and Karen would report it stolen.
Michael, in his sworn statement, said he offered the suggestion. Keith was less specific, suggesting the three of them came up with it together.
"I told Karen that I would get rid of the car," Michael said.
A forgotten death
New York State Editor Michael Kilian writes about how the Karen Mason project came to be.
What happened next is in dispute, but this much is clear: Michael made good on his suggestion. He got the Buick from behind his house, drove it west about a quarter mile, and abandoned it in that small patch of woods on Veterans Road, the same place the Warren County Sheriff's Office would find it less than three days later.
"You could see it sitting there," Keith said in the phone interview. "It didn't have branches or anything sitting over it to hide it."
By Keith's telling, Michael drove the Buick to the woods while Michael's girlfriend — "I don't know who she is," Keith said in his statement — followed behind in Michael's truck.
Michael told police a woman named Jamie, whom he was with that night, followed him in her Trans Am or Camaro; he couldn't recall which.
Michael and Jamie then went to a since-abandoned bar-restaurant called Niki's in Queensbury until about 4 a.m., he said. Jamie went home, and Michael retired to "(his) other house" right in front of Hudson Falls Produce, where he worked.
At 7:30 a.m. Friday, Michael went to work, making his deliveries, he said.
Friday, May 6, 1988
It wasn't until sunrise Friday that Edmund Sipowicz discovered the damage done to his garage.
Sipowicz, the owner of 22 Sherman Ave., who was a few weeks away from turning 70, called the police to report the damage around 6 a.m. Friday. (Sipowicz died at the age of 102 on Dec. 8, 2020.)
Karen Mason's story
Explore the events of Karen's life and the investigation into her death in this timeline.
That morning, Karen did something police say she hardly ever did: She called in sick to the Hadley-Luzerne school.
“It’s just not in her character to call in sick for work,” Lizzio said. “And we've spoken to several teachers that work with her, and that is a rarity that she would call in sick to work.”
Around 7 a.m., Karen called the Warren County Sheriff's Office to report her Buick stolen — an apparent act of fraud.
That's because Lizzio said state troopers believe she was aware of the plan to abandon the car, even if she wasn't the one to actually abandon it.
By all accounts, Karen remained shaken by the incident.
Dickinson said he stopped by his and Gaulin's Western Avenue home around 8:30 or 9 a.m., and found Keith Gaulin and Karen there.
She "was still upset," Michael said in his statement.
Karen's final note
Around noon that day, Karen went to pick up the insurance cards for her new car, the 1988 Oldsmobile she had arranged to buy the day before. She would pick up the car around 5 p.m., Lizzio said.
That night, Karen was still beside herself. Her stomach was upset to the point of illness, another apparent sign of her worry, according to Michael and Keith's statements.
"We know from our interviews that this is causing an internal struggle with Karen, and that Karen is having a really hard time knowing that they falsely reported an incident," Lizzio said.
Keith said he and Karen stayed in her Robert Gardens apartment that night. They tuned into an NHL game on TV — the New Jersey Devils and the Boston Bruins, which Dickinson was attending in person at the Meadowlands. It was a blowout, though, and they switched to "Miami Vice" when the score hit 4-0, Keith said.
They went to sleep around 10 p.m. At some point during the night, Keith realized Karen was no longer next to him. That wasn't alarming, he said; Karen would often get up in the middle of the night and sleep on the couch.
His alarm went off at 6 a.m. Saturday for work. Then he found a note in the kitchen.
"Gone up to Dad's for a little R&R," it read, according to Keith's statement. "Be home early tomorrow, see you then."
State Police believe Karen left her apartment that night, sometime between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., in an effort to put her troubles in her rear-view mirror.
Mess everywhere
In her last days, the girl who had won 4-H prizes for her sewing and who liked things neat as a pin was seeing things spiral out of control.
She was separated, facing divorce.
She was living on her own in a basement apartment.
Her new boyfriend, whom she’d been dating for just a few months, had lost his license for driving while impaired, and had been arrested for cocaine possession at 1:30 in the morning less than three weeks earlier.
There was the car crash into the garage on the way home after drinking.
There was the lie she had told police, that her car had been stolen when she knew that Michael had ditched it.
Her guilt-wracked conscience was making her body rebel.
Everywhere she looked, there was a mess.
When Karen had needed help in the past, when she was studying for a college test she was sure she’d fail, she’d call her dad, who would talk her through her anxiety. But her father was on the road, heading north from Florida in his motor home with Karen’s stepmother. There was no reaching him till he arrived on Wednesday.
Still, the instinct was strong to put her problems behind her, to go to the house she’d helped her dad build, at the foot of the Adirondack Park. He’d even let her drive the bulldozer during construction, her friend, Pam, remembered.
So Karen got into her brand-new Oldsmobile and pointed it west.
Toward Hope.
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New Light: Karen Mason's Story
NY State Editor Michael Kilian writes about the Karen Mason Project
Timeline: Karen's life and investigation into her death
This article originally appeared on New York State Team: Was Karen Rew Mason's car crash related to her 1988 death?
