An Australian F45 trainer lived an outrageous double life after faking her own death in an insurance scam until she was found out and jailed.
The shocking tale began when Karen Salkilld, 43, bought an F45 gym in 2019 and part-owned a farm with her mother in Beverley, 83 miles south-east of Perth.
Four years later, the mother-of-two decided to sell the farm due to mounting debts, but a deal to do so fell through and she had already said she would buy another F45 gym.
The farm was eventually sold for less than she had hoped to get and Salkilld came up with the plan to fake her own death in December 2023.
Salkilld’s elaborate fraud scheme involved pretending to be her then-partner Kelly Winter to claim a massive life insurance payout of £364,878 ($718,923AUD) earlier this year.
In February, the 43-year-old posed as Ms Winter to tell the Insurance Line company she had died in a crash in Broome, Western Australia, two months earlier.
She submitted her claim with a fake death certificate, a falsified Western Australia Coroner’s Court letter and a mocked up record of investigation into the death.
The hoax was initially successful and a week after the fake claim, the insurance company paid out the $718,923AUD into a bank account opened by Salkilld in the name of her partner, who is not implicated in Salkilld’s fraud.
Over the next few days, Salkilld made several payments from the account, but due to their nature, the bank flagged the payments and froze the account.
In an effort to unfreeze the account, Salkilld went to Palmyra police station with various forms of ID, including a Medicare card and a driver’s licence, certified by a police officer.
But Salkilld had hamfistedly stuck her own photograph over Ms Winter’s identity papers as part of the scam. These heavily altered copies of the IDs did not pass the bank’s verification process, Australian outlet Nine reports.
Police arrested Salkilld in March. On her first appearance in court, she pleaded guilty to offences including gaining benefit by fraud and intent to defraud by knowingly using a false record.
Despite appearing in court in relation to the serious fraud charges, the so-called ‘dead woman walking’ had regularly been seen casually going about her business.
Salkilld, an assistant football coach for a local club, was caught by a 9News reporter casually going about her business in Perth in June – shopping, running her F45 studio in Applecross, Perth, and returning home.
Ambushed while coming out of the North Lake shopping centre car park, Salkilld snapped when she was asked: ‘Why did you fake your own death?’
Clutching her hands to her chest, she hit back: ‘What the hell! Who are you guys? I’m not talking to you guys.’
The journalist followed her as she prepared to cross the road and asked: ‘How did you think you could get away with it? You’re charged with serious fraud offences.’
When 9News followed her to her Perth home, she turned on the reporter and said: ‘Are you trying to make everything worse? Or are you trying to put F45 under the banner again or what?’
After entering her property, she yelled through the fence: ‘Jesus Christ, go and find someone else.’
Daily Mail Australia also found Salkilld out shopping in Perth in July. She looked angry while withdrawing a wad of $50AUD (£25) notes.
Wearing a salmon pink sweatshirt and black leggings, Salkilld frowned and clenched her fists as she withdrew the cash from a cash machine in Perth’s southern suburbs.
Salkilld was sentenced to three years in prison in Perth District Court on Monday.
At the sentencing hearing, Judge Vicki Stewart said Salkilld’s crime took effort and persistence and was not ‘opportunistic’, WA Today reported.
‘You were living beyond your means and overcommitted yourself,’ she said.
Ms Winter – who the court heard had nothing to do with the fraud – wrote a character reference in support of her former partner, saying she was concerned for Salkilld’s children if their mum was jailed.
But Judge Stewart said her crime was too serious for a suspended sentence, and jailed her for three years.
Salkilld also has to to pay back $101,771AUD to TAL Insurance, which owns Insurance Line, after the judge ordered the return of $617,191AUD being held by MyState Bank.
She will be eligible for parole in February 2026, after serving half of her sentence, which was backdated to August 2024.
But police indicated she could be hit with further charges over the fraud.
