Brighton Ax Murder - Criminal Discourse Podcast

On November 7, 2022, James Krauseneck Jr. was sentenced to 25 years to life for the second-degree murder of his wife, Cathleen Krauseneck, in 1982. James and Cathleen’s only child, a daughter named Sara, was just three years old and home with her mother when she was axed to death. Sara has always defended her father’s innocence. In 2012, convicted rapist Ed Laraby confessed to Cathleen’s murder, but it didn’t hold up. With James’s conviction, one half of this family believes that justice was delivered, albeit 40 years late, while the other half is now suffering a second loss. This is the Brighton Ax Murder case.

Michigan Roots

This case begins in Mount Clemens, Michigan, where James Krauseneck and his future wife, Cathleen Schlosser, were born and raised. Mount Clemens itself is a quaint town in the United States’ midwestern region, about a half an hour’s drive northeast of Detroit. Its colorful history included international fame for their mineral waters and bathing houses in the late 1800s. In a nod to this, Mount Clemens student athletes are referred to as ‘The Battling Bathers.’

James and Cathy grew up in Mount Clemens during its population peak of about 20,000 middle class and mostly White residents. Cathy’s family, the Schlossers, operate a farm in the area. In 1949, James’s father and uncle took over ownership of their family’s local business: Krauseneck’s Carpet & Drapery, which is still operating as a Carpet One store today.

Both James and Cathy attended Mount Clemens High School (fellow Battling Bathers), and while it appears that they worked together in booster club, they were just friends at the time. James graduated in 1969 – he was on the school’s swim and golf teams, the student council, and was a student teacher. Cathy graduated a year later in 1970 and was active with peer-to-peer groups and art clubs.

After graduation, James Krauseneck and Cathy Schlosser enrolled in Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where they began dating. They married in 1974, the same year Cathy graduated, and the couple had their first and only child, Sara, in 1977. At some point in the late 1970s, the young family relocated from Michigan to Lynchburg, Virginia where James had landed a job as an assistant economics professor at Lynchburg College.

Fatal Move

The Krausenecks’ next move was in September 1981 when they purchased a home in the Evans Farm neighborhood of Brighton, New York, a suburb of Rochester. This is the western part of New York state, bordering the southern shore of Lake Ontario. There were more people here than Michigan, and the neighborhood was more upscale. It was a wonderful place for an ambitious couple to raise a family, with beautiful Colonial-style homes, tree lined streets, and many other families with young children.

The move came about when James got an executive position as an economist at the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester. But there are rumors that James was forced to change jobs after Lynchburg College discovered that he never completed his doctorate degree and was fraudulently accrediting himself as a PhD. The fact that he lied about his credentials is true, but whether Lynchburg College knew, if it was the reason for his job change, and when exactly his wife found out, isn’t known for certain. Cathy’s family believes that she was angry with James and confronted him about his lie once she discovered it.

What we do know is that this would be Cathy Krauseneck’s last move – she would be murdered in the Brighton, New York home at 33 Del Rio Drive just five months after moving in.

February 19, 1982

Friday, February 19, 1982 was by all means an average day. Temperatures were right around the freezing mark, typical for western New York in late winter. According to 30-year-old James Krauseneck, he left for work at his usual time of 6:30 a.m., while his wife and their daughter were still sleeping. He reported to his job at Rochester’s Eastman Kodak Company, where he had a morning meeting.

But James’s assistant would later say that “it was different on the 19th. He was [usually] pretty calm and cool. On the 19th, he wasn’t.” Instead, she said that James was “in a hurry” and “rushed” that day. Eastman Kodak had recently discovered James’s fraudulent academic credentials, although it’s not clear whether his job was at risk.

When James returned home at his normal time, just before 5:00 p.m., he says he immediately noticed something was wrong. A window and interior door leading from their garage into their home had been broken into, and his wife’s purse and their silver tea set were out on the floor downstairs. When he went upstairs, he found Cathy, his 29-year-old wife, lying in bed, under the covers, with a long-handled ax protruding from her head. James searched for their three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Sara, and found her in her bedroom, unharmed.

James took Sara to a neighbor’s home to call police. The neighbor recalls James being extremely upset and almost incapable of speaking, which is why she made the phone call for him. When she asked James what was wrong, “he had a guttural sound. He looked horrified.” Responding officers recall James “making emotional sounds… screaming, growling, that kind of thing…he didn’t say anything. Just screams and growls.”

Sara had been home alone the entire day with her mother’s body. She told police that “a bad man” had entered the home in the early morning hours, but she didn’t seem to know that her mother was dead or that it was her body in the bed. James would prevent investigators from speaking with Sara again for several months, and he never followed up on having her seen by a child psychologist.

When responding officers entered the crime scene, they instantly sensed that they were looking at a staged burglary. The two-foot maul (or wood splitter) used to break into the home came from the garage, and so did the ax that was used to kill Cathy Krauseneck. It was odd that items were disturbed downstairs, but there were no signs of ransacking upstairs, and nothing was actually stolen. In fact, there was jewelry and $43 in plain sight in Cathy’s bedroom, untouched. It didn’t make sense that Cathy had interrupted an attempted robbery if she was still lying in bed, under a comforter and electric blanket, as if she was still asleep when she was killed. She was fully clothed, and there were no signs of sexual assault. What was the motive?

Investigators collected over 100 pieces of physical evidence from the crime scene, but they didn’t find any clues that pointed to a perpetrator outside of the home. The handle of the ax used to kill Cathy had been wiped clean of any fingerprints. The original medical examiner initially came up with a time of death anywhere between 1:55 a.m. and 8:55 a.m., but an official time of death was never listed in Cathy’s autopsy report. Experts believed that Cathy’s murder could reasonably have occurred after James left for work. One neighbor told police that they saw a jogger with a ski mask in the area at 7:25 a.m.

Prime Suspect

Although most friends and neighbors described the Krausenecks as a loving couple and James as a good husband and father, a few reported frequent arguments, incidents of domestic violence, and described James as “arrogant and mean.” Police had found a pamphlet for a local marriage counselor after searching the couple’s vehicle. Cathy’s younger sister, Annett Schlosser, thinks James killed her sister after an argument over James’s incomplete PhD credentials. She believes Eastman Kodak Company learned of his fraud around the time of Cathy’s murder, and he was at risk of losing his job and their new home.

Police conducted an initial interview with James but had a hard time following up. First, James and his daughter got a hotel room and let police know where to find him. But when they showed up on February 20, the day after Cathy was discovered, James had already left for his hometown of Mount Clemens, Michigan with his daughter. James didn’t notify police, but officers found out from the hotel’s front desk clerk that he had left. They were able to get a key and search the hotel room before it was cleaned, but reported that it didn’t look like it had been used at all – the towels were dry and looked untouched, and the beds looked freshly made.

In March, officers made a trip to Mount Clemens. They said James began yelling when investigators mentioned that they suspected the burglary had been staged and referred to his reaction as “consciousness of guilt.” Before officers left, James told them, “Please don’t give up on my case. I need to find out who did this.”

But instead of cooperating, James retained a lawyer and neither he, his daughter Sara, nor anyone else in his family, granted another interview until the case was reopened decades later. One investigator said that James “gave the appearance of wanting to be cooperative, but then he got a lawyer, and we never talked to him again.” Multiple people provided false confessions to Cathy Krauseneck’s murder over the years, but her husband remained the prime suspect.

False Confession

One of those false confessions came from convicted rapist Ed Laraby. As Ed was approaching death in a prison hospital due to incurable disease in 2012, he provided a written confession to Cathy Krauseneck’s murder. Ed was serving two life sentences for sex crimes against teenagers and the attempted murder of a police officer. In the latter case, he attempted to strangle the officer with a nurse’s call cord when he was being hospitalized for his ongoing health issues.

Ed Laraby did live one half mile from the Krauseneck’s Brighton, New York home when Cathy was murdered, but he got major details about the crime wrong. For example, he said he murdered Cathy in the summer of 1981, when it actually occurred in February 1982. He also said he raped Cathy before killing her, but her body had no signs of sexual assault. It’s also important to note that the nature of Ed’s known offenses do not align with Cathy Krauseneck’s attack.

Brighton police did attempt to investigate Ed Laraby in 1982, but that file is sealed and it’s unclear how successful they were. We do know from an officer who surveilled him in connection with a series of Rochester rapes in the early 1980s that apprehending Ed Laraby was “much easier said than done. Mr. Laraby…did not talk to the police…he would most likely invoke his right to a lawyer and remain silent.”

Ed Laraby’s confession was dismissed, but another one he made shortly thereafter was taken more seriously. Ed told police that he was responsible for the death of Stephanie Kupchynsky in the Martha’s Vineyard region of upstate New York. Stephanie was a music teacher who went missing on July 31, 1991, when she was just 27 years old. Her remains were discovered seven years later, in 1998, but the cause of her homicide would remain unsolved until Ed’s confession.

Ed was using these confessions as a bargaining tool to negotiate with officials so that he could be hospitalized and die outside of prison. With the answers he provided in Stephanie’s case, he was granted a burial outside prison grounds. Ed died in prison in 2014 and has not been connected to any other homicides.

Fresh Look

In 2015, Monroe County police and the FBI created a new cold case work group, and the Brighton Ax Murder in Monroe County’s jurisdiction was one of the first cases investigators wanted to reactivate. They began by digitizing the case file documents stretching all the way back to 1982, making them searchable and indexable, a huge step forward in digesting an unsolved case more than three decades old.

Their next step was taking the more than 100 pieces of physical evidence collected from the crime scene and retesting them, this time for DNA rather than fingerprints. The only DNA found was James Krauseneck’s. On one hand, this makes sense, considering that James lived in the home with Cathy. On the other hand, it was significant that of all the numerous items connected to the crime scene, there was no other DNA present besides Cathy and James Krauseneck’s. The physical evidence all but rules out the intruder theory.

Police tracked James down to reinterview him in 2016. They found him out in Gig Harbor, Washington in another executive position. Now, he was the vice president of sales for the Weyerhaeuser company, one of the world’s largest private timberland owners. He was living in a 3,352-square-foot home at a golf and country club, and two days after police interviewed him, he put that home up for sale and relocated to Arizona.

The most critical new evidence was a fresh look at Cathy Krauseneck’s time of death. The FBI and Monroe County PD called in New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Baden, a nationally recognized and well-known expert who’s even been tasked by the United States government to investigate the John F. Kennedy assassination. Dr. Baden applied a more precise time of death analysis that went beyond a simple estimation based solely on Cathy’s body temperature. He also analyzed the digestive state of her stomach contents, the stage of her rigor mortis, and a different rate of body cooling than what was used back in 1982, accounting this time for the fact that she was fully clothed and under a comforter and electric blanket all day.

As a result of Dr. Baden’s work, investigators now had a new window for Cathy Krauseneck’s time of death, and it had to have happened before her husband left for work at 6:30 a.m.

Delayed Justice

In May 2019, as a result of the cold case unit’s findings, Monroe County’s district attorney presented the case against James Krauseneck to a grand jury. They returned with an indictment, and James Krauseneck was charged with second degree murder on November 8, 2019. He made the $100,000 bail and, after forfeiting his passport, was allowed to return to his Peoria, Arizona home with his fourth wife, Sharon. His original trial date was set for June 2, 2020, but that of course was delayed due to COVID.

In December 2021, the courts denied James’s motion to dismiss the indictment. He argued a “Singer” motion, meaning he believed that the prosecution denied his constitutional rights by delaying charges in order to gain a tactical advantage. First, James claimed that there was no new evidence to restart the investigation and that no new evidence was collected, rather that he was being charged based solely on old evidence that wasn’t sufficient to charge him back in 1982. Of course, there was new evidence (DNA testing and a new time of death), and the cold case unit’s formation wasn’t solely for the purpose of investigating Cathy Krauseneck’s case.

Second, James argued that several witnesses who would have testified on his behalf had passed away, and that live testimony is more compelling to a jury than documentation and written record. He noted specifically coworkers at Eastman Kodak Company who said his behavior at work the day his wife was murdered was not unusual. He especially emphasized the missing testimony of the deceased original medical examiner, who would be able to explain their reasoning for the original time of death that doesn’t necessarily contradict with James’s alibi. However, it’s not clear how any of those individuals would testify today, and the fact that they weren’t available to testify meant that their evidence wasn’t subject to cross-examination, which is actually to the defense’s advantage.

During the trial, James’s attorneys argued that Ed Laraby was Cathy’s killer, not James. James’s daughter Sara, now in her 40s, testified on her father’s behalf. But it took less than ten hours for the jury to deliver their unanimous guilty verdict. One of the jurors who was a teenager in 1982 said it was the staged burglary aspect and lack of evidence of an intruder that swayed him.

“If you look at it even the items in the bag were standing up, you had his footprint on the bag…the items on the floor were perfectly standing up, nothing was knocked over, it was just so staged,” he said. “There really was no evidence to show that anyone outside of him could have committed this murder. That really did it for me.”

Divided Family

On November 7, 2022, more than 40 years after he lodged an ax in wife’s head and left his three-year-old daughter home alone for ten and a half hours with her body, James Krauseneck was sentenced to 25 years to life.

Cathy’s mother passed away before the trial began, but her 95-year-old father, Robert Schlosser, attended court proceedings from start to finish. After sentencing, he gave reporters a message for his former son-in-law: “Jim, I hope you live to 100 years old — and enjoy your new home.” Meanwhile, James’s daughter, Sara, was devasted by the verdict, saying her father “was convicted of a crime he did not commit.”

It was even difficult for the jury, who saw the Krausenecks and Schlossers in court every day, knowing they were once a connected, loving family who were now hoping for completely opposite outcomes, brought together once again by this horrible family tragedy. “We just tried to prepare ourselves in terms of what the reaction was going to be because there were really no winners in the situation,” one juror recalled.

The Krauseneck and Schlosser families have been divided since Cathy’s murder in 1982. Annett Schlosser, Cathy’s younger sister says, “When [James] moved out of state, [he] took Sara away from us and wouldn’t let us talk to her or see her or communicate with him.” The Schlossers still love Sara and understand that the verdict is another tremendous loss for her. Robert Schlosser, Cathy’s father and Sara’s grandfather says, “I don’t blame her. That’s her father. Maybe after all this is over with it’ll be different.”

Dark Connections

Interestingly, Cathy Krauseneck’s murder isn’t the only tragedy to befall the Brighton, New York home at 33 Del Rio Drive. In 1977, husband and wife Anthony and Estelle Schifino died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning while they were living in the home. Anthony was well-known in the area as the founder of Rochester Radio Supply Inc. and owner of the Avon Inn. After a night of bowling, the couple unintentionally left their car running in the garage, leading to their death.

The Colonial-style home built in 1945 was updated in 2017 and boasts clean, modern designs along with three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and a two-car garage. It was just sold in 2021 for $230,000 and typically goes for a little under market value, due to its reputation.

Cathy Krauseneck’s story also inspired a 2016 novel by Elizabeth Brundage called All Things Cease to Appear, and that novel inspired a 2021 Netflix horror movie called Things Heard & Seen starring Amanda Seyfried as the character portraying Cathy and James Norton portraying James Krauseneck.