After 37 years, husband is accused in wife’s ax murder
By Nancy Monaghan and Laurie Bennett
Ronald Reagan was President. The San Francisco 49ers had just taken home the Super Bowl trophy. Eastman Kodak was a giant among the corporate headquarters located in Rochester NY. And on the morning of February 19, 1982, while her mother lay dead in the bedroom upstairs, 3-1/2-year-old Sara Krauseneck stared out the front window of her home.
Her father, James F. Krauseneck, Jr., now 67, was arraigned in November 2019 in New York State Supreme Court, where he pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder. He was allowed to return to his home in Scottsdale AZ and is expected back in court in March.
The one-page indictment was powerful in its brevity:
“The defendant on or about Feb. 19, 1982, in the County of Monroe, State of New York , with intent to cause the death of Cathleen Krauseneck, caused her death by striking her in the head with an ax. “
The charges came nearly four years after the FBI Cold Case Unit took on the Krauseneck case at the request of former Brighton Police Chief Mark Henderson.
The homicide shocked all of Rochester and spawned a “20/20” TV investigation and stories in newspapers nationwide. A woman had been found dead in her bed late in the afternoon, an ax buried in her head. Her toddler daughter had been home alone all day with her mother’s corpse. On a quiet street in the Rochester suburb of Brighton, where the Krausenecks had lived for less than six months, police raced to the home when Krauseneck called to report he had discovered his wife’s body. He said he had just gotten home from work at Kodak, where he was an economist, and found her in their bed, young Sara in her own bedroom, and the family dog, Amicus, in the basement.
Krauseneck told police he had left for work at 6:30 that morning while both his wife and daughter were still sleeping. By the next morning, when he was expected to return to the Brighton Police Department, he was instead heading back to Mount Clemens, Michigan, his hometown. His parents had driven from Michigan the night before to pick him up, and he never returned to police headquarters.
Within hours of the discovery, then-Brighton Police Chief Eugene Shaw began to suspect Krauseneck. Evidence of an attempted burglary in the dining room appeared staged, there was a damp bathroom rug hanging to dry in the garage, valuables in the bedroom near Mrs. Krauseneck’s body were untouched, and things didn’t quite add up. One investigator called it “too neat,” given that most burglars are in a hurry to retreat. The Monroe County Medical Examiner’s office put the time of death between 2:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. and determined Mrs. Krauseneck was asleep when she died.
Could a burglar have broken into the home undetected between 6:30 – when Krauseneck said he left for work – and 9:30, started to pack up the dining room silverware and then gone upstairs to kill a woman who was sleeping? Did the dog bark when glass shattered onto the kitchen floor from the door to the garage? No one in the neighborhood had seen or heard anything.
But after years of working on the case, police and prosecutors never charged Krauseneck. Taking the case to a grand jury would have proven difficult: There were no witnesses, and Krauseneck refused to allow Sara to be interviewed. There were innocent answers to some possibly incriminating evidence – Krauseneck owned the ax and used it regularly to chop wood, so his fingerprints on the weapon wouldn’t mean he used it to kill his wife. But there were no fingerprints at all on the ax handle – it appeared to have been wiped clean. So was most everything in the house – clean, no fingerprints anywhere. Co-workers at Kodak said Krauseneck was at work all day.
Not long before Chief Shaw died in 1993, he told Laurie Bennett, then of the Detroit News and formerly of the Rochester Times-Union, that the Krauseneck case was the one that kept him awake at night, the case he was so sorry they could never solve.
For 10 years, until 1992, Cathy Krauseneck’s family in Michigan stuck by her husband. He told them the police were trying to frame him because they could not find the real killer. By the early 1990s, Krauseneck had taken his young daughter to Washington state where his sister lived and where he married his third wife. Contact with Cathy Krauseneck’s family in Michigan diminished every year.
By the mid-1990s, Krauseneck had joined the international company Weyerhaeuser, headquartered outside Seattle, working in the company’s divisions in California and Georgia. He rose through the ranks to become Vice President of Marketing and Sales for the company’s softwoods division. In 2009 he and his fourth wife bought a home in picturesque Gig Harbor just over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and he had a 41-foot boat named Amicus after the family dog he, Cathy and Sara had owned when they lived in Brighton. In 2012, he and his wife bought a home in Arizona.
After the FBI Cold Case Unit took on this case in 2016, Brighton Police Investigator Mark Liberatore and an FBI agent from the Seattle office traveled to Krauseneck’s Gig Harbor home unannounced and spoke with him and his wife. The agents left Washington for Texas where they then interviewed his daughter, Sara, now 41, who by then had two small children of her own.
The cold case investigators pored over every paper in the Krauseneck homicide file, reviewing statements, lists of evidence, reports from the original testing of that evidence by the FBI forensic lab. The Cold Case team met regularly to review updates and consider investigative steps. The final evidence was analyzed this year by the FBI lab in Quantico, and a Monroe County Grand Jury returned an indictment against Krauseneck November 1.
Krauseneck’s wife and daughter accompanied him to court. Afterward, his defense attorneys stressed that Sara Krauseneck Young “has never doubted her father’s innocence.”
Annet Schlosser, Cathy’s sister, described the indictment as a long-awaited step toward holding Krauseneck accountable. “My family is very hopeful and this will help us to heal,” she said. “We need to heal.”