Jim Krauseneck was the dark-haired handsome son of a prominent family in Mount Clemens, Michigan, where his summer job at the local country club was as a caddy and a lifeguard. Cathy Schlosser was a vivacious blonde, one of six children of a working class family in the same town.

Although they went to the same high school – Jim was one year older – it wasn’t until they were both students at Western Michigan University that they became sweethearts. On a May day in 1974, in a church in Mount Clemens, they were married. Eight years later Cathy Schlosser Krauseneck’s funeral would be held in that same church.

In 1975 they moved to Ft. Collins, Colorado, Cathy with a bachelor’s degree in hand and Jim with a master’s. There he would begin studies for his PhD at Colorado State. And there, within four months of their move, Cathy suffered a miscarriage. A few years later, their only child, Sara, was born the day after Cathy’s 26th birthday. The couple became doting parents.

In 1978 and 1979 Jim finished his doctoral dissertation and landed a job teaching at Lynchburg College in Virginia. At Lynchburg, he was known as Dr. Krauseneck, though no doctoral degree had been awarded. His dissertation had been returned for revisions, and Krauseneck never resubmitted his work. He would go on to claim he had received a PhD and that claim helped him land a job at Eastman Kodak in 1981.

Krauseneck loved his teaching job at Lynchburg and was reluctant to leave it, but Cathy was urging him to find a more lucrative line of work. He pressed for a salary increase but his request was denied because his salary was already in line with the school’s parameters.

He accepted the job at Kodak as an economist and became part of the Kodak family in Kodak’s heyday, when it employed about 60,000 people. With financial help from Jim’s parents, the Krausenecks bought a home on Del Rio Drive in the Rochester suburb of Brighton six months before Cathy died..

Cathy enrolled Sara in Queen of Peace nursery school near their home and made a few friends there. At the urging of one friend, she enrolled Sara in dance class. Still, she and Sara were somewhat isolated as Jim worked long hours and drove the family’s only car to Kodak Tower most every day.

Although he had the higher-paying job Cathy wanted, trouble was looming. Kodak officials were raising questions about Jim’s PhD and he kept promising to provide evidence that he had, indeed, received that degree. With pressures at work, he became distant at home, and Cathy confided to friends that he often came home from work angry and short-tempered. Police would later say it appeared he had been sleeping in the den. The marriage was straining, and Cathy had talked about leaving and taking Sara back to Michigan.

The day after Cathy’s death in 1982, Krauseneck went immediately back to Mount Clemens with Sara, who was two months shy of her fourth birthday.

In 1986, Jim remarried but left that marriage abruptly nine months later, one day after Sara’s birthday. He told friends he had married so Sara would have a mother, but his wife later said she believed Jim thought she was getting too close to the toddler. Beyond that, she was shocked and mystified about his sudden departure. By the early 1990s, Jim had moved to Washington state and would marry twice more. He joined a subsidiary of the Fortune 500 company Weyerhaeuser and worked his way up through various positions in California and Georgia before returning to Washington state at the company’s corporate headquarters.

Jim and his fourth wife Sharon were living the lifestyle Cathy Krauseneck had dreamed of. In 2009 they bought a French Country house in desirable Gig Harbor near Tacoma. There they enjoyed a spacious four-bedroom home with three fireplaces including one in the master bathroom, manicured grounds and a view of the eighth fairway at Canterbury Country Club. Jim traveled 23 miles each day to his office at Weyerhaeuser in Federal Way, a sprawling campus built in 1971 to international acclaim for its environmental vision. The company sold the property two years ago and moved to Seattle.

In recent years, Jim held industry positions, including serving on the Steering Committee for Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, and he was on the Board of Directors of the Southern Forest Pine Association.

His parents, Jim and Pauline Krauseneck, had moved to Gig Harbor and lived around the corner from Jim and Sharon.

In 2012, the Krausenecks bought a second home in desirable Scottsdale, Arizona. The one-story Southwestern adobe home with a covered patio on a cul-de-sac is in the in the Terravita neighborhood, and the couple had moved there after his retirement as Vice President of Marketing and Sales in the Softwoods Division of Weyerhaeuser.

Cathy and Jim’s daughter, Sara, lives in Texas. Her second daughter was born on the day before Sara’s 26th birthday and what would have been her grandmother Cathy’s 62nd.