On February 19, 1982, police in the upscale Brighton suburb of Rochester, New York, found the body of 29-year-old Cathy Krauseneck in bed with an ax stuck in her head.
It seemed to have died instantly and with a single blow. Downstairs, there were signs of what they believed to be a staged robbery.
The back door had a single broken glass and there was a sledgehammer, some kind of heavy axe, leaning against the wall. Cathy’s bag and its contents were scattered across the dining room floor in a manner that, to the authorities, appeared almost deliberate.
And there was a silver tea set neatly arranged on the ground nearby. Next to the tea set, investigators found a garbage bag with a slight shoe print inside, as if someone had reached inside to hold it open.
Detectives now believe that the footprint is an important clue in solving the case.
In fact, the scene lacked one of the most important hallmarks of a robbery, retired Brighton Police Detective Mark Liberatore and Detective Steve Hunt told “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty on “The Brighton Ax Murder.” , which aired on Saturday, February 25 on CBS.
“There is an officer involved in this case from the 1980s… who hits the nail on the head,” says Liberatore. “We in Brighton don’t handle a lot of homicides. We handled a lot of robberies…and this was not a robbery.”
At the time, investigators suspected that the scene was staged by Cathy’s husband, Jim, to hide his real intention: to kill her.
Crime scene photos show a pair of boat shoes, like the ones he wore, next to his bed. Forty years later, detectives believe that the faint shoe print on that trash bag was made by those boat shoes.
“He’s a guy who wears boat shoes,” says Hunt. “And we don’t have killers running around in February in winter wearing boat shoes and killing people.”
But Cathy’s bedside boat shoes were never tested for a match to that print and the original investigators did not keep the shoes. Jim Krauseneck’s attorney says her client didn’t kill Cathy, he loved her.
Cathy and Jim Krauseneck and their three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Sara had moved to Brighton in 1981, just six months before the murder, so he could start working as an economist at Kodak. The day Cathy died, she had told the police that she had gone to the office as usual, around 6:30 a.m., and they found her body when she returned shortly before 5:00 a.m. p.m
Without further evidence of a motive or anything directly linking Krauseneck to the crime, authorities in 1982 refused to charge him, and the case remained unsolved.
The case would remain cold for almost 30 years. Then in 2015, the FBI offered to help with funds and facilities to reopen cold cases and Detective Liberatore was asked by Brighton police to re-examine Krauseneck’s case. Liberatore chose Hunt to help him.
There were some fibers and other prints around the house, but by 1982 no light had been shed on the case. And there wasn’t much other forensic evidence for the original investigators to work with, largely because DNA wasn’t yet being used as a crime-fighting tool.
But decades later, examining the boxes of evidence, Liberatore and Hunt agreed that Jim Krauseneck was their prime suspect. And they paid him a visit. In April 2016, they flew to the Seattle area, where he was living at the time after remarrying. They showed up unannounced, hoping to extract a confession.
However, it was not achieved; various DNA tests did not provide much of a clue as to whether Krauseneck was at the scene of the murder.
At Krauseneck’s trial as early as 2022, coroner Barbara Maloney was called to the stand. Maloney said the original medical examiner had several errors in his analysis of her.
Thanks to other investigations and new DNA technologies, the fingerprint put Krauseneck back on the police radar and after a trial he was found guilty.
On September 26, 2022, Jim Krauseneck was convicted of the second degree murder of Cathy Krauseneck. The 71-year-old man was later sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
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