When Officer Thomas Schirmer first saw James Krauseneck Jr., the man was standing behind another police officer in the upstairs hallway of his Brighton home, “screaming and growling” as he looked into the bedroom where his wife lay dead.
Inside, police found Cathleen Krauseneck, an ax embedded in her forehead.
“Do you think she’s OK?” Krauseneck later asked police at the scene, Schirmer testified Tuesday during the opening of a murder trial into the 40-year-old case
Krauseneck, now 70, is accused of killing his wife in the early morning of Feb. 19, 1982.
He sat stoic in a Hall of Justice courtroom, listening to prosecutors, defense attorneys and witnesses recall that fateful day. Sitting behind him, his daughter Sara and wife Sharon, who have asserted his innocence. Sitting behind prosecutors, the family of Cathleen, including her 95-year-old father Robert Schlosser, who traveled from Michigan for the trial.
Prosecutors told a jury Krauseneck struck his wife with an ax from their garage and staged the home to look like a burglary gone wrong before he left for work at Eastman Kodak that day.
Defense attorneys for Krauseneck contend that his wife and 3-year-old daughter were still asleep when he left that morning, accidentally leaving the garage door open. When he returned, he found his wife dead.
At the core of testimony Tuesday was a silver tea service tray found at the scene.
Schirmer, the prosecution’s first witness, told the court he was dispatched to the home with little information on the evening of Feb. 19 and found signs of a break-in when he arrived. The windowpane of a door leading from the seasonal porch into the home was smashed, a maul ax perched nearby, and the contents of a woman’s purse were spilled onto the dining room carpet next to a silver tea service tray and a black trash bag.
But upon closer inspection, Schirmer said elements of the scene were “unusual” compared to nearly 1,000 other burglaries he would go on to investigate over his 30-year career with the Brighton Police Department.
Schirmer testified that milk and sugar containers on the silver tea service tray were undisturbed, indicating the tray was carefully placed on the carpet by whoever moved it.
“A burglar is in a hurry – they want to get in and out of the house quickly,” he said. “Usually, property is thrown in a bag and off they go.”
A broken windowpane is common entry in home burglaries, Schirmer said. But “ ... rarely if ever did I see an ax used,” he said. “And never in 32 years did I see two axes used.”