Suburban Ax Murder Mystery

Kathleen Schlosser, known as Kathy, was born in 1952 in the Mount Clemens area of Michigan, the second of six children of Robert Schlosser, a truck driver who later ran Schlosser Trucking, a gravel business, and his wife. details of the account remain covered until revealed The two were in the same class at school but did not become close until both attended Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, when Jim began driving Kathy to and from campus at the start of breaks. They married on 3 May 1974 and moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, where Jim studied for a master's degree at Colorado State University and Kathy worked as an orthopedic therapist. Their daughter Sarah was born on 15 April 1978. In 1979 the family moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, where Jim taught economics at Lynchburg College, and in September 1981, deciding that teaching did not pay enough, he answered an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal and took a job as an economist with Eastman Kodak, whose headquarters were in Rochester. The family bought a house at Del Rio Drive in Brighton, an upscale suburb of Rochester, for $92,000, and moved in that autumn.

On 16 February 1982 Kodak ran a background check on its employees and found that Jim had not completed his doctorate at Colorado State; he was one paper short. The company told him to finish it but did not dismiss him. Two days later, on the evening of 18 February, the family ate dinner at about 6.30 p.m. - meatloaf for Jim and Sarah, egg salad on lettuce for Kathy - and then drove together to the bank to deposit Jim's pay cheques, stopping at a department store, a drugstore and a liquor store, where they bought an alcoholic drink containing milk. At home Kathy had some of the drink and Jim made her shrimp; Sarah was put to bed at about 10 p.m., and Kathy went to bed at about 11 p.m., with Jim following before midnight.

Jim left for work at about 6.30 a.m. on 19 February 1982, putting the family's golden retriever, Amicus, in the basement as usual. He returned at about 4.50 p.m. to take Sarah to a podiatry appointment. The garage door was open, although he had closed it, and at the front of the house he found broken glass beside the front door and a wood-splitting maul, described as an axe, lying next to it. He went inside, found no one on the ground floor and ran upstairs, where he found Kathy in the master bedroom, lying on her right side with a two-and-a-half-foot axe embedded in her skull. A single blow had driven the blade three and a half inches into her brain; the pathologist believed she was asleep when she was struck. Jim found Sarah, then three and a half, sitting on her bed in her own room, dressed in two sweaters and several pairs of socks. He carried her across the street to a neighbour, Eileen Marin, who telephoned the police at about 5 p.m.; officers began arriving at 5.03 p.m. Nothing had been taken. Both the axe in Kathy's head and the maul by the door belonged to the family. In the dining room, Kathy's purse, a silver tea set and candelabras had been scattered on the floor beside a black plastic bag, but money and jewellery elsewhere in the house were untouched, and the police concluded that the burglary had been staged. No fingerprints were found anywhere in the house, not even those of the family, and no forensic trace was recovered. A faint shoe print inside the plastic bag appeared to come from a boat shoe, and a pair of Jim's boat shoes was photographed but never collected or compared. Detectives interviewed Jim for five or six hours that night; his parents drove from Michigan, and the police suggested he and Sarah go to a hotel and return at 8.30 the next morning. The family checked out and drove to Michigan instead, and Jim did not speak to the police again for years.

Sarah was interviewed on 19 February 1982 and said she had seen a bad man in the house, with an axe in his head, whose face was of many colours; detectives concluded she was describing her dead mother. The autopsy on 20 February gave the cause of death as an axe wound to the head and put the time of death between 6.30 and 9.30 a.m. Her stomach was empty and her bladder full, which suggested she had slept through the night. A neighbour reported hearing a moaning sound at about one or two in the morning followed by a dog barking. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it

Kathy's family initially supported Jim. In 1984 and 1985 police travelled to St Clair, Michigan, where he had moved with Sarah; in 1986 the district attorney, Howard Relin, consulted Dr Nicholas Forbes, who thought Kathy could have died as early as 5.55 a.m. but said there was no precise way to fix the time. Jim remarried in 1986 and divorced nine months later, then moved to Washington State near his sister. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed

In April 2015 the case was reopened with the FBI, and the file was sent to Quantico. In April 2016 investigators made a surprise visit to Jim at his home in Gig Harbor, Washington, and he denied the killing. In 2018 the prosecution approached Dr Michael Baden, a former New York medical examiner, who reported in October 2019 that Kathy had died between 3.30 and 6.30 a.m., based on heat loss of about one degree an hour because she was heavily clad and covered by a comforter and an electric blanket. The defence argued that the blanket had been switched off, that the stomach and bladder findings contradicted an early death, and that Baden had misrepresented the original autopsy. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now

details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed The house at Del Rio Drive was sold in 2023 for $372,000.