A man has confessed on television to killing his parents and burying them in the garden of their home in upstate New York eight years ago. Lorenz Kraus, 53, was arrested immediately after leaving the studio following the shocking admission.
Kraus’s on-camera confession aired Thursday, a day after police discovered two bodies at the Albany property. Investigators had launched an inquiry after it was revealed that Kraus’s parents, Franz and Theresia Kraus, were still receiving Social Security payments despite having not been seen in years.
During a half-hour interview with local outlet CBS6, Kraus described the deaths as mercy killings, claiming his elderly parents were in decline.
“They knew that this was it for them, that they were perishing at your hand?” anchor Greg Floyd asked.
“Yes,” Kraus replied. “And it was so quick.”
Initially hesitant to explicitly say he had killed his parents, Kraus made the admission after several minutes of questioning. He said they had not asked to be killed but were aware of their deteriorating condition.
“I did my duty to my parents,” Kraus stated. “My concern for their misery was paramount.”
He explained that his mother had recently been injured while crossing a road, and his father was unable to drive following cataract surgery. Kraus did not claim either of them had a terminal illness.
Charged with two counts of murder, Kraus appeared briefly in court on Friday, where a public defender entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. He remained silent during the hearing.
Stone Grissom, CBS6’s news director, told the Times-Union the interview came about after Kraus emailed a two-page statement to local media, including his phone number. When Grissom called him and asked whether he had killed his parents, Kraus replied, “I plead the Fifth.”
Grissom agreed to post Kraus’s statement online if he came in for an interview, and to his surprise, Kraus arrived within the hour. Grissom ensured Kraus was unarmed upon arrival. A plainclothes police officer was present in the lobby, where the interview took place. Floyd had only 10 minutes to prepare.
“I was thinking that I was on a mission to find the truth of what happened,” Floyd told the Associated Press.
Throughout the interview, Kraus avoided saying how his parents died, but Floyd persisted with the key question: “Did you kill them?” Eight minutes in, Kraus admitted to suffocating both and described the method.
“I did not prepare for this because it was thrust upon us with virtually no notice,” Floyd said. “And I think that worked out in an advantageous way because I didn’t go in with a set of predetermined questions. I just followed the script that he laid out. I followed what he was saying and reacted to that.”
Floyd, with 45 years of broadcasting experience, described the interview as unlike any he had done before. He said he kept thinking about the elderly couple, aged 92 and 83, whom Kraus described as survivors of World War II in Germany.
“Maybe it’s kept me a little grounded because going through that was a tough thing to go through. And then you think, ‘Well, okay, did we at least do justice for these two people who lost their lives?’”
The bodies were discovered in the garden of the Kraus home, located on a street of small, closely spaced houses. The search followed a financial crimes investigation, which revealed Kraus had been collecting his parents’ benefits for personal use.
Floyd said there had been no public knowledge of the couple’s disappearance. Neighbours believed they had returned to Germany.
“No one knew anything until Tuesday, when a number of police vehicles appeared on the street, searching the house and digging in the backyard,” he said.
Albany County Assistant Public Defender Rebekah Sokol, who represented Kraus at the hearing, said she would be examining how the interview came to be. She noted that if the media acted as an agent of the police, it could affect whether Kraus’s statements would be admissible in court.