A man confessed to killing his parents and then burying them in their back yard during a recent interview with a local television news channel in upstate New York, leading authorities to charge him with two counts of murder.
Lorenz Kraus’s remarkable interview with WRGB aired pn Thursday, shortly after police discovered two bodies at his family’s home in Albany – and about eight years after his parents were last seen alive before apparently vanishing without a trace.
“I buried them in their property,” Kraus, 53, told WRGV anchor Greg Floyd during the interview.
Floyd asked: “You buried them in the back of your house in Albany?”
Kraus said: “Yes.”
Though Kraus tried to invoke his constitutional right against self-incrimination during the conversation, he also said, “Yeah, basically,” when Floyd asked: “You suffocated them? You suffocated your parents?”
Kraus subsequently explained that he used his hands to choke his father to death and a rope to do the same to his mother.
“My father, after he died – my mother put his head on his chest, and after a few hours, I finished her,” he said, adding that he buried the bodies after several days.
Police arrested Kraus outside WRGB’s studios immediately after the interview.
He first came under authorities’ scrutiny in connection with alleged financial crimes, as the local Times Union newspaper reported. Acting on a tip fielded in May, the Social Security Administration requested that police check on Kraus’s parents – Franz and Theresia, who were thought to be 92 and 83. Officers did not see any sign of them, though they were ostensibly still collecting benefits.
By Wednesday, investigators had started digging in the Kraus family’s back yard and found one set of human remains. They said they found another set of human remains on Thursday. Local police chief Brendan Cox said he was confident the remains were those of Franz and Theresia Kraus.
Lorenz Kraus contacted several news outlets before arranging to sit down with Floyd and claiming his killing his parents had been merciful. “They knew they were going downhill,” Kraus said.
He alluded to how Theresia had been injured crossing a street, and Franz was unable to drive after undergoing surgery for cataracts.
“I did my duty to my parents,” Kraus also said. “My concern for their misery was paramount.”
Furthermore, Kraus said communities need to “widen up the law so that people can deal with these kind of problems”.
Kraus appeared in court on Friday after his arrest and pleaded not guilty to two charges each of murder as well as illicitly concealing a corpse. He was ordered held without bail.
Local district attorney Lee Kindlon told journalists that Kraus’s confession to WRGB is helpful to prosecutors, but he said physical evidence and witness testimony is also going to be crucial.
The Times Union reported that Kraus graduated from Siena University in 1994 as a political science major and was named valedictorian. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute confirmed he graduated with a master’s degree in business administration in 2009, the Times Union also reported.
Police said a relative called them in February 2020 to check on Kraus’s parents, according to the New York Post. A neighbor reportedly told officers the Krauses had moved out of the US.
As the Times Union noted, prior to his arrest Thursday, Kraus was perhaps best known for an “obscure” presidential campaign and “his adherence to conspiracy theories and antisemitism”.
WRGB’s station manager, Stone Grissom, told the Associated Press that he personally searched Kraus to make sure he was unarmed after he arrived for the interview. Grissom also said that there was a plainclothes police officer in the front lobby of the station, where the interview unfolded.
Local assistant public defender Rebekah Sokol, who represented Kraus on Friday, said she had “very serious concerns” about the WRGB interview in part because, to her, “it looked like a police interrogation”.
Associated Press contributed reporting
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