A New York man was arrested on Thursday after admitting during a television interview that he killed his parents before burying them in the backyard of their New York home eight years ago.
The Albany Police Department said in a statement Thursday that officers arrested Lorenz Kraus, 53, after he confessed to the killings during an interview with WRGB, a local CBS affiliate based in Albany, New York.
“I buried them in their property,” Kraus told CBS6 anchor Greg Floyd during the half-hour interview.
Floyd then asked: “You buried them in the back of your house in Albany?”
Kraus replied: “Yes.”
The arrest stemmed from a financial crime investigation into Kraus’ parents’ Social Security benefits, police said.
Authorities executed a search warrant of Franz and Theresia Kraus’ Albany home on Tuesday, police said. The investigation revealed that the couple had not been heard from in years and authorities suspected that their son “had been collecting their social security benefits and using the funds for his own personal use,” according to the police statement.
On Wednesday, authorities recovered the bodies of Kraus’ parents in the home’s backyard, police said.
Kraus then contacted WRGB on Thursday afternoon “to give a full confession of killing his parents,” police said.
He told the local outlet that he killed his parents because they were becoming more frail and he “knew they were going downhill.”
“They knew that this was it for them, that they were perishing at your hand?” Floyd asked Kraus.
“Yes,” said Kraus. “And it was so quick.”
Kraus said later in the interview that he strangled his 92-year-old father with his hands and his 83-year-old mother with a rope.
“I did my duty to my parents,” Kraus said in the interview. “My concern for their misery was paramount.”
Kraus was arrested moments after the studio interview ended. He has been charged with two counts of murder and two counts of concealment of a human corpse. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Assistant Albany County Public Defender Rebekah Sokol, whose office is representing Kraus, urged the public to remember that Kraus is presumed innocent.
“While the interview from the other night was certainly shocking, I have to question how it occurred, who initiated, and what the police’s involvement was,” she said in a statement. “If a vulnerable individual’s constitutional rights were violated for the sake of ratings, that would be extremely concerning.”
“I am starting to suspect that the TV interview cannot be admissible in court, but it is very early in the case and time will tell,” she added.
A neighbor who lived next to Kraus’ parents said she noticed that the elderly couple vanished in June 2017.
Since then, Kraus regularly visited the property to collect mail, mow the lawn and shovel snow, the neighbor said. When asked about his parents, Kraus told her they had moved to Germany.
The neighbor, who lived next to Kraus’ parents from 2016 to 2021, asked that her name not be published due concerns over her personal safety.
“Every time I ask him for them, he don’t look you in the eyes when he’s talking to you,” she said.
“He just gives you short answer and is in a rush all the time,” she added.
That same summer, after a storm knocked a tree onto both of their properties, Kraus left an envelope with $300 in her mailbox to cover the damage, she said. But he requested that whoever she hired not clear the damage on his side of the property.
Around that same time, she noticed Kraus discarding a large amount of trash, including what she said appeared to be a carpet. She said she also noticed that the once well-kept grass in the Kraus’ backyard disappeared and was replaced by what resembled a dirt field.
The neighbor said she has yet to be contacted by authorities about the case.
“On one hand, I felt that he was psycho,” she said. “On the other hand, I was thinking ‘how can child kill the parents?’ It’s just unbelievable.”
“My instinct was right,” she added.
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