ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A man admitted during a television interview to killing his parents and burying them in the backyard of their upstate New York home eight years ago, then was arrested as he left the studio.
The stunning on-camera confession from Lorenz Kraus, 53, came Thursday, a day after police say they recovered two bodies from the home in Albany as part of an investigation that found Kraus' parents, Franz and Theresia Kraus, were still receiving Social Security payments despite not having been seen or heard from in years.
Lorenz Kraus contacted local news outlet CBS6, and sat for a half-hour interview, in which he described the deaths as mercy killings for aging parents who were becoming more frail.
“They knew that this was it for them, that they were perishing at your hand?” news anchor Greg Floyd asked Kraus.
“Yes,” said Kraus. “And it was so quick.”
Kraus was initially reluctant to directly say he had killed the couple, but made the admission after several minutes of questioning from Floyd. Kraus said his parents didn’t ask to be killed but “they knew they were going downhill.”
“I did my duty to my parents,” Kraus said in the interview. "My concern for their misery was paramount.”
Kraus said his mother had recently been injured from falling while crossing a road, and that his father could no longer drive after cataract surgery.
Kraus, who did not mention his parents having any terminal illnesses, was arrested moments after he left the television studio and has been charged with two counts of murder. A public defender entered a not guilty plea during a brief court appearance Friday. Kraus did not speak during the hearing.
Interview came together quickly
Stone Grissom, the TV station's news director, told The Times-Union the interview came about when Kraus emailed a two-page statement to news outlets that included his phone number. Grissom called Kraus, who told him he had buried his parents in his yard.
"When I asked if he killed them, he said, ‘I plead the Fifth,'” Grissom said.
Grissom said he promised to post Kraus’ statement on the station's website if Kraus agreed to come in for an interview. To his surprise, Kraus agreed and arrived within the hour. Grissom said he checked Kraus upon his arrival to ensure he was unarmed.
A plainclothes police officer was also in the front lobby, where the interview was conducted, Grissom said. He added that Floyd had just 10 minutes to prepare for the interview.
“I was thinking that I was on a mission to find the truth of what happened," Floyd told The Associated Press.
During the interview, Kraus repeatedly declined to say how his parents died. Floyd wouldn't let it go, and kept turning back to his most important question: “Did you kill them?” Eight minutes into the interview, Kraus said he had suffocated them both and described how he did it.
“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," he said. "I just followed the script that he laid out. I followed what he was saying and reacted to that.”
The interview was unlike any that Floyd has conducted during his 45-year career. But he said he keeps thinking about the couple, who were 92 and 83 years old, and were described by their son 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?’"
Investigation began as fraud inquiry
The discovery of the bodies in the yard on a street of close-together small homes was the culmination of the financial crimes investigation which police say found Kraus had been collecting his parents’ benefits and using the funds for his own personal use.
Floyd said the story came as a complete surprise. No one had reported the couple went missing. Neighbors thought they had moved back to Germany, Floyd said.
“The public never knew anything until Tuesday when an array of police vehicles showed up on that street and started searching a house and digging in the backyard,” he said.
Albany County Assistant Public Defender Rebekah Sokol, who represented Kraus at Friday's hearing, said she would be looking into how the interview came about because “if the media was essentially an agent of police in this matter, that could raise questions about whether (Kraus') comments in the interview would be legally admissible at trial.”