An upstate New York man was arrested this week moments after he left a TV studio where he confessed in an on-camera interview that he had killed his parents.
Lorenz Kraus, 53, made the disturbing confession to CBS6 in Albany on Thursday, admitting that he killed his parents eight years ago. Kraus was at the station to respond to police recovering two bodies on his property the day before.
The station also posted the entire interview on YouTube:
Kraus was arraigned in Albany criminal court Friday on two counts of murder and concealment of a human corpse and pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In the 30-minute interview with news anchor Greg Floyd, Kraus was at first reluctant to reveal the cause of his parent’s death in 2017. Several minutes into the interview that changed.
“When your parents died, did they know what was happening to them?” Floyd asked.
“Oh yeah,” Kraus said.
“And they knew it was at your hand?”
“Well, yes, no one else’s.”
The interview aired on the station’s 6 p.m. broadcast. By the time it ended police were waiting for Kraus in the station’s parking lot.
In what he called a mercy killing, Kraus claimed he wanted to spare his parents the deterioration that comes with aging.
The parents would have been in their 70s and 80s at the time, the New York Times reported.
Kraus said he strangled his father, Franz, with his bare hands and then strangled his mother, Theresia, “with a rope after she had lain her head on her husband’s chest for hours.”
He then admitted to burying them in the backyard of their home in the Whitehall section of Albany.
Kraus said his parents did not ask to be killed but “they knew they were going downhill.” He added that he had done his “duty to them as a son.”
The discovery of the bodies by police was the result of an investigation that found that Kraus had allegedly been collecting his parents’ social security benefits and using the funds for his own personal use.
The Social Security Administration had requested police go to the Kraus home for a welfare check.
Conspiracy theories also played a part in Kraus’s appearance, the Times reported.
According to the newspaper:
In a manifesto rife with antisemitic and bigoted remarks that Mr. Kraus shared with the news station, he referred to a handful of people — Zionists, Gov. Kathy Hochul and recipients of Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarship — as “domestic enemies” and asked that he be prosecuted “under German law.”
Kraus also made a presidential run as a Democrat in New Hampshire in 2020, Albany’s Times Union reported. He campaigned on a platform of dissolving the presidency and promoted a series of antisemitic conspiracy theories, according to the newspaper.
The Albany newspaper also reported Kraus’s conspiracy-driven online posts over recent years revealed a hatred of the British, the Council on Foreign Relations, Freemasons, and Jews.
In his court appearance on Friday, Kraus was ordered to be held in the Albany County jail without bond.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
