A man who said during a TV interview that he murdered both his parents by suffocation and buried their remains in their backyard was immediately arrested by police following his apparent confession.
In a shocking interview with CBS6, Lorenz Kraus, 53, told interviewer Greg Floyd his parents, Franz and Theresia Kraus, were getting old and that he had killed them.
“You suffocated them? You suffocated your parents,” Floyd asked.
Kraus nodded and then added: “Yeah, basically.”
“Did your mom or your dad ask you to take their lives?” Floyd asked.
“They didn’t explicitly say that”, Kraus replied.
“They realised what was happening to them as it happened?” asked Floyd.
“Yes, and it was so quick,” Kraus said.
He said he suffocated his father first, “and after he died my mother put her head on his chest and she was there for a few hours, and then I finished her.”
Asked if he had buried them immediately, Kraus said, “No, no, no.”
“I didn’t know what to do after that. It took me several days to realise I can’t do this, I can’t do that [so] just bury them on the property.”
CBS6 aired the interview on Thursday, just after police confirmed they had found the remains of two people, believed to be Kraus’s parents, at the property.
Immediately after completing the interview, Albany police arrested Kraus outside the CBS6 building.
Authorities had been initially investigating Kraus in relation to financial crimes following a tip-off when the Social Security Administration requested a welfare check on the elderly couple, who were still collecting benefits.
But when officers arrived, Franz and Theresia, who would be 92 and 83, respectively, if they were still alive, could not be found, and he became a suspect in his parents’ 2017 disappearance.
He then contacted the media and agreed to be interviewed about what happened.
Police had also visited in 2020 – after being asked to undertake a welfare check on Franz and Theresia by a concerned family member – but were reportedly told by a neighbour the couple had moved abroad.
Kraus has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of concealment of a human corpse.
