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.
