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An upstate New York man confessed in a TV interview on Thursday that he killed his parents and buried their bodies in their backyard nearly a decade ago, authorities said.
Lorenz Kraus, 53, made the shocking on-camera confession to CBS6 in Albany a day after police say they recovered two bodies from the home in the city. Police were initially investigating why Kraus’ parents, Franz and Theresia Kraus, were still receiving Social Security payments despite not having been seen or heard from in years.
Kraus sat for a 30-minute interview with news anchor Greg Floyd and was initially reluctant to directly say he had killed his parents in 2017. Several minutes into the interview, Kraus made the stunning admission.
“They knew that this was it for them, that they were perishing at your hand?” news anchor Greg Floyd asked Kraus.
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“Yes,” said Kraus. “And it was so quick.”
Kraus described deaths as mercy killings for aging parents because their health was declining. Kraus said his parents did not ask to be killed but “they knew they were going downhill.”
“I did my duty to my parents,” Kraus said. “My concern for their misery was paramount.”
Kraus did not say that his parents had terminal illnesses, telling Floyd that his mother had been injured after a fall while crossing a road, and that cataract surgery left his father unable to drive.
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Floyd asked Kraus about the details regarding his parents’ deaths.
“You suffocated your parents?” Floyd asked Kraus.
“Yeah,” Kraus replied.
Kraus said he killed 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.”
Kraus was arrested moments after he left the television studio and was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of concealment of a human corpse.
Kraus appeared at a brief court hearing on Friday. A public defender entered a not guilty plea on behalf of Kraus, who did not speak during the hearing.
The initial financial crimes investigation that led to the discovery of the bodies found that Kraus had been collecting his parents’ social security benefits and using the funds for his own personal use, according to police.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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