Joe Harker
A man has been charged with murdering his parents after he admitted live-on-air to burying their bodies in the garden.
Lorenz Kraus, 53, was arrested after he participated in a TV interview in New York on Thursday (25 September) in which he said he'd killed them.
Speaking in an interview with CBS which came about after he emailed a statement to a number of news outlets along with his picture and phone number, Kraus claimed that he had carried out mercy killings.
He said he'd done it 'sometime August 2017' and claimed he 'did my duty to my parents' who were elderly, but initially he repeatedly declined to directly tell the interviewer he'd killed his parents.
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"My concern for their misery was paramount," he said, and while he kept trying to avoid the question of whether he'd killed them he was eventually asked by interviewer Greg Floyd if he suffocated his parents and said 'yeah'.
The interviewer then asked which of his parents he had killed first and the man explained what he'd done back in 2017.
He said: "My father. After he died my mother put her head on his chest and, uh, she was there for a few hours and I finished her."
Kraus claimed it took him 'several days' to decide that he would bury his parents in their garden, and described how he allegedly killed each of them by saying 'for my father my hand, for my mother a rope'.
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As for why, the man claimed his parents didn't ask for him to kill them but alleged they 'knew they were going downhill'.
The bodies of Franz and Theresia Kraus were only recently discovered after police investigated their home to work out why they were still receiving social security benefits when nobody had seen or heard from them for several years.
Police claim that Kraus was collecting the benefits on behalf of his parents and using the money for himself.
The man was arrested right after the interview, and his lawyer has since entered pleas of not guilty to two charges of murder and two charges of concealing a human body.
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Assistant Albany County Public Defender Rebekah Sokol said the interview was 'shocking' but suggested that the 53-year-old's claims he made during it may not be admissible in court.
During the interview, he said he 'did the right thing for them based on the situation' and claimed he 'did my duty to them as a son'.
"My father already told me he has double vision, he had a hearing aid, he couldn't hear any more, his eyes were going, he couldn't drive," Kraus said of his parents' condition.
"My mother, I knew, was not using her turn signals properly so they were losing their independence and even awareness of the world because of the breakdown."
The interviewer countered that most people wouldn't kill their parents because they could no longer 'use their turn signals', with Kraus saying there were other factors to it.
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He remains in custody.