A man who ran for the presidency in 2020 on a platform of anti-semitism, 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 in 2017. He told neighbors that his parents had moved away to Germany.
âYou suffocated them? You suffocated your parents,â Floyd asked.
Kraus nodded and then added: âYeah, basically.â
âDid your mom or your dad ask you to take their lives?â Floyd asked.
âThey didnât explicitly say thatâ, Kraus replied.
âThey realised what was happening to them as it happened?â asked Floyd.
âYes, and it was so quick,â Kraus said.
He said he suffocated his father first, âand after he died my mother put her head on his chest and she was there for a few hours, and then I finished her.â
Asked if he had buried them immediately, Kraus said, âNo, no, no.â
âI didnât know what to do after that. It took me several days to realise I canât do this, I canât do that [so] just bury them on the property.â
CBS6 aired the interview on Thursday, just after police confirmed they had found the remains of two people, believed to be Krausâs 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.
The Albany Times-Union reports that Kraus is also at the center of a financial crimes investigation relating to the use of his parentsâ bank accounts. The article goes on to say that a âscreedâ received at their offices from Kraus about his wish to be interviewed about his parents contained references to a Filipino cryptocurrency.
The newspaper stated that when they reached out to Kraus, he was already en route to be interviewed by the CBS affiliate.
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 parentsâ 2017 disappearance.
He then contacted the media and agreed to be interviewed about what happened.
Police had also visited in 2020 â after being asked to undertake a welfare check on Franz and Theresia by a concerned family member â 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.
Kraus launched an audacious campaign to run for the presidency in 2020 on a campaign of anti-semitism.
In a revealing interview, Kraus said that his father exposed him to politics at a young age but that he didnât identify with either Democratic or Republican politics.
âThe themes of my campaign are good faith nationalism,â he said. His campaign website was described as âlayered with anti-semetic memes, and Kraus calls for meme creators to partake in spreading these views. â The url for the website was BanJews.com.
Kraus referred to President Trump as a âlunatic zionist waving a gun in everyone’s face.â
Kraus is a 1994 graduate of Siena College and holds an MBA from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
