Reporter, News Director Speak Out After Man Admits Killing Parents in Shocking Televised Interview

Lorenz Kraus, 53, reached out to the station one day after police conducting a search of his parents’ Albany home as part of a fraud investigation discovered two bodies buried in the back yard.

Authorities were investigating the property for suspicion of Social Security fraud as checks for both Franz, 92, and Theresia Kraus, 83 had been deposited for the past eight years, but no one had seen the couple. Kraus was suspected of “collecting their social security benefits and using the funds for his own personal use,” according to a police statement seen by NBC News.

The couple had never been reported missing. One neighbor told the news outlet that Kraus visited the property regularly to collect the mail, mow the lawn and shovel the snow. She said that when she asked him about his parents, Kraus told her they had moved to Germany.

Stone Grissom, news director at WGBR, said there was virtually no time to fully prepare for the interview after Kraus reached out — or what he admitted during it. Talking with The Times Union about how the interview came to be, Grissom shared that it started with a two-page statement emailed to their station and others that included a selfie photo and Kraus’ phone number.

The statement did not address his parents directly, but was instead a manifesto of sorts about politics and the state of the country, with his plan to have a board of trustees put in place to replace both state and federal governments, with guidance to “get Trump on the right track.”

After stating that this board of trustees should have “prosecutorial immunity,” Kraus wrote, “In return, I will answer all questions in this police matter.”

“On the phone, he told me he buried his parents in his yard,” Grissom said. “When I asked if he killed them, he said, ‘I plead the Fifth.'”

“If you killed both of your parents, how are you out walking the streets?” Grissom said he then asked Kraus. “He didn’t really have an answer to that.” At this point, Kraus had not said anything to police about his parents’ deaths or bodies, nor had he been charged with anything.

That’s when Grissom said he made an offer he never expected Kraus to follow through on. He told the man that he would post his statement on the station’s website, as Kraus had requested — but only if he agreed to come into the station for an interview. To his surprise, Krause agreed … and then showed up within the hour.

“Safety was a major concern,” Grissom told the newspaper. Kraus was, after all, a suspect at this point in the murders of his parents. The first body had been found just one day prior to Kraus reaching out, with the second uncovered on the same day. Grissom said he frisked Kraus himself when he arrived to ensure he was unarmed, as they had no idea what to expect.

He also positioned a plainclothes police officer in the secured front lobby where the interview was conducted by anchor Greg Floyd. “I feel a personal responsibility — I’m the head of the newsroom, and I invited him,” Grissom said of the extra safety precautions.

While Grissom said he had enough time to tell Floyd what Kraus had said on the phone, there wasn’t any more time to prepare for the interview itself, though Floyd thinks that helped it work better. Rather than prepared questions, the multi-Emmy-winning reporter said he “was just reacting to what [Kraus] was saying.”

Within an hour of filming the interview, the station made the decision to preempt its usual 6 p.m. news broadcast — and the commercials — to air it in its entirety.

At first, Kraus did not admit to killing his parents, but in what the Times Union described as a “master class in knowing when to push a subject and when to stay quiet,” Floyd got him to open up.

It took a full eight minutes, during which Kraus talked about his parents’ declining health, the family grieving the loss of his younger sister after her death at just 14 years old from cancer, and his admission that he’d “buried them in their property.”

Eight minutes into the interview, Floyd asked, “When your parents died, did they know what was happening to them?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And they knew it was at your hand?”

“Well, yes, no one else’s.”

Floyd continued to push as the interview carried on, asking Kraus if he suffocated is parents. Finally, he got the full story, with Kraus alleging that he’d first strangled his father with his hands. Then, while his mother was resting her head on her husband’s chest, he claimed that he strangled her with a rope.

Kraus said in the interview that while his parents had not “explicitly” asked him to end their lives, they had given him “hints” that they wanted him to step up. He said that he “knew they were going downhill.”

“They knew that this was it for them, that they were perishing at your hand?” Floyd asked him.

“Yes. And it was so quick.”

He explained during the interview that he was confessing on tape like this so that the public could judge for themselves. “I did my duty to my parents,” he said. “My concern for their misery was paramount.” Kraus did not specify any illnesses that his parents might have had.

Grissom told the Times Union that he believes Kraus agreed to the interview to unburden himself after eight years. “This is my personal opinion, but it seemed like it was weighing on him,” he told the newspaper. “Once he admitted it, you could almost feel the relief in him.”

“While the interview is getting a lot of attention, it’s important to remember that two people — children of World War II, as their son described them — lost their lives here,” Floyd said. “Today I am thinking of them.”

As soon as the interview was over, Kraus left the building and was immediately arrested in the parking lot, according to multiple medial outlets. He was charged on Thursday night with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of concealment of a human corpse. On Friday morning, Albany County Assistant Public Defender Rebekah Sokol entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. He did not speak.

Sokol said that she would be looking into the interview admission, and in particular how the interview itself came about. “If the media was essentially an agent of police in this matter, that could raise questions about whether [Kraus’] comments in the interview would be legally admissible at trial,” she argued, per CBS News.

“While the interview from the other night was certainly shocking, I have to question how it occurred, who initiated, and what the police’s involvement was,” she said in a statement received by NBC News. “If a vulnerable individual’s constitutional rights were violated for the sake of ratings, that would be extremely concerning.”

Kraus’ next court date is October 1.