By Marie Szaniszlo
Boston Herald
GROTON, Mass. — The 22-year-old man accused of bludgeoning his mother, his grandparents and the elderly couple’s caretaker to death with a baseball bat earlier this month in their Groton home took heroin and said he “freed them,” according to newly unsealed court documents.
After showing up naked and covered in mud on a neighbor’s doorstep on Sept. 8 and telling him he had just killed four people, Orion A. Krause “started to sing quietly” and then told officers, “I freed them,” a Groton police report said.
Shortly afterward, Krause was taken to Nashoba Valley Health Center, where he told a nurse he took heroin, although it is unclear from the report whether he was on heroin when he allegedly killed his mother, Elizabeth “Buffy” Krause, 60, of Rockport, Maine; her parents, Frank Lackey III, 89, and Elizabeth “Esu” Lackey, 85, both of Groton; and the couple’s caretaker, Bertha Mae Parker, 68, also of Groton.
Krause’s attorney, Edward Wayland, and his father, Alexander G. Krause, did not return calls yesterday.
Earlier this month, Ayer District Court Judge Margaret R. Guzman ordered Krause, of Rockport, Maine, to be held without bail at Bridgewater State Hospital until an Oct. 30 hearing on his competency to stand trial on four counts of murder.
After Krause told officers he killed his family with a baseball bat, they went to his grandparents’ Common Street home, where they could see through a window a light and TV on, and two elderly people sitting in the kitchen, their report said.
They forced their way into the house, where they encountered a scene so gruesome that an EMT afterward told an officer he “was not feeling well and needed to go outside,” according to the report.
Krause’s grandparents, as well as his mother, were seated in the kitchen, the report said, while Parker was found outside, face-down in a flower bed, with “several feet of drag marks in blood on the driveway next to the victim.” All four were dead, with “severe” head trauma, according to the report.
A police K-9 later led officers to several items outside, including clothing, shoes and a wooden baseball bat “with what appeared to be blood all over,” the report said.
At a press conference earlier this month, Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan said Krause’s mother had contacted Rockport police the night before the killings, concerned because he had abruptly left the family’s home.
The next day, he called and told her he was in the Boston area and asked if she could pick him up, Ryan said. On their way back to Rockport later that day, the two stopped in Groton to visit her parents, she said.
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