Oberlin graduate Orion Krause takes plea deal in 2017 murders

A man has pleaded guilty to beating three family members and a home health aide to death with a baseball bat in Massachusetts just a few months after receiving his diploma from Oberlin College in 2017. Orion Krause, 26, took a deal Wednesday that means spending his life behind bars, though he will have a chance for parole in 25 years. Instead of first-degree murder, he was allowed to plea to four counts of second-degree murder, according to Middlesex County Superior Court records. Judge Kenneth Salinger remanded Krause to the custody of Massachusetts Correctional Institution Cedar Junction, a maximum-security prison with about 400 inmates. His trial had been scheduled to begin Sept. 7 in Massachusetts. That would have been a day before the four-year anniversary of the slayings in Krause's hometown of Groton, about 40 miles northwest of Boston. Police said he traveled from his home in Rockport, Maine, to share a meal with his family on the night of the killing. He later showed up naked on a neighbor's doorstep covered in mud and cuts. "I killed my family with a baseball bat," he said, according to investigators, then started to quietly sing. That same night, Krause allegedly called a professor at Oberlin College, where he had studied jazz and played the drums, and said he felt he had to kill his mother. Investigators later revealed Krause had indeed killed his mother, Elizabeth Krause, 60, and turned on his grandparents, Elizabeth Lackey, 85, and Frank Lackey, 89, as they sat in their armchairs. Then he chased down his grandparents' caretaker, Bertha Mae Parker, 68, and killed her as she fled outside. Many of those details are repeated in a 2020 civil suit filed by his grandparents' estate. Following the end of criminal proceedings, the lawsuit remains open in Superior Court, seeking financial compensation for the Lackeys' deaths and the suffering they experienced as they succumbed to wounds caused by blunt force trauma. Oberlin College declined Thursday to comment on the developments in the Massachusetts murder case. After his arrest in 2017, however, college President Carmen Twillie Ambar sent a message to the campus community, alerting it to Krause's arrest. "The nature of this crime is horrific, and the grief of family and friends immeasurable. And yet Orion is one of our own," she said, urging those affected by the news to seek support. Contact Jason Hawk at (440) 329-7122 or news@lcnewspapers.com.