JonBenet suspect 'like a wolf'

2006-08-24 18:55

San Jose - John Mark Karr bragged to his landlord's family that "sexually, I am like a wolf" and said he preferred girls to women when he worked in Costa Rica as an English teacher, his former housemates told The Associated Press.

Karr, now jailed in Los Angeles after his arrest in Thailand, faces a Colorado warrant for the 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey.

Karr travelled around the world since then, including brief stays in Honduras and Costa Rica, where he rented a room in 2004 from Canadian John Hall, who teaches at a private university in the capital of San Jose.

Hall, 42, told the AP in an exclusive interview that he rented a room to Karr through an internet posting, but asked him to leave after about five weeks because Karr was saying "rude and inappropriate things" to his Costa Rican wife and stepdaughters, then 16 and 20.

Thrown out

"I threw him out because he was causing problems for them," Hall said.

One stepdaughter, now 22, told the AP that Karr said several times that he liked girls.

"My mother asked him whether he was looking for a girlfriend in Costa Rica and he answered that he didn't like adult women, only small ones," she said, speaking on condition her name not be published.

"I thought he meant young women, and never imagined he meant girls."

After kicking Karr out, Hall remained suspicious enough to do a computer search to see if he was a sex predator.

"I suspected he was a paedophile.

"I looked on the internet to see if there was something on him, but I didn't find anything," he said.

- AP