So who killed JonBenet?
2006-09-05 15:31
Boulder - Now that DNA evidence has ruled out one-time suspect John Mark Karr in the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, investigators are left again without a prime suspect and their ears ringing with criticism.
District attorney Mary Lacy conceded she has no hidden trump card that could be used to confirm the claims of any other would-be confessor, simply because details about the case that authorities normally keep secret have long been revealed in books, news reports and internet chatter.
"As far as we can tell, there is no physical evidence in this case that has not been in the public domain," Lacy told reporters.
"The ability of our office or any law enforcement to connect this crime to a person based on something they know about it that no one else knows was gone a long time ago."
Public case
Max Houck, director of West Virginia University's Forensic Science Research Centre and co-founder of the Institute for Cold Case Evaluation, said it is hard to imagine working a case so public that authorities cannot eliminate fake confessors by holding back some details.
"If you, as an investigator, know something that only the killer would know, you have a hole card," he said.
"But we're in an era where more and more is known about any public case that happens to hit the public's imagination, or at least the media's examination."
Karr arrested over e-mails, phone calls
Lacy, through a spokesperson, declined an interview request. But in a news conference, she said she relied solely on phone calls and hundreds of pages of e-mails Karr swapped with University of Colorado journalism professor Michael Tracey to make the case for arresting Karr in Thailand last month and bringing him to Colorado.
Karr, a 41-year-old former teacher who had been obsessed with JonBenet, gave graphic accounts of the crime scene, detailed enough to convince prosecutors he was for real. The case collapsed when his DNA failed to match evidence from the crime scene.
Suspects and pretenders
Richard Lavinthal, a former justice department spokesman and a public relations consultant for the legal field, criticised Lacy for admitting there was nothing left to separate suspects from pretenders.
"What district attorney Lacy did was, in effect, announce to the world she has now made the case impossible to solve, unless through some fortuitous action there is someone out there who gets arrested and his DNA gets into a data bank and ends up matching the DNA from the case," Lavinthal said.
"It's as if she put up a giant billboard that says 'Attention, the Ramsey case can never be solved."'
Easy targets
The case is an ugly chapter for the wealthy university town known for its liberalism and scenic beauty. Public fascination with the case is easy to understand, said Michael Radelet, a criminologist and chairpoerson of the University of Colorado's sociology department.
The Ramsey family never fitted in in Boulder, and some were eager to blame them, criticising JonBenet's role in beauty pageants and even the family's conservative politics, he said.
People who do not fit in often become targets, Radelet said, comparing Karr to JonBenet's mother, Patsy Ramsey, who died of cancer just weeks before Karr's arrest.
"John Karr was an easy target. The guy is ... a loner," Radelet said. "Patsy Ramsey is a type of easy target. She's new rich, an outsider from Atlanta, Republican and a beauty queen. In Boulder, that's the same as being poor, uneducated and black in Birmingham, (Alabama) in 1930."
Investigation will continue
Radelet is a member of Families of Homicide Victims & Missing Persons, a group dedicated to getting to the bottom of some of the 1 200 unsolved homicides on the Colorado books. He hopes the Karr episode will encourage investigators to focus on solving other crimes.
No chance. Lacy said she would press on in the JonBenet case.
Lou Smit, a renowned cold case investigator who has worked on the Ramsey case, will not talk specifically about it any more. But he said he remains a believer "that any cold case can be solved."
- AP