Cops 'misled' by Karr confession

2006-08-30 07:29

Boulder - Colorado prosecutors on Tuesday defended their arrest of John Mark Karr for the notorious unsolved murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, saying they were misled by the schoolteacher's confession.

Boulder County district attorney Mary Lacy conceded that she had no evidence linking Karr to the 1996 crime aside from his bizarre e-mails to a college professor.

However, Lacy said authorities had to act because they considered him an imminent threat to a five-year-old girl in Thailand.

Believes he killed her

"John Karr himself sincerely believes he killed JonBenet Ramsey so I have no sympathy for him," Lacy said.

"Because he believed it himself and continues to believe it his (confession) had all of the emotional impact that you would expect (from the killer)."

No suspects

Lacy said she was now convinced that Karr, 41, was not JonBenet's killer, leaving authorities with no suspects in the mysterious, decade-old crime despite having "seriously" investigated some 200 people.

Karr was arrested in Bangkok two weeks ago for JonBenet's murder, triggering a media frenzy that raged until he was abruptly dropped as a suspect on Monday, after DNA tests failed to link him to blood mixed with saliva found in the girl's underwear.

Criticism for arrest

Boulder prosecutors have come under withering criticism for their decision to extradite Karr, even though they could not prove that he had ever been in Boulder and had no forensic evidence tying him to the crime scene.

Karr lived in Alabama at the time of the murder.

Enamoured with Thai girl

Lacy and her top deputy, Peter Maguire, said they surreptitiously obtained samples of Karr's DNA in Bangkok while he was under surveillance, but found them unreliable and felt pressure to arrest the teacher after he became enamoured with a five-year-old girl in one of his classes.

"He was expressing feelings toward this child in the same way that he was expressing feelings toward the dead child (JonBenet)," Lacy said.

The prosecutors said they remain concerned about Karr's apparent attraction to young girls.

Karr remains in custody and faces extradition to California to face child pornography charges, and "at least every parent in this country has seen his face and knows his name," Lacy said.

- Reuters