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.