By Staff
Prosecutors abruptly dropped their case Aug. 28 against John Mark Karr in the decade-old slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, saying DNA tests failed to put the 41-year-old school teacher at the Colorado crime scene despite his confounding confession to strangling the 6-year-old beauty queen.
While prosecutors now suggest in court papers that he is just a guy with a twisted fascination admitting a crime he didn't commit, someone needs to be responsible for the media circus launched from Thailand.
"I was with JonBenet when she died," is what he said.
He called her killing an "accident."
That's a strange word to choose when the girl died from a massive blow to the head and strangulation with a cord.
It didn't take long for his credibility to crumble.
If, as Karr reportedly told authorities, he drugged JonBenet, why did her autopsy find no evidence of drugs?
He also reportedly told police that on the day of her murder, he picked JonBenet up from school – even though it was Christmas vacation and there were no classes.
"Because his DNA does not match that found in the victim's blood in her underwear, the people would not be able to establish that Mr. Karr committed this crime despite his repeated insistence that he did," District Attorney Mary Lacy said in court papers.
Karr was being held in jail in Boulder until he could be sent on to Sonoma County, Calif., to face child pornography charges dating to 2001.
Karr emerged as a suspect in April after spending several years swapping e-mails and telephone calls in which Karr admitted responsibility for the death with Colorado journalism professor Michael Tracey, who produced three documentaries about the case.
How did this case get so far out of control? Authorities found no evidence Karr was even in Boulder at the time. In fact, Karr's family furnished strong circumstantial support for their contention he was celebrating the Christmas holidays with them in Georgia when JonBenet's body was found on Dec. 26, 1996, just as the national media machine needed a new obsession after O.J. Simpson ran its course.
His ex-wife Lara also said that during the holidays in 1996, Karr was with her in Alabama.
But there was that tantalizing detail the Rocky Mountain News reported that Karr signed a yearbook, "Deep in the future, maybe I shall be the conqueror," echoing the ransom note's S.B.T.C." initials.
"We're deeply distressed by the fact that they took this man and dragged him here from Bangkok, with no forensic evidence confirming the allegations against him and no independent factors leading to a presumption he did anything wrong," defense attorney Seth Temin commented.
Everyone not directly involved in this case ought to subject themselves to some serious introspection and feel ashamed about why a 10-year-old Colorado murder case matters with wars going on, terrorism and the first anniversary of Katrina.
Why are we so quick to lap up every sensational morsel and turn Karr overnight into some sort of perverse celebrity?
Motivating phony admissions can be mental illness, guilt over another crime or a craving for the attention a big case brings, the chance to go down in the history books.
But what's our excuse for playing along?
This lust reveals more than we'd like to admit about us as a nation.
The public's insatiable appetite for the sensational led the sickening rush to judgment on this one.