Is This the Man Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey?

By Richard Lacayo

Confessions are supposed to clinch a case. And then there are confessions like the one that John Mark Karr made last week in connection with the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Ten years ago, the 6-year-old beauty queen's terrible death and weirdly captivating life--the hair, the costumes, the come-hither poses--became the stuff of national obsession at the very moment the O.J. Simpson story was going stale. It even promised, like the Simpson case, to be a family affair, because from the first, suspicion fell on John and Patsy Ramsey, JonBenet's parents. But the killer was never identified, the trails all went cold, and the story faded. This June, Patsy died of ovarian cancer.

Then suddenly there was Karr, saying he was the one. Or sort of saying it. At the press conference in Bangkok at which Thai officials announced his arrest, he described his role in the crime with an odd circumlocution. "I was with JonBenet when she died," he said. Detached, tentative, composed sometimes to the point of affectless, he added that the killing was "an accident"--a strange way to describe the death of a girl who suffered a massive blow to the head and was strangled with a cord. When he hesitated before answering certain questions, you wondered whether it was to consult his memories or his fantasies.

Immediately, questions about his credibility started to mount. Thai authorities say he told them he had drugged JonBenet. If he had, why did her autopsy find no evidence of drugs? Karr also reportedly told police that on the day of the murder, he picked up JonBenet from school. Not possible: she was killed during Christmas vacation. Strangest of all, Karr's ex-wife Lara says that during the Christmas season of 1996, the time of JonBenet's death, Karr was with her in Alabama.

All the same, police and prosecutors in Boulder, Colo., where JonBenet died, must have had significant evidence to persuade a Colorado judge to issue the warrant for Karr's arrest. "There is a fairly lengthy sealed warrant," says L. Lin Wood, the Ramsey-family attorney. "[Boulder County district attorney] Mary Lacy believes she's got the guy." Investigators say privately that Karr knows things about JonBenet's death that only the killer could know. And then there was the tantalizing detail reported last week by the Rocky Mountain News that investigators in Lacy's office were in contact with a high school classmate of Karr's. What they want is a yearbook signed by Karr with an inscription that includes the phrase "Though, deep in the future, maybe I shall be the conqueror." Could those last four words explain one of the enduring mysteries of the JonBenet ransom note, which ends with the baffling initials S.B.T.C.?

The trail that led police to Karr began with an anonymous e-mail he sent four years ago to Michael Tracey, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado who has produced three documentaries about the case--films that had piqued Karr's interest. In time there would be hundreds of e-mails, which Tracey would eventually show to Boulder County prosecutors, who were sufficiently intrigued to reinvigorate their investigation. Earlier this year, not long before Patsy Ramsey's death, one of the investigators even posed as her online to engage Karr in a series of e-mail exchanges. When Karr began asking to meet with "Patricia," investigators asked the real Mrs. Ramsey whether she would meet him. She agreed but was soon too ill to do it.

So who is the real Karr? Until he was 12, he lived with his parents in Atlanta. Then, for reasons the family has not made public, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Hamilton, Ala. He attended high school there but dropped out in 1983, in the fall of his senior year. Not long after, he met and married 13-year-old Quientana Shotts. Their union was annulled in 1985 after Shotts filed a complaint alleging that Karr had forced her to wed him through "intimidation and fear." Four years later, he married again. This time his bride, Lara Knutson, was 16. By 1996, Karr was a student at Bevill State Community College in Hamilton, Ala., and was working in Marion County as a substitute teacher. But in November of that year, he was removed from the county's roster of substitutes after complaints by parents about his behavior in class. JonBenet was killed the following month.

Short-lived jobs are a theme of Karr's resume. In the spring of 2000, while studying early-childhood education at the University of North Alabama, Karr became a student teacher at the Kilby Professional Laboratory School. But school administrators soon called him in to discuss complaints about his behavior with fifth-grade girls. Karr failed to show for the meeting. Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of North Alabama, just weeks before graduation.

By July of that year, Karr had moved to Petaluma, Calif., the city that had been gripped by the 1993 abduction and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas. According to his brother Nate, by that time Karr was working on a book about men who commit sex crimes against young girls and was preoccupied with the murders of Klaas and Ramsey. Karr and his family had moved to California so that he could take a job as a teaching assistant at a Catholic elementary school in San Francisco. That job too lasted only a few weeks, although school officials say he left of his own accord. Eventually he found work in Petaluma as a substitute teacher. But four months later, the Napa County Sheriff's Department informed school officials that it was investigating Karr for possession of child pornography. A few weeks later, he was arrested.

For Karr, that was a turning point. He spent five months in jail. His wife took their three sons and began divorce proceedings. Two months later, when he failed to show up for a court appearance, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Karr spent the next five years on the run in Europe, Central America and Asia, working as a teacher wherever he could and eventually landing in Bangkok. When police moved in last week, he was living in a shabby ninth-floor hotel room. He had just started yet another job, as a second-grade teacher.

After Karr is returned to the U.S. this week, prosecutors will move to run tests to see whether his DNA matches samples found under JonBenet's fingernails and in her underwear. If they match, all the questions about his credibility will drop to the floor. If they don't, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey will go back into the unsolved-mystery file. And so will the story of John Mark Karr.

> Read the latest developments in the Ramsey case at time.com

With reporting by Reported by Greg Fulton/Atlanta, Rita Healy/Boulder, Simon Montlake/Bangkok, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles