Man Detained In Thailand Over Jonbenet Death

[Beavis and Butthead]

Funny, just watching the video and I was waiting for a Jack Ruby lookalike to step out and cap him!

That video certainly did look like the Oswald/Ruby one

[sriracha john]

Suspect in US child beauty queen murder taught at Bangkok school

An American arrested yesterday for the 1996 murder of a child beauty queen in the US was until recently teaching at a highly respected school in Bangkok. John Mark Karr, 41, was sacked about two weeks ago because he was scaring the children, according to a teacher at the school who asked not to be named.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/News/18Aug2006_news03.php

[phormio]

Suspect in US child beauty queen murder taught at Bangkok school

An American arrested yesterday for the 1996 murder of a child beauty queen in the US was until recently teaching at a highly respected school in Bangkok. John Mark Karr, 41, was sacked about two weeks ago because he was scaring the children, according to a teacher at the school who asked not to be named.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/News/18Aug2006_news03.php

Good Find!

Notice how it says a "highly respected school" , look at the map and a few come to mind, if he was living in the vicinity as previously pointed out. Geuss BKK Post afraid of legal issues if names the school ?

Thanks.

[John K]

He is clearly enjoying all the attention of being in the spotlight. He is looking at people who are looking at him. This is all very wrong, this is looking more and more like a witch hunt.

Edited August 18, 2006 by John K

[sfokevin]

This is turning into a sick circus...

[jdinasia]

If cleared of the murder in the States, would he not have to return to face any charges here (if he was doing this to escape imprisonment here ?)

If the verdict is not guilty, will he face other charges in the States ? What happens to people who make false confessions ?

He was convicted in California of kiddie porn charges in absentia (he skipped out on bail) ... he'll be sent to Cali to serve out his time. They could charge him with extra crimes beyond fleeing prosecution etc etc ... So no matter what happens in Colorado this guy is screwed.

[krikrik]

"He was convicted in California of kiddie porn charges in absentia (he skipped out on bail) ... he'll be sent to Cali to serve out his time. They could charge him with extra crimes beyond fleeing prosecution etc etc ... So no matter what happens in Colorado this guy is screwed."

So he has been on the run all this time ? Seems the US authorities were not making much effort to find him.

He doesn't seem to be using a different name.

The school in BKK clearly didn't do much of a background check, either. (And you might think his demeanor alone would have put them off employing him. Perhaps they liked his blue eyes. )

Let's hope this prompts schools to check more thoroughly.

Edited August 18, 2006 by krikrik

[Thaiquila]

Yes, skipping out is a problem, but the charges were relatively minor, having images on his computer. This appears to be the only pedo-related legal charge he has had (other than the "confession").

I also don't think a false confession is a crime if you are insane.

[Beavis and Butthead]

a couple of years in jail vs the death penalty are 2 completely different definitions of being "screwed"

[Thaiquila]

a couple of years in jail vs the death penalty are 2 completely different definitions of being "screwed"

Well, maybe. A couple of years on a short eyes charge can mean getting murdered by fellow inmates.

[Beavis and Butthead]

Yeah, he could get Dahmered

[John K]

A false confession will almost always be seen by the court as mental illness or police being a bit to aggressive in the interrogation. I am sure he is destine for some long hours with a court appointed psychiatrist when he gets back to the states.

Yes he will do time for his conviction and skipping bail but that is a separate issue.

As for this issue his mental state could be used to reduce his sentence on the other charge if he gets a good lawyer.

[SamuiJens]

This is turning into a sick circus...

You're soo right.

[sriracha john]

2001

_ April 13: Karr was arrested on five misdemeanor counts of possession of child pornography, the Sonoma County sheriff's office said.

_ Oct. 5: After a series of court hearings, Karr was released from jail, but was ordered to report to a probation officer and avoid child pornography, children and places where children congregate, such as schools, beaches and parks. The court records in the case were sealed.

_ December: A warrant was issued for Karr's arrest after authorities said he violated the terms of his supervised release.

"He was convicted in California of kiddie porn charges in absentia (he skipped out on bail) ... he'll be sent to Cali to serve out his time. They could charge him with extra crimes beyond fleeing prosecution etc etc ... So no matter what happens in Colorado this guy is screwed."

So he has been on the run all this time ? Seems the US authorities were not making much effort to find him.

He doesn't seem to be using a different name.

The charges he was convicted on were misdemeanor, not felonies, and thus accounted for the lack of diligence in tracking him down... even with him using his real name.

He would face the punishment for failing to keep up with his release orders as well as for fleeing itself, as jd pointed out.

As for others' points on the insanity defense... that is no easy task to achieve. He is certainly odd and rather bizarre, but is he is psychotic? (the necessary degree of impairment for a successful insanity defense)... he certainly doesn't seem to be and would have an extremely difficult time convincing a jury he was. In reality, very few times are an insanity defense sought... and even fewer times is it successful.

Edited August 18, 2006 by sriracha john

[orchis]

Doubts start to arise if he really is the killer;

conflicting details in his story and the autopsy report,

his wife saying he was with her in Alabama on Dec 26 1996.

wait and see.

[John K]

SJ

The insanity defense is secondary. I suspect he will fail to know the withheld information and then there would be no case of murder and only of some sort of mental illness.

From the looks of it he looks like he would enter a guilty plea where the insanity keyword defense would be to support a not guilty plea.

If there are any lawyers out there from the USA, input would be good at this time.

[kat]

I doubt he can use an insanity plea, because he was successfully functioning as a primary school teacher - oh hang on - in Thailand. Hmmm, maybe that doesn't rule out insanity, as any foreigner with a pulse can work as a teacher here.

I agree; we should wait and see.

[cwilliam]

-- A suspect in the JonBenet Ramsey murder has been arrested in Thailand, Denver TV station KUSA reports. CNN working to confirm.

He didn't do it just trying to get his 10 minutes of fame and a free trip back to the states.He may have convinced himself he did it.Watch out for school teachers.I guess this will hurt his resume.

[cwilliam]

What they just reported on the news here was JonBenet had DNA under her fingers nails and this is where the DNA match came from with the person they arrested.

Not true they took a dna sample here,his ex-wife says he was in Alabama at the time,just another kook wannabe.

[jdinasia]

they probably got DNA during the investigation ... (in BKK) ... it matched ... so they arrested and took a direct sample ... it has been sent ... they will take a new sample when he arrives in Colorado to reduce chain of custody issues. Remember they were on this guy for 21 days here.

[Gonzo the Face]

Did anyone catch the news report that his Thai Visa was from the US, but it had been reported that he had not been to the US in a couple years.

I thought this [not being in the US to get the visa] , was illegle since shortly after the capture of the Hambali guy .

Perhaps he had a good friend over there that helped.

Edited August 18, 2006 by Gonzo the Face

[sriracha john]

Karr said he had chloroformed the child

An autopsy on Ramsey showed she had vaginal abrasions.

2001

_ April 19: Karr's wife filed for divorce.

_ Oct. 5: After a series of court hearings, Karr was released from jail, but was ordered to report to a probation officer and avoid child pornography, children and places where children congregate, such as schools, beaches and parks. The court records in the case were sealed.

_ November: A judge issues a restraining order, compelling Karr to stay 100 yards away from his wife and three children for three years.

Doubts start to arise if he really is the killer;

conflicting details in his story and the autopsy report,

his wife saying he was with her in Alabama on Dec 26 1996.

wait and see.

As you don't specify what the "conflicts" are that you are referring to, an examination of some of the more commonly cited ones is necessary.

He's quoted widely as saying he drugged and raped her but that the autopsy doesn't reveal any drugs or signs of rape.

According to Page 1 of her autopsy, it seems only a standard drug and alcohol screens were conducted. If he used chloroform as stated above, there's a strong possibility that it went undetected on a standard drug screening.

Page 2 of her autopsy reveals her underwear was urine-stained and also had "red areas of staining."

Page 4 of her autopsy reveals dried blood on her labia majora. Additional dried blood was found inside the "vestibule of the vagina." There was also an area of hyperemia (an increase in the quantity of blood flow to a body part; engorgement) along the walls of her vagina. Lastly, there is a 1 cm "red-purple" area of abrasion there as well.

*her entire 9-page autopsy report is available at the smoking gun*

All the above are rather inconclusive as to whether a sexual assault had or had not occurred.

What Karr interprets as "sex" is unknown and may or may not include full penetration (which apparently did not occur). If there was not full penetration, it's entirely possible that any semen would simply be externally wiped off, leaving no evidence.

As for his wife's alibi, the validity of that remains unclear. Obviously, as per above quotes, they had an extremely messy divorce resulting in an unknown number of "issues" between them. It is highly unusual for a judge to issue a restraining order against a father to see his own children following a divorce. Coupled with the untold trauma of his child pornography arrest, the still born death of their twin children, all leading up to her stating the "Karr name has ruined my life." (sorry, I didn't include that in my quotes (it's from the earlier post about Karr's father thinking his son was already dead). While it may sound like all these factors would precisely preclude her from providing an alibi for him, all these and other unknown underlying issues between the two would make me cautious to believe her statements as cold, hard facts.

Did he do it? ... I don't know. We have to wait and see, BUT until these "conflicts in his story" become more believable or reliable, I will withhold believing he is entirely innocent.

*edit... I apologize if any of the medical descriptions are too graphic for some readers.

Edited August 18, 2006 by sriracha john

[rijkard]

He had just begun to teach at Bangkok Christian College, Thailand's oldest private school, which was established by American Presbyterian missionaries in 1852, school officials said. The school, which has about 5,000 male students in 12 grades, employs several foreign teachers for its English courses.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060818/ap_on_...jonbenet_ramsey

[taxexile]

an interesting update from time/cnn

No Neat Endings for the JonBenet Case

John Mark Karr has confessed to the decade-old crime, but doubts about his story persist. Can he be believed?

By UNMESH KHER

SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHORBackground: A Loner's Life in Thailand

Magazine: "Find the Killer"

Posted Friday, Aug. 18, 2006

A confession as unequivocal as the one offered up by John Mark Karr on Thursday would probably be enough to close almost any tough case. But the mystery surrounding the 1996 murder of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey simply will not succumb to easy explanations. Within a day of the reclusive, expatriate teacher ' s admission in Bangkok — that he " accidentally " killed the girl a decade ago, when his plot to kidnap her went awry — questions about his claims have only multiplied.

Even as he confessed, Karr was suspiciously evasive when asked about the details. And doubts were later raised about whether he was even in Colorado when JonBenet was murdered. He has, of course, not yet been convicted or even charged with the crime. Boulder County district attorney Mary Lacy stressed in a news conference Thursday that her office, despite the confession, is still sifting through the evidence and proceeding with exceptional caution. "There have been no charges filed at this time, "Lacy pointed out. " There is a presumption of innocence." She also seemed to suggest that the arrest may not have been prompted by a certainty about Karr's guilt so much as concern that he might flee, or that he poses a danger to the public.

Her caution was welcome, in a case in which the spotlight of suspicion initially fell, and has lingered for most of a decade despite little evidence, on JonBenet’ s parents. " It's terribly important," warns Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic in Baltimore, Md., "not to have the same rush to judgment in this case."

But then, suspicion is one thing; a suspected killer's confession, quite another.

Or is it? The sketchy portrait of Karr emerging from documents and accounts of his former acquaintances and family, suggests that this peripatetic grade-school instructor is, at the very least, a complicated man who clearly takes a keen interest in crimes against children. That in itself says nothing about his guilt or innocence. Karr' s ex-wife Laura told a California television station that he was as obsessed with the murder of Polly Klaas — a 12-year old girl who was abducted from her home in Petaluma, Calif., in 1993 — as he was with the JonBenet murder. But she also insists he could not have murdered JonBenet because she was with him in Alabama when it happened.

Meanwhile, Karr's brother Nate, who hasn' t spoken with him in five years, told Fox News that his brother's fascination with pedophiles and predators stemmed not from pathological obsession, but from an intent to write a book about men who commit crimes against children. Nate has also said that he thinks his brother wrote to Polly ' s convicted killer in prison. Karr also said he wrote several letters to JonBenet' s mother Patricia, who died of cancer two months ago, expressing remorse for having murdered her daughter.

Marc Klaas, Polly's father, says that the name "John Karr never crossed my path in any way, shape or form "until Wednesday. He admits, however, that he gets a lot of e-mail from cranks, and might have deleted Karr 's missives. Still, he says, his experience with followers of sensational crimes leads him to doubt that Karr has anything to do with JonBenet 's murder. "With Karr, you're dealing with a guy who seems to be obsessed with little dead girls," says Klaas, pointing out that aside from the admission of guilt, Karr appears to have "no connection" to the crime itself. It isn' t yet clear how — or if — Colorado police established that Karr was in their state when JonBenet was murdered. Ramsey family attorney H. Lin Wood, however, says he doubts prosecutors would make such a high-profile arrest without being sure of Karr' s whereabouts on the day of the crime.

Karr' s past does raise suspicions. When he was arrested in Bangkok, he was living in a dormitory-like guesthouse in a neighborhood frequented by sex tourists. Before that, in 2001, soon after he moved to California, the Sonoma county district attorney issued an arrest warrant for one John Mark Karr on five counts of child pornography, after the suspect failed to appear in court. (It isn' t yet certain that warrant was for the same John Mark Karr, but it seems likely.) The name John Karr is also associated with an online company PowerWurks, apparently launched in 1996, whose owner claimed to be running a child-friendly company but was in fact using the name to trawl for young girls on the Internet.

Of course, Karr 's putative pedophilia would not make him guilty of murder. Nor would it explain why Karr might have killed JonBenet. "A child molester who abducts and kills his victim is the rarest kind of molester," says Ken Lanning, a former FBI agent who has spent more than three decades studying crimes against children, and currently operates his own consulting company. Questions and inconsistencies in Karr's story make Lanning cautious about believing Karr's claims. "My reaction to all of this is that until [the police] independently corroborate what he's confessing to, it doesn't mean anything. "

So it's possible that Mark Karr is delusional or that he is — more incomprehensibly — simply lying. At least one former acquaintance of Karr' s considers this a distinct possibility. Janice Myhan, a professor of education at the University of North Alabama, says Karr was prone to telling outlandish lies. Myhan taught and advised Karr when he attended UNA from 1998 to 2000, where he majored in early childhood education. Karr was diminutive and intense, Myhan recalls, and frequently peppered her with questions from the front row, stopping her in mid-sentence to get her to repeat her words, so he could copy them in his notes. He carried a briefcase to class and seemed to be far more computer-savvy than his peers. Yet Karr was a sloppy liar, says Myhan. His tales and explanations were often so inconsistent that Myhan eventually stopped believing much of what he said. Myhan says he once told her, for instance, that he couldn’t go to the infirmary when he was sick because he could not afford insurance. Yet he tooled around in a Porsche. He would say he lived one place one day, and claim he lived elsewhere on the next. "I would not be surprised if his confession is just another one of his stories," says Myhan.

But that too is something the police, and possibly a jury, will ultimately have to decide.

By Unmesh Kher. Reported by Verna Gates/Birmingham, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Elizabeth Coady/Chicago and Greg Fulton/Atlanta

[sriracha john]

SJ

I suspect he will fail to know the withheld information and then there would be no case of murder and only of some sort of mental illness.

I was under the impression that his knowledge of unknown-to-the-public-information that he revealed in his hundreds of emails to the Colorado professor was precisely what did draw the attention of the authorities.

[John K]

My guess it will be about the first of October before the facts are sorted out both in and out of his head.

[sriracha john]

Did anyone catch the news report that his Thai Visa was from the US, but it had been reported that he had not been to the US in a couple years.

Most likely an erroneous report as there is the strong possibility that he would turn up as a fugitive if he returned to the USA during any of the last several years. If, he did in fact arrive here from Malaysia as reported elsewhere, he could have obtained his visa to enter Thailand from the embassy/consulates in Malaysia.

[John K]

As a rule of thumb,

More errors will be found in the media’s reports the closer one is to a news story.

Everyone wants a piece of this, ratings sweeps in the USA are coming up shortly.

[Jacqqq]

Karr' s past does raise suspicions. When he was arrested in Bangkok, he was living in a dormitory-like guesthouse in a neighborhood frequented by sex tourists

I must admit that I don't know where exactly is Soi Sri Bampen but then I never reckon Sathorn in general is synonymous with "sex tourists" ??!!!

More alarming is (this news report from a former student in the States.

“I remember how he would call me out in the hall and ask unnecessary questions, like what I wanted to be when I grew up and what I did with my friends for fun,”

Davidson said. “I didn’t think a lot about it because he was a teacher and kids are supposed to trust teachers.

Heck, since when a teacher enquiring about a kid's ambition raises red flag of paedophile tendencies !!!

Edited August 18, 2006 by Jacqqq

[chonabot]

It's amazing how many shady farangs I have seen in 5 years in BKK. I'm talking some really criminal looking folks: tattoos on hands, face, neck and head. It's almost like a cess pool where some of these people migrate to.

Very naiive attitude, do you think that having a tatooed hand or neck makes you a criminal?

The majority of these murderers are normal looking people, do you think they would want to draw attention to themselves?