BOULDER, Colo. — Prosecutors on Monday abruptly dropped their case against John Mark Karr, the itinerant schoolteacher arrested in the decade-old killing of JonBenet Ramsey, saying his DNA did not match blood recovered from the crime scene.
Less than two weeks after flying Karr from Thailand to face charges -- an event that set off an international media circus -- Boulder County Dist. Atty. Mary Lacy closed the case against him, acknowledging that she could find no evidence he was in Boulder on the night the 6-year-old beauty queen was sexually assaulted and strangled in her family home.
The state "would not be able to establish that Mr. Karr committed this crime despite his repeated insistence that he did," Lacy wrote in a five-page motion to dismiss the case.
Karr's repeated confessions -- by e-mail, on the phone and in a televised news conference in Thailand -- met with skepticism from the start, both from investigators with knowledge of the case and from armchair psychologists who debated every twist and turn online. But he did reveal an intimate knowledge of the slaying, raising enough suspicion that the district attorney sent an investigator to Bangkok this month to follow Karr and stand outside his apartment door, trying to listen in on his phone calls.
Karr, 41, still faces five misdemeanor counts of possessing child pornography in California in a Sonoma County case that dates to 2001. An extradition hearing is scheduled for this afternoon.
If convicted on all five counts, Karr could face a one-year sentence. But he could also walk free on time served if he got credit for the six months he spent in jail in California after his arrest. For now, Karr remains in the Boulder County jail -- no longer a murder suspect but still under intense public scrutiny. Hundreds of pages of his e-mails and transcripts of his phone conversations have been posted online by prosecutors, disclosing his thoughts on bland topics such as the state of public education and also his fantasies and boasts about sex with 6-year-old girls.
Lacy suggested in her court filing that those fantasies were a key reason she moved against Karr so quickly, before investigating his alibi, testing his DNA or interviewing his friends and family. She had learned, she wrote, that he was about to begin teaching young girls at a Thai school, and in his e-mails he discussed sexual fantasies about some of his students, using phrases that he had also used to describe his "love" for his "princess," JonBenet.
