Houston Community News >> Karr-Ramsey Case
8/29/2006 Boulder, Co. - Prosecutors abruptly dropped their case against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey and released him today, saying DNA tests failed to put him at the crime scene despite his repeated insistence he killed the 6-year-old beauty queen.
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The move came just a week and a half after the 41-year-old schoolteacher was arrested in Thailand and put on a plane to the U.S. in what was regarded as a remarkable break in the decade-old murder mystery that had cast suspicion on JonBenet's parents.
District Attorney Mary Lacy said Karr emerged as a suspect in April after he spent several years exchanging e-mails and later telephone calls with a Colorado professor in which he admitted responsibility for the slaying. According to court papers, Karr told the professor he accidentally killed JonBenet during sex and that he tasted her blood after he injured her vaginally. But officials at the Denver crime lab conducted DNA tests last Friday on a cheek swab taken from Karr and failed to connect him to the crime.
"This information is critical because ... if Mr. Karr's account of his sexual involvement with the victim were accurate, it would have been highly likely that his saliva would have been mixed with the blood in the underwear," Lacy said in court papers. She also said authorities found no evidence Karr was in Boulder at the time of the slaying.
Karr was released from custody by the Boulder County sheriff, who said California authorities had not asked for him to be detained to face child pornography charges in that state. Karr's whereabouts were not immediately known. Defense attorney Seth Temin expressed outrage that Karr was even arrested.
"We're deeply distressed by the fact that they took this man and dragged him here from Bangkok, Thailand, with no forensic evidence confirming the allegations against him and no independent factors leading to a presumption he did anything wrong," Temin said. Lacy defended the decision to arrest Karr. She said that there was no way to take a cheek swab from him without alerting him that he was under investigation, and that would have created an "unacceptable risk that he would flee."
Also, prosecutors detained Karr after he began to describe an interest in several girls in Thailand "in much the same terms that he had described his interest in JonBenet," Lacy wrote. Shortly before he was arrested, authorities confirmed he was involved with at least one of the girls, Lacy said.
(Contributed by AP)