Prosecutor Says DNA Samples Did Not Match
By Amy Goldstein and T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
BOULDER, Colo., Aug. 28 -- Prosecutors dropped their case against John Mark Karr in the decade-old killing of JonBenet Ramsey on Monday, abruptly ending a 12-day whirlwind that reached halfway around the globe and riveted public attention over whether the slaying of the child pageant star had at last been solved.
Less than two hours before a court hearing here in which the 41-year-old teacher was to have been charged with murder, the Boulder County district attorney announced that investigators had not gathered enough evidence against him. In court documents and a public statement, District Attorney Mary Lacy said that Karr's DNA did not match samples from the crime scene and that family members had provided "circumstantial evidence" that he was with them in Atlanta during Christmas in 1996, when the 6-year-old girl was killed.
At mid-afternoon, a sheriff's deputy went to Karr's cell in the Boulder jail and told him he was being released. The deputy began driving Karr to an undisclosed location in town, but turned around and brought him back to jail: Boulder Sheriff Joe Pelle said he had just received a teletype from law enforcement officials in Sonoma County, Calif., saying they wanted Karr transferred there. Karr faces an outstanding arrest warrant in Petaluma, Calif., on unrelated misdemeanor charges from 2001 of having child pornography on his computer.
Legal experts who have followed the Ramsey case over the years disagreed over whether the prosecutor had botched the investigation by arresting Karr. But both critics and defenders of the district attorney said the dramatic and confusing events of recent days may make it more difficult for prosecutors to win a conviction if a more compelling suspect is found.
Monday's tumultuous reversal came less than two weeks after Karr became the first person arrested on suspicion of killing JonBenet, who was found strangled in the basement of her family's home here. Karr was apprehended in Bangkok, where he had just started a job teaching second-graders at a private school. As Thai police led him through an immigration detention center past a crush of reporters, the suspect said he had loved JonBenet and had been with her when she died.
"No evidence has developed, other than his own repeated admissions . . . to establish that Mr. Karr committed this crime," District Attorney Mary Lacy told the court. Judge Roxanne Bailin then granted Lacy's motion to terminate the case against Karr.
On Monday, for the first time, the prosecutor disclosed more than 400 pages of e-mails spanning four years and transcripts of telephone conversations from June to Aug. 12 between Karr and a professor who has specialized in the case.
In the four years of e-mail correspondence with University of Colorado journalism professor Michael Tracey, Karr, who uses the alias "Daxis," details his obsession with JonBenet and what he describes as his sexual experiences with girls. Late this spring and early this summer his contact with Tracey increased, and he gave what he said were more specifics about JonBenet's death.
In the first phone call, Karr told Tracey he had engaged in sexual activity with JonBenet, whom he described as "an incredible little girl with maturity beyond her years."
In one e-mail in April, Karr asked Tracey to tell the girl's parents that "a person you feel strongly to be JonBenet's killer (I hate that term) wishes to speak to them, to explain what happened that night and to explain also that there was never any intention to kill her."
In this heavily politicized university town and around Colorado, politicians and legal experts were deeply divided over the sudden end to what had seemed a remarkable breakthrough in one of the nation's most notorious unsolved murders -- and whether the district attorney acted wisely in transporting Karr from Thailand.
In the days after the arrest, fragments of the suspect's past came to light that deepened the mystery of whether his avowals of his role in JonBenet's death were credible. Relatives and others who have known him depicted an intelligent but troubled man who was attracted to young girls and appeared obsessed with the Ramsey case.
When Karr was 19, he married a girl of 13 who filed for divorce a year later, saying she was "fearful for her life and safety." His second wife, to whom he was married for a dozen years, until 2001, was 16 and pregnant when they wed.
His family contains a history of mental illness; he was raised largely by grandparents after his mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, according to his mother's stepmother.
At the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, Lt. Dave Edwards issued a statement last week saying that investigators had been aware of an "apparent fascination" Karr had with the 1996 Ramsey case -- as well as the murder of another child, Polly Klaas, who had been killed in Petaluma three years earlier -- and that he had "made certain uncertain allusions to placing himself in the killer's role" in JonBenet's death.
The day after Karr's arrest, Lacy sounded cautious about whether her office had found JonBenet's killer. At a news conference, she warned that the investigation was at an early stage.
Monday, some lawyers who have followed the case closely said Lacy mishandled Karr's arrest.
"It's hard to believe that the Boulder D.A. could be so dumb on a case this big," said Craig Silverman, a defense lawyer and former prosecutor in Denver. Larry Pozner, of Denver, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said: "Boulder is not Guantanamo. You don't arrest and then find out if you have reason to arrest."
Gov. Bill Owens (R), a longtime critic of Lacy who has speculated on the role of the girl's parents in her death, lambasted the prosecutor for what he called "the hysterics" surrounding Karr's arrest. "Mary Lacy should be held accountable for the most extravagant and expensive DNA test in Colorado history," Owens said.
But former Denver district attorney Norman Early said the prosecutor had little choice but to arrest Karr, rather than risk the possibility that he might harm a child in Thailand. Early speculated that Lacy had wanted to bring Karr to Boulder quietly to obtain DNA and handwriting samples -- but instead found herself in the midst of an international media spectacle when word of the arrest leaked.
Goldstein reported from Washington. Staff writer Anne Hull in Washington contributed to this report.
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