Prosecutors In Colorado Defend Karr Arrest

Teacher Still Faces Calif. Porn Charges

BOULDER, Colo., Aug. 29 -- Prosecutors said Tuesday that they pursued the now-collapsed case against John Mark Karr in the JonBenet Ramsey murder mystery because of his graphic e-mails about the 1996 killing and because Karr was targeting a 5-year-old girl at the elementary school where he taught this summer in Thailand.

Speaking with reporters a day after announcing she would not bring criminal charges against Karr, Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy said that investigators had followed him for at least a few days in Thailand, secretly listening to his telephone conversations and surreptitiously trying to take DNA samples that might link him to JonBenet's killing. Those samples proved unreliable, Lacy said, but while Karr was being followed investigators and police in Thailand became concerned over his interest in a girl who was to be a student in his class in Bangkok.

That concern prompted Thai police to expel Karr, 41, from the country and Boulder prosecutors to bring him to Colorado before they had completed their investigation.

"We felt we could not ignore this," she said. "We had to follow it. There was a real public safety concern here directed at a particular child."

Lacy met with reporters Tuesday amid growing criticism, including a toughly worded attack by Colorado Gov. Bill Owens (R), over her handling of the case. The prosecutor said she would not resign. When her second term as district attorney ends in 2009, she must leave office under a term-limits law.

She calmly said at a news conference that her office "did a good job" in arresting Karr. She said the governor and other critics should "put yourself in our spot: Would you have considered [the risk of] flight and the safety of a child appropriate?"

Lacy said investigators will continue to probe the unsolved murder of the 6-year-old child pageant star, a case that became a media obsession when JonBenet was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her family's Boulder home the day after Christmas in 1996.

Although he will not be charged in JonBenet's death, Karr remained in a Boulder jail cell pending extradition to Sonoma County, Calif., on misdemeanor charges of possessing child pornography.

On Tuesday, a district court judge in Boulder ordered Karr sent to California by Sept. 13, saying he had violated terms of his bond in that state by failing to show up for a hearing on the pornography charges. If convicted, Karr could get a year in prison on each count.

Meanwhile, Lacy laid out a more detailed scenario on how and why she felt Karr needed to be taken into custody for questioning.

Lacy told reporters that in May she became aware of Karr, though she only knew him as "Daxis" -- the name he used in e-mails that he had been exchanging for four years with Michael Tracey, a University of Colorado journalism professor. In those messages, and in 11 telephone conversations secretly taped by investigators this summer, Karr repeatedly said he had an "intimate love affair" with JonBenet and killed her accidentally after a sexual encounter.

He also suggested that he could sell the movie rights to his story for a large sum.