The JonBenet Fraud

Denver Post : "The murder case against John Mark Karr collapsed in a heap of bizarre e-mails Monday, dealing another blow to the decade-long search for JonBenét Ramsey's killer."

NYT : "The announcement by the Boulder County district attorney, Mary T. Lacy, incited a storm of questions about why Mr. Karr, 41, had been believed in his admissions and how he could have led prosecutors into what became an elaborate global farce. Hordes of reporters had tracked Mr. Karr's journey, from his apprehension in Thailand nearly two weeks ago to his return to the United States."

How he could have led prosecutors into a farce? What about those hordes of reporters ?

And the Daily News 's big climb-down? Not so much. "LIAR IS FOUND OUT":

"The creep who convinced Colorado prosecutors he might be JonBenet Ramsey's killer was unmasked as a liar yesterday after his DNA failed to match genetic material on the slain 6-year-old's body."

There we go again: The creep who convinced prosecutors. Not the creep who convinced editors.

Rocky Mountain News : "When people confess to a crime they did not commit, it's usually to put an end to coercive interrogation, several experts said Monday.

"But there is a smaller group of people who become so obsessed about the smallest details of a case, they convince themselves that they committed the crime."

Well, now it's been confirmed: Richard Armitage was the other secret source in Plamegate. Mike Isikoff summarizes the findings of a new book of which is he the coauthor:

"In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, 'Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,' Armitage had been at home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a 'senior administration official' who was 'not a partisan gunslinger.'

"Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was. On the phone with Powell that morning, Armitage was 'in deep distress,' says a source directly familiar with the conversation who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. 'I'm sure he's talking about me.'

"Armitage's admission led to a flurry of anxious phone calls and meetings that day at the State Department. (Days earlier, the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into the Plame leak after the CIA informed officials there that she was an undercover officer.) Within hours, William Howard Taft IV, the State Department's legal adviser, notified a senior Justice official that Armitage had information relevant to the case. The next day, a team of FBI agents and Justice prosecutors investigating the leak questioned the deputy secretary. Armitage acknowledged that he had passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State Department memo: that Wilson's wife worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA. (The memo made no reference to her undercover status.) Armitage had met with Novak in his State Department office on July 8, 2003--just days before Novak published his first piece identifying Plame. Powell, Armitage and Taft, the only three officials at the State Department who knew the story, never breathed a word of it publicly and Armitage's role remained secret.