My Sunday Feeling

This is a man named John Mark Karr. He said he killed poor little JonBenet Ramsey. I don't believe him.

One the one hand, you would be hard pressed to find a more textbook example of a perverted whack job. A cursory examination of Karr's marital life-his 2 ex-wives were 13 and 16 when he married them-and vocational history alongside his history of repeated firings from teaching jobs for improper behavior in the classroom leads to the easy conclusion that he is a troubled person with an inappropriate interest in small children. Recent disclosures of certain e-mail messages sent by Karr to a professor of journalism at the University of Colorado buttress this conclusion.

In one message close to the anniversary of her death he wrote, "JonBenet, my love, my life. I love you. I shall forever love you." Or consider the following, " Sometimes little girls are closer to me than with their parents or any other person in their lives. When I refer to myself as JonBenet's closest, maybe now you understand." The New York Times today wrote that Karr started a Usenet site called Powerwurks which was allegedly devoted to the welfare of troubled kids and their problems. You can read some of these postings, along with editorial comments of the site's creator by going to http://www.powerwurks.com .

Finally, he was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand where he had been employed, albeit briefly, as an elementary school teacher. Perhaps, not coincidentally, Bangkok is notorious for a flourishing sex trade where child prostitution is available for the pervert with a need to scratch that particular itch. Oh. I almost forgot that there are some warrants outstanding on him for possession of-guess what?-child pornography.

No doubt, if you wanted to cast somebody as a sex criminal in your next detective movie, Karr looks like a guy you would want to audition. He could find the character.

But his story just isn't adding up. Karr claims to have picked JonBenet up after school the day of her death. Not possible. School was out for Christmas break. Besides, the lucky gal he was married to in 1996 says that he was in Alabama with her at the time. He says that he raped her and gave her drugs. But no drugs were found in her system and there was no evidence of rape. Karr also described her death as "an accident." The hell it was. That poor baby was strangled and her skull was fractured. Some accident.

And, as if this whole sordid tale could not get any weirder, in his e-mails to the professor Karr claimed that he was the subject of a 4 state Federal investigation for child molestation and murder. This was news to the Feds, who issued a denial.

You know, most guys embellish their war record or they greatly inflate their high school football career when they make stuff up about their lives. It takes a special person indeed to brag about being a murdering child molester.

So why would he say this stuff? Who knows? It is not unheard of for people to come out of the woodwork in sensational cases who claim to have "done it." The most famous example involves the Lindbergh kidnapping back in the thirties which generated over 200 "confessions." Counting Karr's, there have been 4 in the Ramsey case. His has been the first arrest.

But let's not get carried away by this. Typically, a confession is the product of a bargain between law enforcement and a defendant after he is confronted with the evidence. Here, insofar as we know, the lion's share of the evidence involving Karr, comes from Karr in the form of the e-mails in which he documents his obsession with little girls in general and JonBenet Ramsey in particular. Under these facts, this kakamamie confession gives them probable cause to get him off the streets and to bring him in.

Besides, Karr may recant as soon as he gets back. Why would he do that you ask? Easy. Believe it or not, I have never spent a night in jail. But I do know-and am related to-guys that have. Nobody has ever recommended it. I can scarcely imagine the conditions inside a jail in Bangkok or the kind of lunatics that tend to be incarcerated there on a given night. I would imagine that I might confess to killing Nicole Simpson to get out of there and I don't exactly resemble Pee Wee Herman's stunt double as does Karr. He might have looked pretty good to some of the regulars.

No, all of the available evidence proves that John Mark Karr is a pedophile and a loon who has absolutely no business being in a position of trust with children. If the DNA evidence comes back matching him up to the crime, I will fall over backwards.

The tragedy of this latest chapter of the whole sordid story is that it threatens to obscure the fact that an innocent little girl was savagely abused and killed. It is easy to think of JonBenet Ramsey as some kind of rouged up cartoon character who performed in those creepy child beauty pageants. ( Is it just me? Or are the people who are into these things just weird?) She was not a cartoon character. She was a little kid. And she sure as hell deserved better.

John Mark Karr says he killed JonBenet Ramsey. I do not believe him.