Below The Beltway

That’s the question people are beginning to ask about John Mark Karr, the suspect who has confessed to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey in 1996:

John Mark Karr told reporters in a press conference last night in Thailand he was with the 6-year-old beauty queen when she died nearly 10 years ago. He said the death was accidental, as part of a botched kidnapping effort. When asked how he entered the family?s Boulder home, he declined to comment.

But investigators in Thailand have told the Associated Press that Karr has made several other statements to them, including claims that he picked JonBenet up from school the day she was killed and that he drugged her. JonBenet was on Christmas vacation at the time, so school was not in session, and there was no evidence of drugs found in JonBenet?s body during the autopsy.

More importantly, it appears that Karr has been obsessed with child abduction and murder cases in the past and took a particular interest in the JonBenet Ramsey case:

PETALUMA, California (AP) — John Mark Karr displayed a deep fascination with JonBenet Ramsey for years before he was arrested in her death on Thursday in Thailand.

Karr, who told reporters Thursday that he was “with JonBenet when she died” but that “her death was an accident,” began teaching children in Georgia and Alabama before he became a substitute in Petaluma, a wine country town where he lived until 2001 with his wife and three sons.

The Denver Post reported that Karr, 41, had faced child pornography charges. His father, Wexford Karr of Atlanta, told the newspaper his son had told him he was behind bars in connection with the Ramsey case.

Sonoma County Chief Deputy District Attorney Joan Risse confirmed the pornography charges and an outstanding arrest warrant against a John M. Karr, though she said she didn’t know if he was the same person held in JonBenet’s 1996 death in the child’s Colorado home.

Lara Karr of Petaluma, who divorced Karr in 2001, told KGO-TV in San Francisco that he often spent time reading up on the cases of Ramsey and Petaluma resident Polly Klaas, who was abducted and slain in 1993.

His father told The Denver Post that while Karr was in college as an adult, a professor encouraged him to write a book about the Ramsey case after being impressed with a school paper.

“He researched everything he could about her,” Wexford Karr said.

And Kevin Aylward points to other inconsistencies:

First, some of Karr’s claims (as reported) about the murder do not match even the most rudimentary facts known about the case. Karr claims that JonBenet was drugged, but no drugs were noted in any of the autopsy reports. Karr claims to have picked up (or kidnapped) JonBenet from school and taken her to the basement, but it’s inconceivable that JonBenet was in school on Christmas day – the day of the murder.

The most vexing question is whether Karr was in Boulder in 1996. John Mark Karr’s ex-wife says he was home in Alabama on December 25, 1996. Karr’s brother has said that Karr spent Christmas with the Ramsey’s in 1996, though none of the hundreds of sites dedicated to the case have any record of Karr’s presence

In the end, the DNA will decide the matter, but if it turns out that this is just a sick man who has convinced himself that he did something he couldn’t possibly have done, then it will be just another strange twist in a truly bizarre case.

Ann Althouse thinks Karr is a wack-job and offers these thoughts:

If I were writing a work of fiction inspired by this man, I would make him a good man tortured by pedophilic urges he knows are wrong, struggling all his life to resist them, struggling — so far — successfully, but feeling he has reached the limit of his strength, and choosing now to confess, falsely, to killing a little girl whose image he really has fallen in love with, to make the authorities come and get him and lock him away, so that he can never hurt hurt anyone, as he has, in fact, never hurt anyone.

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