August 17, 2006

"Is this just an obsessive guy craving his 15 minutes of fame?"

"Do we have a wack-job or a murderer?"

My guess: wack-job.

MORE: 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.

19 comments:

KCFleming said...

Damn.

Palladian said...

His weird, tilted, pallid, oversized-appearing head sitting on that creepily thin skeleton neck makes him look like both a wack-job and a murderer.

stephenb said...

I'm with you, Ann. Wack-job for sure.

altoids1306 said...

I hope this story gets more play in East Asia. Many schools very lax in due diligence, and hire the most incompetent foreign english teachers. Of those that I've seen, most are only there because they look American and can speak unaccented English - they have absolutely no teaching credentials to speak of. And an unusually high percentage are skinny unmarried males.

knox said...

Jason, there's tons of conflicting evidence in this one... for example, I remember reading in the Vanity Fair article that there were no footprints in the snowy ground... Then I read somewhere else that the ground was only very, very patchily snowy, and the police had sort of mischaracterized it.

Anyway, it's not clear what information you can believe, or not believe in this case. All I know is, nothing in this is as open-and-shut as I originally thought...

I just hope this freak who was hanging out in Thailand gets put away forever instead of released like he was last time.

Gahrie said...

to make the authorities come and get him and lock him away,

Make that "has a suicide complex."

Child molesters don't last long in prison.

Brent said...

. . . And I so wanted this to be the very public humiliation and comeuppance of Vanity Fair and Geraldo. . .

I'll just have to wait for a higher class of intellect to appear in the next generation, oh . . .wait . . .

vnjagvet said...

Drudge posted a link to this guy's resume yesterday. I found another one by googling John Karr and Albany. It was in Korean.

In the resume, he sought a job as a private teacher for very young (pre school) children of wealthy people. In essence, he was seeking a job as a private pre school tutor.

Could he possibly have had such a job in 1996? Could he have been working at the Ramsey house then? If so, why didn't his name come up until now?

He looks like a wack job to me. He also looks like a central casting version of a child molester.

Melissa Clouthier said...

Ann,

You could be a psychological profiler! You're good.

So, if he didn't do it, who did? Do you still think the conventional wisdom? Ma or Pa or Bro Ramsey?

luagha said...

It is a common police trick to specifically mischaracterize a number of bits of nonessential information to the press. That way, if someone comes forwards with the correct information, the police will know that they came across it somehow.

So the police might claim that 'she was strangled with a tourniquet' when really she was strangled with bare hands. When someone runs up waving his arms saying, "What are you guys saying! I strangled her with my bare hands!" to the police, they know they've got a live one.

I heard on the radio (so you know it's true) that he seems to know some details that he really shouldn't, as per the above. The person in the email conversation with him pumped him for those details with the police's help.

michael farris said...

"a good man tortured by pedophilic urges he knows are wrong, struggling all his life to resist them, struggling -- so far -- successfully"

So residing in _Thailand_ makes sense? Maybe he just set out to give himself a real challenge by resisting his urges in a country where it's reportedly pretty easy to fulfill them? Why didn't he really set the bar high and become a priest in the Phillipines?

I officially have no clue about what person or persons murdered the little girl. Conventional wisdom is that the parents are the first suspects and their behavior certainly didn't do much to deflect suspicion away from them.
One intriguing article I read about the case (I don't think it was the Vanity Fair one) had an interview with a profiler pretty conversant with the case who thought that the behavior all the way around suggested that the parents didn't do it but knew (or strongly suspected) who did and for reasons of their own didn't want it pursued.

And am I the only one who thinks he looks like he's in not-so-early (but not final) stages of a terminal wasting disease?

NSC said...

Over ten years even the most secret of details can slip out of an investigation so this thing about him knowing stuff that isn't public is not totally convincing. He has studied the case and who knows what he found out with this obsession.

I am with Ann on this, likely he is just a creepy wack-job who is guilty of bad things, but not this bad thing.

Maybe DNA will prove he did it, but bets are still on the family as the culprits.

MadisonMan said...

It seems like placing him in Boulder on the day of the crime will be a problem. The ex-wife has him in Alabama that day. There's a considerable distance between those two points. He *could* probably have flown direct to Denver -- a United hub -- rented a car (evidence!) and driven to the Ramsey house, done the deed, and returned, and flew back. Without anyone noticing at home? I don't think so.

Wack job.

knox said...

Jason, you could be totally right, all I'm saying is that there have been all sorts of things about this case that were supposedly "indisputable" and then turned out not to be, that's all. I was totally confident the parents did it for a long time, based on a lot of "facts" that it turned out weren't all that accurate.

Personally, the Pageant thing involves *what I see as* a weird objectification of children that makes it very easy for me to believe that the parents could be somehow culpable in her death. But at this point, I'm witholding all judgment because you literally don't know how much of what you're hearing is true.

knox said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
knox said...

over the last several days, I keep having double posts, so, sorry in advance...

Charlie said...

Yesterday, the Sope-Bocks the first to report on the "test " posts from an organization called PowerWurks on UseNet newsgroups, back in the Spring and Summer of 1996. Sope-Bocks readers followed on the names and found the Chiko Patel and someone named Suresh both live in Hamilton, Alabama. The readers speculated, from MySpace profiles, that both people lived in Hamilton, AL the same time as John Mark Karr.
Was he a private tutor or where they pupils at the school where Karr was a student-teacher? If so, the PowerWurks to John Mark Karr link could become quite clear. The Sope-Bocks will be updated as I research the matter in-depth...

VekTor said...

I'm wondering more and more if he isn't trying to tip people off that he isn't really the guy... I found the following rather intriguing:

Dressed in a baggy turquoise polo shirt and khaki pants, Karr said that JonBenet’s death was “not what it seems to be,” though he declined to elaborate.

“In every way,” he added, as authorities bundled him into a waiting vehicle. “It’s not at all what it seems to be.”


(from http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/08/17/karr.apinterview.ap/index.html )

Revenant said...

I recall reading of other notorious cases where similar things have happened.

People falsely confess to infamous crimes all the time. Dozens of people "confessed" to the Black Dahlia killing, for example.

Anyway, thus far I've seen no evidence that Karr actually did the crime -- there's just his confession. We'll see what further investigation brings to light, but I still think the killer was one of the victim's family.