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some hometown history on Karr here...

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060819/DATELINE09/60819007/1155/dateline

Article published Aug 19, 2006
Drawn by Aqualung

Adam Northam, copy editor

I awoke on Thursday uncomfortably, moving from a celestial R.E.M. sleep to full consciousness all at once. My dream, whatever it was, vanished in an instant and was replaced in my vision by the cool white ceiling. I stared at it for a moment while my wits returned. I was awake. There was no denying it now.

I sat up to the foot of my bed, which doubles as a desk chair in my cramped little space, and met the blue glow of the computer monitor. I surfed to Yahoo to read the national news, as is my custom in the a.m. I saw John Karr’s picture, a skinny white face surrounded by a brown tempest of hula-shirted Thai lawmen.

I didn’t read the story immediately, because my main concern was the status of Abraham’s warring children, their age-old feud manifested most recently through the conflict between Israel and Lebanon and Hezbollah. I read the story and was satisfied that the world had not gone to war during the night. There were no other stories of particular interest to me, so I decided to read about the scared-looking white man in Thailand.

Then I realized what had happened since I went on hiatus from the news. This was not to be a slow news day. It began with a news bomb, delivered to me in the waking moments by Yahoo News. John Karr was arrested in Thailand in connection with the 1996 murder of Jonbenet Ramsey. Suddenly I remembered the winter of 96, the season when America learned the horror of the Jonbenet murder, pulled their children to their bosoms and feared in unison.

I had promises to keep, and plenty of time to follow the developments later, so I painfully undocked from the bed and rose to face the day. One thing about the story stuck in my heart: the AP writer had included the observation that John Karr spoke with a Southern accent. The thought of the potential child killer being born of the South was disheartening to me. “Damn, I hope he ain’t from Alabama,” I said aloud in the dimness, to no one.

I killed off the chores, grabbed a shower and hit the road. I was going home, to my parents’ house, for a weekend of welcomed boredom and anonymity in the last few days before the fall semester started at the University of Alabama. As I crossed the bridge over the Black Warrior and left Tuscaloosa behind, I decided to give my sister a call and announce my journey home. We talked about trivial matters for a moment, and then she dropped the real news bomb on me, with far more precision and firepower than Yahoo.

“You’re driving into a shitstorm, just so you know,” she said to me over the phone, almost in a whisper, as if the shitstorm were a matter of sensitive intelligence.

I was perplexed for a moment as I jockeyed for the outside lane in cellular silence.

She continued.

“You know that guy they caught in Thailand?” she asked.

“Yeah, in the Jonbenet thing…”

“He’s from Hamilton,”

“That’s where I’m from!” I said stupidly.

And that’s when Thursday really began for me, on the phone with my sister, moving at high speed across the old, brown Hugh Thomas Bridge, which shakes with the Holy Ghost. John Mark Karr, who was arrested in Thailand in connection with the 1996 Christmas murder of Jonbenet Ramsey, was from my hometown of Hamilton, Ala.

This trip home, though structured and executed identically to the hundreds of trips before it, would be one to remember. What is shaping up to be one of the biggest news stories of the year was rooted for me at home.

I knew what this meant, and it was reaffirmed to me as I passed through the town of Fayette, the halfway point on the T-town/Hamilton Express. There I spied the Tuscaloosa WVUA 7 News team in their hunkered-down white Taurus. They were on their way home after what I assumed was a morning spent in Hamilton. They were the first of many fellow journalists I would see, from the short blonde from Fox 6 who came to journalize the barber shop to the CNN crew at the courthouse square. My little hick hill-town was buzzing.

There’s a wicked mist that descends upon small towns when under media siege. There’s an unannounced excitement as the humble hide from the T.V. cameras and old ladies’ cups runneth over with dusty knowledge and concrete theories of guilt and innocence. People call their folks and report sighting family members and friends on Fox News. The cigarettes glow intense and the coffee spills at restaurants and gas station eateries as the everyday visitors discuss their birthing of the might-be killer. Phone calls go out to almost forgotten numbers, the long-distance bill is, for once, damned, as old friends’ voices unite in the airwaves.

Hardly anyone knows anything of consequence, but the Hamiltonians have much to say, and the presence of national news satellite trucks validates every tongue, whether it speaks to a reporter or not.

That John Karr needs a’ killin’.

He needs prayin’ for.

It’s just sad.

“It” being sad is the one thing that most of the townsfolk agree on. It was the shared opinion of my father and one his fellow Southern Baptists. He approached my sister, my father and me as we had lunch after I arrived in Hamilton. He stood at the end of our table exchanging Deaconisms with my father. It’s always Sunday in Hamilton, and he had come initially to discuss the preacher’s recent mission to Romania. Of course, the conversation was only a verse away from John Karr. I mostly kept my mouth shut, save for the formalities of introduction, for I was eager to hear what opinion my father’s discussion with the man might offer. They decreed the sadness of the entire Jonbenet situation, from Colorado to Thailand to Hamilton, and along with my sister, that John Karr didn’t kill Jonbenet Ramsey.

I dismissed it all at first as optimism for the local boy incarcerated in Asia. Alabamians believe in and protect our own, and I thought surely the claims of innocence to be a hope in Hell.

The opinion of innocence began to hold water for me, not when the national news began to doubt his guilt, but when my sister began to communicate with the television. From the moment I had first spoken to her about the calamity, she had proclaimed her belief in his innocence. To her, things were awry.

I took serious note of her misgivings after lunch on Thursday as I settled into her house to visit. Some of the yellow had shown through the day’s journalism. As the video of John Karr’s arrest rolled endlessly through the projector, the talking heads began to refer to Karr as a “monster,” and news stories online called Karr “smug,” “cocky,” and “sullen.” My sister was distraught.

“He’s so not cocky,” she shakes her head in disagreement. “He looks like a deer in the headlights! If you knew him at all, you could see that he’s just in a trance.”

I don’t know John Karr at all, but my sister, Alicia Northam, 43, veteran resident of Hamilton, knew John Karr in adolescence. She was a member of the class of 1981, a class two years above Karr's, and knew him through a small circle of friends at Hamilton High School. She also served with John Karr on the trumpet line of the Aggie Band at Hamilton. Alicia has been, many times, inside the house where Karr grew up, which she has always known as “Granny Karr’s House.” My mother remembers that Granny Karr rode the old folks’ bus, the Community Action van, maintained by my mother’s office, the Marion-Winston Community Action Agency. Granny Karr was the matron of John Karr’s home, as the whereabouts of his mother are shrouded to most.Alicia and I became caught up in the small town frenzy brought upon us by the visiting media and rubbernecked the short mile down the road to gaze upon Granny Karr’s house. It was a deserted little white house, and Alicia noted that someone had “come and cut the yard” since she had seen it earlier that day. The Karr house from earlier that morning, with grass all grown and out of control, was the house that was shown on CNN.

“It’s just one of those great, old late 40’s houses,” Alicia said as she remembered the Karr home. “It was old, solid as a rock, like it would be standing there till the return of Jesus.” She goes on to elaborate, with the sensory detail that hibernates in one’s mind for decades, about the honey-pine wall panels and the smell of cooking. She remembers when her circle of friends used to hang out in John Karr’s room, which he shared with his brother, drinking Granny Karr’s sweet tea and listening to Jethro Tull records.

She remembers John Karr.

“He was a quiet guy, always on the fringes,” she said. “When the group got together, he would sit off in the corner and talk to one person at a time.” Alicia was involved in Karr’s one-on-one talks, several times. “He would talk about whatever he was obsessed with at the time.

“He would get obsessed and tell wild stories and ideas that always culminated with him gaining the highest possible achievement, exploding into a supernova, a big star, whether he wanted to be a huge actor, or a rock star, or a writer, or whatever it was. He was like a John Nash, always looking for the one idea or theory that would propel him, that would set him apart. He wanted to show everyone that his brain was wired differently. He did it all to make people admire him.

“He wanted admiration more than friendship I think,” Alicia recalled.

Admiration may have been what John Karr sought as he drove around Hamilton in his red DeLorean. The car has become an object of discussion in Hamilton and on the news. Alicia remembers the car and said it was one of a few different unusual, foreign cars that Karr owned, which she always assumed came from his father in Atlanta.

In fact, Alicia almost bought a vehicle from Karr once, a Fiat X 1/9.

“At the time John had two of them and I was going to buy one from him,” Alicia said. “But dad advised against it. He said it would be expensive to maintain and hard to get parts for, so I passed it up.”

Alicia went on to further explain the soul of John Karr, as I listened intently, bewildered that my own sister knew so well the newest national villain. She told me about some more of Karr’s obsessions, which I labeled in my notes as “trip-vision.”

“He would talk about seeing auras, colors, the shifting of the wind,” Alicia said. “Sometimes he would be on a kick of some really far-out stuff. He talked about wanting to tap into the unused portion of the brain, to access some unknown mental power. He was like a character from Dazed and Confused.”

Alicia said that evidence of the personality of John Karr could be found on paper, if the journals have not been lost over time.

“There are stacks of spiral notebooks of John’s writing just waiting to be found, if someone hasn’t thrown them away,” she said. “He wrote all the time, his writings were usually cosmic or mystic, just way out there stuff. Sometimes all you could do was just laugh and bullshit back at him.”Alicia said that John Karr was not the quiet, meek and easy-going guy that locals have described him as to the news teams.

“He wasn’t a bad guy, he was just very different,” she said. “He went out of his way to not blend in.”

John Karr not blending in can be seen on page 108 of the 1980 Hamilton High School Yearbook. The photograph is of the Aggie Band’s trumpet section. John Karr sits on the bottom row, second from left, wearing black shoes, the wrong shoes. Every other visible foot in the picture is clad in the traditional white band shoe. John sits there with shining black feet, his legs pulled apologetically under the chair, although there is no place to hide in the face of the lens. His eyes are fixed to his right, across his body and the picture, focusing on something unseen.

I sat there looking at the picture, knowing exactly what it felt like to wear black shoes on band picture day. As I studied the photo, more news of John Karr appeared on the television. He had written an internet blog, asking parents and kids to contact him to help them, in any way.

“That sounds just like John,” Alicia says. “Trying to be a messiah.”