Posted on 08/25/2006 5:52:05 AM PDT by Mr. Brightside
Brother: Karr didn't kill JonBenet
By JON SARCHE and CHASE SQUIRES, Associated Press Writers
39 minutes ago
BOULDER, Colo. - John Mark Karr's brother insisted Friday that Karr did not kill JonBenet Ramsey. "Absolutely not. Emphatically. Without a doubt," Nate Karr said in a television interview.
Karr told ABC's "Good Morning America" he was certain his brother spent Christmas 1996, when JonBenet was slain, with his family.
"Well I can say almost without question that from the time that John had children he has never missed a Christmas with his family, and that's any Christmas," said Karr, who appeared on the show with his father, Wexford Karr.
"If he was away from his family during Christmas it would have been a family scandal," Nate Karr said.
The brother said he was uncertain where the family spent the holiday when the 6-year-old child beauty queen was slain in her Boulder, Colo., home.
"To the best of our recollection, he was either with us in Atlanta or with (his ex-wife) Lara," Nate Karr said. "It's not as easy as you might think to remember 10 years ago."
Addressing his brother, Nate Karr said: "We love you and we support you 100 percent. ... Help's on the way."
John Mark Karr, meanwhile, spent his first night in an 8-by-10-foot jail cell in Colorado, away from other inmates for his own safety.
Nine days after his arrest in Thailand, the 41-year-old former schoolteacher now awaits a court appearance that could come as early as next week.
Karr arrived in Colorado Thursday, flying in from Los Angeles on a state police plane to face charges in a homicide case prosecutors acknowledged is in its infancy.
Formal charges were pending and the date of Karr's first court appearance could be announced Friday, the district attorney's office said.
His first few hours at the jail were to include physical and mental evaluations, and he was isolated from the other 480 inmates, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said.
"Anybody that's in jail in our population that faces these kinds of charges, charges against children, faces some danger," Pelle said.
Questions about Karr's involvement in the case have arisen since he told reporters following his arrest in Thailand that he was with JonBenet at the time of her death but that it was an accident.
Boulder County prosecutors have refused to detail any evidence they might have, but in a court filing this week said investigators didn't learn of Karr's name until Aug. 11, five days before his arrest. They said he was arrested in part because they feared he might get tipped off and vanish.
The court filing conflicts with the Sonoma County, Calif., sheriff, who said his office alerted Boulder authorities about Karr in 2001 after he was arrested on child pornography charges. The sheriff and Boulder prosecutors declined to comment on the apparent discrepancy.
Karr has professed love for JonBenet in e-mails with a Colorado professor, and told a California woman he believes the girl was tortured before she was strangled.
Sonoma County sheriff's Lt. Dave Edmonds said Karr expressed an "apparent fascination" with 1993 murder victim Polly Klaas and JonBenet, and "presented ideas about what the murderers of Polly Klaas and JonBenet Ramsey must have thought and felt."
But there was no confession, Edmonds said, or anything else to suggest Karr played a role in JonBenet's slaying.
The Boulder arrest warrant and supporting affidavit remain sealed and the district attorney is fighting media requests to open them. Prosecutors said in the court filing Wednesday the affidavit contains evidence never before disclosed publicly.
Former Denver prosecutor Craig Silverman speculated that investigators may already have DNA evidence that they believe links Karr to JonBenet's death.
He said prosecutors may have obtained and tested DNA from a letter Karr reportedly sent through the mail, and that may have persuaded Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy to send an investigator to Thailand to surreptitiously collect more samples.
Nate Karr told ABC his brother may have become obsessed with the case because he wanted to write a book about it. Because he lost the ability to see his sons and wife five years ago, "maybe he felt lost," the brother said. "And maybe that was the only reality he had left."
After JonBenet's father, John Ramsey, found her body in the family's basement on Dec. 26, 1996, police collected DNA from blood spots in her underwear and from under her fingernails.
Investigators have said some of the DNA was too degraded to use as evidence, but some was of sufficient quality to submit to the FBI in 2003. The sample did not match any of the 1.5 million samples in the agency's database, according to the Ramsey family attorney.
Other evidence includes a ransom note, a mysterious boot print found outside the house, marks on JonBenet's body that some say could have been made by a stun gun; and signs that someone may have entered the house through a basement window.
Dozens of attorneys have come forward offering to represent Karr. The county public defenders' office has asked to meet with Karr, the sheriff said. It was not known whether such a meeting had taken place Thursday.
This whole think just looks weirder every day - very Boulder.
He got an improvement over L.A. - there he had a six by niner...
Not really. We all know what he is. And he knows we know. It's the strangers that suffer. He was a gigolo in South Florida for several years, getting old ladies to spend their dead husband's fortunes on him. To hear them talk about him, he's an angel from God himself. It's so frustrating to try and tell them something different, they won't listen and we are the evil ones. We gave up. That's what he does, or did. I haven't seen him in nearly 10 years, but I get stories from family.........
Karr may be guilty, he may be innocent, I don't know.
DNA will come VERY close to proving it, one way or the other.
Here's the questions I haven't seen asked or answered:
1. Do the Ramsey's admit knowing Karr before JonBenet's death?
2. How did Karr come to be at the Ramsey's house on Christmas Eve?
3. Was Karr a close friend of the Ramsey's?
I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a very sordid story behind all of this.
You make a good point about Karr's motive. This isn't someone who was beating down the door of the Boulder police. They found him, it was not the other way around. I know the Boulder police have proven to be incompetent up to this point, but apparently the FBI is in on this investigation now. I can't imagine they would have gone all the way to Thailand to pick this guy up without having some very strong evidence that he was the guy. I would think that they would have checked his whereabouts on that Christmas Day at a bear minimum.
They've got something on him that hasn't been released to the media. I can't wait until we find out what it is.
More than one handwriting expert has claimed a high likelihood that the same person wrote both the yearbook sample and the ransom note. I also saw the one I suspect you are talking about explain why he was disqualified in a particular case. I don't recall him saying it was a lack of credentials. He said he has testified in more than 2000 other court cases.
If you look closely at the samples you will see what I am talking about. I can't imagine that the tails on the letters are anything but an exceedingly rare characteristic.
Wanna bet a Ruth's Chris dinner that this ain't the guy?
There's a logistical problem here - how Karr (if he is indeed the murderer) managed to be in Boulder CO away from his family in Atlanta/Alabama that Christmas. So far there has been no satisfactory answer to that question.
Can you identify any particular reason why your brother might have become a sociopath?
He was born that way. Was never any different, even as a small child. He has never changed, he's now 50 years old. I am 51, and my next younger sister is 48. She's okay as are all subsequent siblings, though they have "normal" problems, like drug and alcohol abuse, etc., but that goes with the generation. He, on the other hand, is like a person from the Twilight Zone...........
Speaking as someone who spent a month in jail based solely on amateur opinions about handwriting such as yours, I really resent armchair sleuths that haven't a clue what they're talking about. Handwriting analysis is as voodoo a science as is polygraphing. It is useful only in very limited cases and not where handwriting is disguised.
Speaking as someone who spent a month in jail based solely on amateur opinions about handwriting such as yours, I really resent armchair sleuths that haven't a clue what they're talking about. Handwriting analysis is as voodoo a science as is polygraphing. It is useful only in very limited cases and not where handwriting is disguised.
It's the dots here I find intriguing. If you have time, could you expand on your remarks? A few years ago I had a seven year old try to break into my home while I was there. Every word out of his mouth was a lie. When his father came for him, I saw him whack this child so hard he flew across the room. I reported that, but wondered, as does the other poster, can someone simply be born absolutely evil with no help from hsi environment?
(And could the perp be Burke?)
Not only that, there a is noticeable, antagonistic sarcasm in both and they are both exceedingly long (for a dude).
By the way, $118,000 in the bills described would occupy a space of 2/3's of a box of a 500 sheet ream of paper....No large attache case needed.
I came up with a theory of what's going on here. The one piece that didn't fit is why the Boulder cops were willing to make themselves look stupid (again) by bringing Karr to this country with a lot of media attention. Surely, they could arrange to do a DNA test with him still in Thailand, and make an arrest if there was a match.
Then it dawned on me...they're not after Karr, they're after John Ramsey! If they went at Ramsey with a full-on legal assault, he'd hide behind his PR firm and his lawyers. He'd not be required to testify, either. Karr's attorney would put Ramsey on the stand in a New York minute, where he would NOT have his own attorney shouting "Objection!" every ten seconds.
I've always believed that John Ramsey had some sort of inappropriate relationship with JonBenet, Patsy killed the girl in a fit of jealousy, John discovered it, and realized that if Patsy went down, his own behavior would be exposed as well. They concocted a story, and managed to stick to it, making sure they were not interviewed separately by the police.
What's happened lately? Well, you have Patsy's death a couple of months ago, no need for John to protect her any more. You also have the ten year anniversary of the murder coming up, and one more shot for the 24/7 news media to make Boulder officials look bad. You also have this nutball in Thailand who is willing to say he did it, and provide the trial that is necessary to get out the real facts, since any exculpatory evidence the prosecutor has needs to be delivered to the defendant's attorney. You time the arrest for a slow news cycle, after the cease fire in Lebanon has taken hold.
Anyone have any facts that don't fit in with the above scenario?
I'm sorry to hear of your experience, but it seems to me that your anger should be directed at whoever jailed you based on a single piece of evidence rather than on the practice of document analysis.
I trust you also resented Buckhead's amateur sleuthing here, which started the episode that came to be known as Rathergate?
Sure. When parents kill their own children, they typically do it in a far less violent and gruesome manner than was involved in this murder. Usually parents kill very young children (especially infants) or teenagers. These facts don't rule the parents out; it just means that based on the profile of someone who would kill a 6 year old in the manner used, Patsy is an unlikely candidate. A pedophile is not.
I had not read that any handwriting expert identified the ransom note as Patsy's writing; only that some of them said she could not be excluded as the author.
If you listen to the 911 call she made when she found the ransom note, she sure doesn't sound like someone who just murdered her child. She sounds completely hysterical.
I agree, it wasn't Patsy. But what about Burke? Also, the d.a. cannot ethically put JMK on trial as part of a strategy to get JR. She'd be jailed if it got out. No, they are just completely imcompetent fools.
I'm wondering about the letters at the end of the random note and how it was similar to the yearbook. That was a big coincidence.
They also know there's a very good chance they can get this guy off without even breaking a sweat.
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