Brother: Karr didn't kill JonBenet

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.

I'm still looking for the why of dragging Karr all the way to Colorado with flimsy evidence.

Because Karr talks like he did it and he would be considered a flight risk (he's already skipped out in California). That's probable cause (not enough to convict but enough to hold somebody over). Boulder finally had a location on him so they swooped in and took him while they could knowing he might disappear again if they didn't.

FWIW, I don't have a problem with apprehending Karr (although one has to factor the cost/reward aspect here given who would have to pay for all of this). What I have a problem with is the media hyperventilating over this before hardly any evidence linking him to the crime is presented. We already know his entire family tree, all the family's dirty laundry, etc. yet NOBODY can even place this guy inside the state of Colorado in 1996.

I'm still waiting for some evidence of that, even hearsay evidence. Nope. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Unless the guy is Peter Pan, he needed some means to get to Boulder and I've yet to hear any evidence to that regard. As flimsy as the Karr family defense is that he was with them, it's still stronger than anything the prosecution has come up with to say he was in Boulder (except for Karr's own statement which I disregard without any corroboration).

Perhaps "evil" is not exactly the right word. Perhaps pure "id" is more apropriate. From Wikipedia:

Freud's structural theory

Ego

In Freud's theory, the ego mediates between the id, the super-ego and the external world. Its task is thus to find a balance between primitive drives, morals and reality while satisfying the Id. Its main concern is with the individual's safety and allows some of the Id's desires to be expressed, but only when consequences of these actions are minimal. Ego defense mechanisms are often used by the ego when Id behavior conflicts with reality. This conflict occurs between the Id and either society's morals, norms, and taboos or between the Id and the individual's expectations as a result of the internalization of these morals, norms, and taboos into the superego.

Although in his early writings Freud equated the ego with the sense of self, he later began to portray it more as a set of psychic functions such as reality-testing, defence, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory.

The word ego is taken directly from Latin where it is the nominative of the first person singular personal pronoun and is translated as "I myself" to express emphasis.

Super-ego

The super-ego is a symbolic internalization of the father figure and cultural regulations. The super-ego tends to stand in opposition to the desires of the id because of their conflicting objectives, and is aggressive towards the ego. The super-ego acts as the conscience, maintaining our sense of morality and the prohibition of taboos. Its formation takes place during the dissolution of the Oedipus complex and is formed by an identification with and internalization of the father figure after the little boy cannot successfully hold the mother as a love-object out of fear of castration. "The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on — in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt" (The Ego and the Id, 1923). The concept of super-ego has been subject to criticism for its sexism. Women, who are considered to be already castrated, do not identify with the father, and therefore form a weak super-ego, apparently leaving them susceptible to immorality and sexual identity complications. In Freud's work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he also discusses the concept of a "cultural super-ego".

The id ("das Es", cf. Latin id, English it, German es) is the psychical system "which behaves as though it were the Unconscious", or the "dynamically unconscious repressed", in effect, the reservoir of need-gratification impulses such as the primitive instinctual drives of sexuality and aggression. Freud believed that the id is inborn, operating on the dynamics of the primary process mode of thinking. The drives of the id are said to work according to the pleasure principle, requiring immediate gratification or release without concern for external exigencies. Though hunger itself may be seen as a pure id desire, the crying of the hungry infant is already an instinctive attempt to relate, that is, to communicate that need to the object of the drive in question, namely, one who can help to satisfy that need. Thus drives are linked to object relations, as Freud observed in his 1895 essay "Project for a Scientific Psychology".

Freud may have borrowed the term das Es from his advocate and personal acquaintance Georg Groddeck. Groddeck, a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine and self-proclaimed "wild analyst", published Das Buch vom Es (roughly, "The Book of It") several weeks before Freud published The Ego and the Id (1923). German readers would have been aware of Nietzsche's previous use of "it" to describe that which is impersonal and subject to natural law within us.

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My brother is pure "Id" as he has no or very little concience. His "primitive desires" are the only driving force in his life. There is no or very little "ego" to act as a balance to his over powering "Id". His self-defense mechanism is to lie and to ignore anything that is contrary to his id's desires. He would run away from home as a small 6 or 7 year old and tell absolute horror stories to people he could con into giving him what he wanted, ie, food, transportation, shelter, etc. And these people were almost always senior citizens, thus as an adult he became a gigolo and preyed upon elderly rich women. Apparently, his brain is structured abnormally for some reason that may never be discovered by science. Others like him are everywhere in this world. It may be a birth defect, either genetically caused or developmentally produced in the womb. In either case, I believe that he is incurable and will be this way until he dies...................

(And could the perp be Burke?)

I have suspected him from the very beginning. here is my reasoning:

If, the father had killed JonBenet, the mother would have been outraged. Conversely, if the mother had killed JonBenet, the father would have been outraged. If Burke, the little brother, had killed his sister, then the parents, in order to avoid losing both children, would have concocted this story of an intruder and kidnapping with a stupidly written note. Burke would have been put i some institution for probably the rest of his life, and Patsy could not accept this situation. She wrote the ignorant kidnapping note, edited it, and perfected it to her satisfaction, and then placed it where it was found. The crime scene was cleaned as best they could and the body hidden in the basement.

This may be just conjecture on my part, but I don't think Karr did this. He's just a sick person who wants attention. Only his DNA found there would convince me, and even then it could have been put there after the fact. Having only my brother as a guide, I believe Burke is probably the prime suspect. A person, such as my brother, can lie so convincingly, he can appear as an innocent little angel to even professional investigators. The parent's actions, on the day of the murder, were so out of whack with what would be expected of a grieving parent, that it made me extremely suspicious of Burke..........

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