John Karr's fifteen minutes are over.
It appears that he's as fake as an Adnan Hajj photo for Reuters.
From The Washington Post:
Prosecutors dropped their case against John Mark Karr in the decade-old killing of JonBenet Ramsey on Monday... .
Less than two hours before a court hearing here in which the 41-year-old teacher was to have been charged with murder, the Boulder County district attorney announced that investigators had not gathered enough evidence against him. In court documents and a public statement, District Attorney Mary Lacy said that Karr's DNA did not match samples from the crime scene and that family members had provided "circumstantial evidence" that he was with them in Atlanta during Christmas in 1996, when the 6-year-old girl was killed.
At mid-afternoon, a sheriff's deputy went to Karr's cell in the Boulder jail and told him he was being released. The deputy began driving Karr to an undisclosed location in town, but turned around and brought him back to jail: Boulder Sheriff Joe Pelle said he had just received a teletype from law enforcement officials in Sonoma County, Calif., saying they wanted Karr transferred there. Karr faces an outstanding arrest warrant in Petaluma, Calif., on unrelated misdemeanor charges from 2001 of having child pornography on his computer.
..."No evidence has developed, other than his own repeated admissions . . . to establish that Mr. Karr committed this crime," District Attorney Mary Lacy told the court. Judge Roxanne Bailin then granted Lacy's motion to terminate the case against Karr.
That DNA evidence served to completely blot out the spotlight on Karr. It was instrumental in eliminating him as JonBenet's murderer and revealing him to be a major league hoaxer.
Yes, DNA is powerful stuff in a murder case, unless you're O.J. Simpson.
Rather than joining the elite ranks of the notorious, like Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy, Karr is relegated to run-of-the-mill child porn pervert status.
That's obviously not what he had in mind. He dreamed of more.
Karr fed the media his fantasies and they feasted -- wildly.
While Karr flew back from Thailand, toasting his notoriety with champagne and dining on roast duck, the media ate his story up.
Karr was given center stage while Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, and Iraq stood in the wings.
In the days after the arrest, fragments of the suspect's past came to light that deepened the mystery of whether his avowals of his role in JonBenet's death were credible. Relatives and others who have known him depicted an intelligent but troubled man who was attracted to young girls and appeared obsessed with the Ramsey case.
When Karr was 19, he married a girl of 13 who filed for divorce a year later, saying she was "fearful for her life and safety." His second wife, to whom he was married for a dozen years, until 2001, was 16 and pregnant when they wed.
His family contains a history of mental illness; he was raised largely by grandparents after his mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, according to his mother's stepmother.
To say that Karr has a troubled past is putting it mildly.
His present isn't too great either.
Although he's not the infamous killer that he claimed to be, his arrest may have spared someone's life, a victim not yet chosen by Karr. Who knows?
Even though he duped officials, another child predator is off the streets, at least temporarily.
And now, the finger-pointing begins over how the Karr "confession" and arrest were handled.
...Monday, some lawyers who have followed the case closely said Lacy mishandled Karr's arrest.
"It's hard to believe that the Boulder D.A. could be so dumb on a case this big," said Craig Silverman, a defense lawyer and former prosecutor in Denver. Larry Pozner, of Denver, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said: "Boulder is not Guantanamo. You don't arrest and then find out if you have reason to arrest."
Imagine that!
The Bush administration even gets slammed in the John Karr circus!
I'd expect no less. How could The Post resist highlighting a quote like that?
Gov. Bill Owens (R), a longtime critic of Lacy who has speculated on the role of the girl's parents in her death, lambasted the prosecutor for what he called "the hysterics" surrounding Karr's arrest. "Mary Lacy should be held accountable for the most extravagant and expensive DNA test in Colorado history," Owens said.
But former Denver district attorney Norman Early said the prosecutor had little choice but to arrest Karr, rather than risk the possibility that he might harm a child in Thailand. Early speculated that Lacy had wanted to bring Karr to Boulder quietly to obtain DNA and handwriting samples -- but instead found herself in the midst of an international media spectacle when word of the arrest leaked.
Leaks.
See what happens when there are leaks and the media go on a feeding frenzy?
Lacy can't be blamed for all the hoopla, unless she was responsible for leaking Karr's arrest.
The question isn't whether Lacy acted appropriately. She did.
The subsequent media circus was the leaker's fault.
Who was behind the leak? Could it be Karl Rove? Did Dick Cheney want to destroy Lacy's career?
It was probably Richard Armitage.
So, what have we learned?
We learned that John Karr is weird, a pedophile, and possibly mentally ill.
What else have we learned?
We already knew this: The media that drooled over Karr are weird, too.
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