|
JonBenet's killer arrested.
Yeah, the media has never been known to lie or fabricate stories for whatever reason. They completely created the entire story that JonBenet was killed by her parents, despite any real evidence. The parents (who lived in my hometown long ago) were humiliated, dragged through the mud and accused of killing their daughter. Anyway, pretty amazing that they caught the guy 10 years after the fact. Apparently Patsy Ramsey was informed before her death a couple of months ago that they were pursuing this guy and planned to arrest him.
I did it!
| quote: | Accused JonBenet killer says death accident
By Nopporn Wong-AnanThu Aug 17, 4:34 AM ET
An American primary school teacher accused of the grisly Christmas 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey said on Thursday he loved the child beauty queen and her death was an accident.
John Mark Karr, 41, arrested in Thailand on Wednesday in a dramatic twist in the case that has gripped the U.S. media, was charged with murder, kidnapping and sexual abuse of a child.
"I loved JonBenet," Karr told reporters Bangkok in his first public comment since his arrest. "She died accidentally." When asked if he had killed the girl, he appeared to shake his head.
Karr, slender, sandy haired and dressed in a blue polo shirt and beige corduroy trousers, was impassive earlier as he was presented briefly at a news conference, encircled by police.
He was arrested on a U.S. Federal warrant in the presence of FBI officers after being followed for three weeks as he sought a job teaching English and Mathematics in Bangkok.
"We arrested him yesterday at an apartment not far from my office after having followed him for 21 days," Immigration Police chief Lieutenant-General Suwat Tumroungsiskul told Reuters. "During the arrest, we were accompanied by American officers. He has been in and out of Thailand a couple of times and the arrest warrant was issued just a couple of days ago," Suwat told reporters.
Police said Karr had applied for jobs at Bangkok's dozens of international schools. They had said earlier one had hired him.
"People like him are dangerous. We have criminals from all over the world running away from their home countries to look for teaching jobs in Thailand," Suwat said.
SWIFT EXTRADITION
U.S. media said Karr had been living in JonBenet's hometown of Boulder, Colorado at the time of the murder. The child was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her home on December 26 1996.
Bangkok-based U.S. Homeland Security official Ann Hurst told the news conference Karr would be extradited quickly from a country where the process can take weeks.
"He will be removed to the United States within a week," she said. She said Karr had been very cooperative with police and had displayed "a variety of emotions" since his arrest.
The case grabbed big headlines from the start and Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy said the arrest followed "several months of a focused and complex investigation."
At the time of JonBenet's murder, a note was left on a staircase of the family home saying she had been kidnapped by a "small foreign faction" who wanted $118,000 in ransom.
JonBenet's parents, John and Patsy, came under suspicion during the initial investigation and in 2002 they reached an out-of-court cash settlement with a former detective who wrote a book accusing them of murdering their own daughter.
Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in June. The couple had been informed of the progress of the investigation that led to Karr's arrest.
"So Patsy was aware that authorities were close to making an arrest in the case and, had she lived to see this day, would no doubt have been as pleased as I am with today's development almost 10 years after our daughter's murder," John Ramsey said.
Ramsey told KUSA-TV in Denver that, to the best of his knowledge, he was not acquainted with Karr.
No charges were ever filed in the decade since JonBenet was killed, but the murder generated intense media coverage drawn by JonBenet's success in youth beauty pageants, the family's wealth and mysterious elements of the case, including the note.
(Additional reporting by Rosalind Russell and Tanny Chia in Bangkok, Keith Coffman in Boulder, Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles and Deborah Charles in Washington) |
|
