Expert: 'Do we have a wack-job or a murderer?'

Sue Lindsay and Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Legal and law enforcement experts have begun to express outward skepticism about claims by a teacher that he killed JonBenet Ramsey.

John Mark Karr told reporters in a press conference last night in Thailand he was with the 6-year-old beauty queen when she died nearly 10 years ago. He said the death was accidental, as part of a botched kidnapping effort. When asked how he entered the family’s Boulder home, he declined to comment.

But investigators in Thailand have told the Associated Press that Karr has made several other statements to them, including claims that he picked JonBenet up from school the day she was killed and that he drugged her. JonBenet was on Christmas vacation at the time, so school was not in session, and there was no evidence of drugs found in JonBenet’s body during the autopsy.

So far, there is no paper trail of Karr being in Colorado. Police in Boulder said today that they have no record of ever having contact with him.

Denver defense lawyer Larry Pozner said Karr's news conference confession, televised late last night, was bizarre.

"Is this just an obsessive guy craving his 15 minutes of fame? There are those people who confess under circumstances where we immediately know, this is real. This isn’t one of them," Pozner said. "We have to withhold judgment because he has not given enough facts for us to decide: Do we have a wack-job or a murderer?"

Denver lawyer and former prosecutor Craig Silverman expressed similar reservations.

"This confession is nonsensical and it appears to be delusional. To claim this was an accident is ridiculous. It's hard to imagine a more intentional, deliberate murder than hitting a girl with sufficient force to split her skull open and to fashion a garrote and twist it until she stops breathing."

A former investigator knowledgeable about the case watched a press conference by Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy this morning and said he was concerned about what she said - and didn’t say.

"Her statements about, 'I wish that we could have continued (the investigation) in this vein, rather than in the public eye,' I agree with her in that regard. Because, for her sake, I hate to predict what’s going to come down if this whole things falls apart and they drag a guy 12,000 miles back from Bangkok only to get his 15 minutes of fame and a free ticket back to America."