Picture rekindles toy-bear mystery

Similarities exist between 1 in girl's room, Karr photo

Kevin Vaughan, Charlie Brennan And Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News

Published August 19, 2006 at midnight

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A mysterious stuffed Christmas bear, once considered a potentially important clue in the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation, is again in the spotlight - thanks to a photograph e-mailed to a University of Colorado professor by the man now in custody in the killing.

But instead of helping shed light in the case, the bear and the picture represent more unanswered questions in a killing that has vexed detectives and sparked controversy for nearly a decade.

In 1999, investigators released a photograph and asked for the public's help in identifying a small stuffed bear dressed in a Santa Claus suit. It was found in the Ramsey home, and the girl's parents didn't recognize it.

Investigators later learned the bear had been a prize in a beauty contest won by JonBenet a couple of weeks before she was killed.

That seemed to be the end of the issue.

Enter John Mark Karr, the 41-year-old man arrested in Bangkok, Thailand, this week as a suspect in JonBenet's unsolved murder.

Karr carried on a four-year e-mail correspondence with CU journalism professor Michael Tracey.

One of the e-mails Karr sent to Tracey contained a photograph of a young boy holding a white Santa Claus teddy bear purportedly taken on Christmas morning.

Tracey declined Friday to comment on the photo and wouldn't discuss the e-mail's author or whether he believes Karr is the child in the picture.

However, in one e-mail exchange with Karr, part of a small sample of the correspondence obtained this week by the Rocky Mountain News, Tracey apparently referred to the picture.

"I think you are tortured," Tracey wrote, "and that the dynamite trail leads back to that pretty little boy opening presents, with the Santa doll just visible over his shoulder."

Tracey acknowledged he shared details of the picture with students at the University of Colorado as part of his media- studies lectures.

"I've used the media coverage of the Ramsey case as a case study of how bad it can get," said Tracey, long critical of the treatment of the Ramsey family by the police, the media and the public as the investigation unfolded. "I show (students) a lot of the materials we use in the (three) documentaries" Tracey has produced on the JonBenet case.

Whether the picture, and the bear in it, has any significance wasn't clear Friday. But a former investigator knowledgeable about the case said the bear mystery was definitively solved years ago.

The bear had first become of interest to investigators during a June 1998 interview of Patsy Ramsey by Detective Tom Haney, on loan from the Denver District Attorney's Office. He showed Ramsey pictures from inside the house taken immediately after JonBenet's murder.

One picture showed the bear, perched on the twin bed alongside the bed in which JonBenet had been sleeping.

"He was asking her about different things in JonBenet's room, and she acted like she didn't know" where the bear had come from, said a former investigator, who spoke only on a guarantee of anonymity. "She was kind of asking, 'What's that? - like she never remembered.

"It was then a question of, well, did somebody lure JonBenet using this bear? Has anybody ever seen a bear like this?"

On Jan. 28, 1999, then-Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter issued a public plea for information about the bear and its potential origins. His office Web site received about 28,000 hits by the time the riddle was solved.

The source said JonBenet won the bear in a Denver-area pageant and believed the date of the event was Dec. 14, just short of two weeks before her death.

"We confirmed it a couple of different ways," the source said. "It was a prize from that pageant. It's a non-issue."

The source said investigators' "proof-positive" about the source of the bear included a statement from the pageant organizer who saw the bear presented to JonBenet, as well as video footage from the pageant showing the bear on a table, among a group of prizes, before it had even been presented to JonBenet.

"It had nothing to do with the homicide," the source said.

And the bear seen in the photograph from the Ramsey home?

In February 1999, Boulder police investigators acknowledged that they had never seized it as evidence, and the Ramseys said that they didn't have it.

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