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Littwin: Head spinning over Karr? You're not alone

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 22, 2006 at midnight

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Did he do it?

Cast your vote here: Yes, no, or shut up, I'm watching Nancy Grace.

My mother says he didn't do it. My wife, though, says she doesn't like the look in his eyes.

Meanwhile, I hear Peter Boyles is still after Patsy Ramsey. At least we can take comfort from this: When Boyles is talking about JonBenet, that means he's not talking about illegal immigrants.

My colleague, Bill Johnson, has decided there's a better chance that Mickey Mouse is guilty of killing JonBenet than is the Boulder DA's suspect. He says he's sure the uber-creepy John Karr is innocent because Karr's ex-wife gave him an alibi, and you know how ex-wives are. (I don't actually have an ex-wife myself, but I've read the literature.)

An e-mailer, meanwhile, lays out a scenario in which Karr did do it, with his now-ex-wife as accomplice - accounting, yes, for the alibi! I wasn't sure whether he was serious, or whether he was pitching a movie of the week.

By the way, it turns out the ex-wife may be backing off the alibi and, through her lawyer, says she is still looking for family Christmas photos from 1996. Heck, I can get you family Christmas photos from 1996 - I can get them for you by 3 o'clock - and I'm Jewish.

It also turns out that Karr apparently didn't actually tell the Thai chief of immigration police that he picked up JonBenet from school that day or that he drugged her. It seems that Lt. Gen. Suwat Tumrongsiskul got the school-pickup idea from a TV documentary.

Of course, you could see how he could get confused. It's hard to keep things straight when you're busy singing Bee Gees songs - ladies and gentlemen, Suwat and Karr and the Brothers Gibb back together - to Karr in the Thai lockup. He then offered a few lyrics for the assembled media.

The media contingent had raced to Bangkok just in time for the concert. They weren't just standing around listening to music, though. They found out that Karr was possibly seeking a sex-change operation - and that he had had his sideburns lasered.

By the way, Lt. Gen. Suwat - smile that everlasting smile - you're my kind of karaoke cop.

OK, we laugh because, well, what else are we going to do? I mean, who wants to wait to see what evidence Mary Lacy, the Boulder DA, actually has in the case?

I knew it was going to bad. I didn't know it would be this bad. We now know what's beyond media frenzy, because this is it.

There's a war going on in Iraq. And there's a sort-of truce in Lebanon. And the president says nobody's going anywhere so long as he's president.

And the news? What John Mark Karr (now officially a three-named creep) had for dinner on his flight to the States from Thailand.

This is important, if not necessarily in a culinary sense. It's important because this is not the kind of news you could get 10 years ago, when JonBenet Ramsey was murdered. Or at least you wouldn't get it as quickly. You might have had to wait until breakfast.

Now we have the nonstop Web, and we have the 24-hour news cycle in full gear. And every detail, at every minute, becomes "news," even if reporters have to fly business class so we can know that Karr had the roast duck with soy sauce and yellow noodles. (I slipped, by the way, while clicking the channels to see my pal, Tony Kornheiser, on Monday Night Football, and saw instead Nancy Grace interviewing a guy who picks out liars for a living. We watched a clip of Karr on the plane to see if we can tell. We couldn't. Oh, it's going to be a long season.)

There are ups, there are downs. There are ins, there are outs. If you get caught up in the vortex, you're a goner.

Here's a typical story. The ransom note, as all JonBenet experts know, was signed S.B.T.C. No one knows what it meant. A classmate in Alabama produced a yearbook in which Karr wrote "Shall Be The Conqueror" - the kind of thing you write only when you're in high school. Yes, SBTC. Then people started saying the whole idea was a stretch. And you could Google SBTC and get Small Business Technology Coalition, which probably wasn't involved. But then a handwriting expert says the yearbook shows that Karr is almost certainly guilty, only to be countered by experts who say it proves no such thing.

How many times did you change your mind in that paragraph?

Did he do it? Vote here. And vote often. Because you can change your mind every commercial break.

Just don't ask yourself why you're hooked on this story. There's no time. Not when we have to brush up on extradition law and, of course, debate why Karr flew business class, why he picked the walnut dressing and why he crushed his beer can. And then there's the champagne glass clinking with an orange-juice-drinking Boulder DA investigator.

Was it "brilliant" strategy, as someone said, or exploitation, or wasted taxpayer money?

Why, as Patt Morrisson asked on The Huffington Post, was a Homeland Security guy on the plane with Karr? Wasn't he supposed to be checking for hair gel?

Or maybe everyone in Thailand gets a "Homeland Security" T-shirt.

As the BeeGees sang, and this was obviously before cable TV news, "It's only words, and words are all I have . . ."

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