A familiar face: The Jonbenet Ramsey Murder

False Confession

In 2006, something happened that blew Jonbenet's angelic face back in the headlines and our TV screens. A former school teacher, John Mark Karr, confessed out-of-the-blue to the 1996 strangulation of JonBenét in graphic, sexual detail. Karr was arrested in Thailand where he'd been living on the lamb after facing child pornography charges in the U.S. The now 51-year-old initially brought himself into the mess by reaching out to a University of Colorado Boulder professor named Michael Tracey over email in regards to a documentary Tracey was making on the case. Once those e-mails took a disturbing turn – revealing the grown man's sexual fascination with JonBenét – Tracey reported Karr to the police who arrested him in Bangkok as a possible suspect. He was immediately flown to Boulder for questioning, but was ultimately cleared after his DNA failed to match the profile of an unknown male found on the waistband of JonBenét's long-johns.
Karr's demented confession involved a series of diary entries allegedly written from the scene of the crime. In one dramatic account, Karr recalls strangling JonBenét in a "love game" gone wrong. "Close your pretty eyes, sweetheart," reads the excerpt, in which Karr repeatedly refers to himself as "Daxis." "Daxis loves you so much. Oh God, I love you, JonBenét. And my lover's eyes are slowly closing ..."
Karr's alleged involvement broke international headlines, and his earnest insistence on having killed her was enough to set off a media fiasco. However, he was ultimately dismissed as a suspect altogether and written off as a pedophile who was after notoriety and fame. Officials also failed to verify that he was ever in Boulder. According to a 2010 report by the Daily Beast, the one-time suspect is now living a new identity – and a new gender – in the Pacific Northwest.