Meticulous details figure in a grand fabrication

updated 3:58 a.m. ET Aug. 29, 2006

BOULDER, Colo. - In year after year of e-mails, John Mark Karr described an aching love for JonBenet Ramsey and grisly details of how he killed her.

How the girl was hung by a rope, her wrists tied together, and how she was slowly strangled to put her in a “dream-like state” before he performed oral sex. How he was a “dashing prince” who loved the girl, tasted her blood after the sex went too far and how he tried to revive her when he realized she was dead.

But every detail Karr provided in a tantalizing narrative confession turned out to be a lie.

In a stunning development, prosecutors abruptly dropped their case Monday against Karr after DNA tests failed to put him at the crime scene, despite his insistence he sexually assaulted and strangled the 6-year-old beauty queen.

“I loved her so much and I am so sorry that she died in my arms,” Karr wrote to a Colorado professor in May, part of a longtime correspondence that led to his arrest. “If anyone came close to screaming, it was I. ... ’Please don’t leave me. I love you so much. Oh, babydoll, please come back to me!”’

Just a week and a half after Karr’s arrest in Thailand was seen as a remarkable break in the sensational, decade-old case, prosecutors suggested in court papers that he was just a man with a twisted fascination with JonBenet who confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.

“The people would not be able to establish that Mr. Karr committed this crime despite his repeated insistence that he did,” District Attorney Mary Lacy said.

The 41-year-old schoolteacher will be kept in jail in Boulder until he can be sent to Sonoma County, Calif., to face child pornography charges dating to 2001.

The district attorney vowed to keep pursuing leads in JonBenet’s death: “This case is not closed.”

Karr was never formally charged in the slaying. In court papers, Lacy defended the decision to arrest him and bring him back to the United States for further investigation, saying he might have otherwise fled and may have been targeting children in Thailand as well.

A call from ‘Daxis’
Lacy said Karr emerged as a suspect in April after he spent several years exchanging e-mails and later telephone calls with University of Colorado journalism professor Michael Tracey, who has produced documentaries on the Ramsey case.

According to court papers, Karr told the professor he accidentally killed JonBenet. He went into graphic detail during a July 15 telephone call with Tracey that lasted 100 minutes, with Karr claiming he performed sex on the little girl, then hoisted her up with a rope.

Karr, going by the alias Daxis, said he placed a new “necklace around the throat of the child.” The garrote was loosened and tightened, and JonBenet stopped breathing, Karr told the professor during the call.

“Daxis explained again that due to the twitching of JonBenet he was concerned she might be brain dead but her body could continue to survive,” according to a summary of the call in the 98-page arrest affidavit. “He did not want JonBenet to suffer, so he struck her in the head with a flashlight he brought with him.”

The meaning of “Daxis” was not immediately clear.

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