Monthly Archive for August, 2006

How the New York Post ran with John Karr arrest

Published
by
Andrew Drummond
on August 23, 2006
in General News
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Andrew Drummond covered the arrest of John Mark Karr for a number of newspapers including The Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and New York Post.

This is how the New York Post ran with the story

Jonbenet creep flies high until doors slam in US jail

*Jonbenet pervert ‘I loved her - Then killer her by mistake’

JONBENET PERVERT: ‘I LOVED HER’ - THEN KILLED HER BY MISTAKE
By ANDREW DRUMMOND in Bangkok, JENNIFER FERMINOin Boulder, Colo., and DAN MANGAN in New York
 COOL & CREEPY: John Karr, at his Thai appearance yesterday, gave cops two versions of the killing.August 18, 2006 — “I killed her.”

John Mark Karr said those chilling words to police in Thailand - just as Colorado cops prepared to charge him with the 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, authorities said yesterday.

The 41-year-old fugitive teacher, busted Wednesday in a seedy Bangkok hotel, told cops he drugged the tiny beauty queen with chloroform, raped her and then accidentally killed her in the basement of her Boulder home, Thai officials said.

“I was with JonBenet when she died. Her death was an accident,” a soft-spoken and stuttering Karr told reporters yesterday in Bangkok, as photographers’ flashbulbs repeatedly illuminated his clean-cut but creepy countenance.

“I loved JonBenet,” added Karr, who appeared ashen and wore a baggy turquoise polo shirt that was buttoned to the neck and khaki pants.

Asked if he was innocent, the divorced father of three said, “No.”

“It’s very important for me that everyone knows that I love her very much and that her death was unintentional,” said Karr, who insisted he is “very sorry for what happened.”

Thai police revealed that the former used-car salesman is so convinced JonBenet died accidentally, he told them that even though he killed her, “it was not first-degree murder, it was second-degree.”

Karr reportedly told cops he believes JonBenet fatally overdosed on the chloroform he gave her to knock her out.

A top Thai cop said Karr also has claimed he planned to kidnap the tiny beauty queen for an $118,000 ransom, but strangled her after his plan went askew.

The suspect - who left California in 2001 to flee charges of possessing child porn - told reporters he wrote JonBenet’s mom, Patsy, before she died of ovarian cancer in June to tell her “many things, among them that I am so very sorry for what happened to JonBenet.”

Thai cops said Karr also told them he picked JonBenet up at school and took her back to her home the day she died. But the slaying occurred during the Christmas season.

Karr had been living in a cheap hotel in a seedy district of the Thai capital.

The area is noted for low-rent prostitutes and seedy massage parlors…continues


 

Snake on a plane 1

 JonBenet creep sings a loony tune 1

John Mark Karr extradited - Sydney Morning Herald

Published
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Andrew Drummond
on August 20, 2006
in General News
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DNA test for teacher who says he killed JonBenet

Catherine Elsworth and Andrew Drummond Bangkok

August 20, 2006

THE suspect in the killing of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey is expected to be extradited to America today despite growing speculation over his confession to Thai authorities and the likelihood that only DNA testing will prove whether he committed the crime.

John Mark Karr, 41, a teacher and child-care assistant, allegedly told Thai officials that he drugged, raped and accidentally killed six-year-old JonBenet in the basement of her family home in Boulder, Colorado, 10 years ago.

Once extradited to Colorado, Karr is likely to face charges of murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault.

But speculation has grown that rather than being the killer, the husband of two teenage brides who was once arrested for possession of child pornography could merely be obsessed with the case.

Karr was seized in an apartment in Bangkok on Wednesday after a US judge issued a warrant for his arrest. Hours later, before a roomful of journalists, he said: “I was with JonBenet when she died. Her death was an accident.”

But some experts have said that without corroborating evidence, such as DNA, the confession appeared unlikely to secure a conviction.

DNA that came from a Caucasian white male was found beneath the girl’s fingernails and on her clothing. Authorities have never said whether the DNA matched anyone on an FBI database.

A DNA mouth swab was taken from Karr in Bangkok. The results are unknown. He will be given another test when he is handed over to prosecutors.

“DNA is the big ticket, the 600-pound gorilla in this case,” former Denver prosecutor Craig Silverman told the Rocky Mountain News.

“If his DNA doesn’t match, that’s a huge problem for the prosecution. If it’s a match, then it’s game, set and match for the state.”

Karr’s ex-wife, Lara Knutson, whom he married when she was 16, said Karr was with her and their three children in Alabama during the Christmas holiday period in 1996 when JonBenet was killed.

The post-mortem examination showed no evidence of drugs in the girl’s system and there was no conclusion about whether she was raped.

Examples of Karr’s handwriting are also being examined to see if he wrote the ransom note demanding $118,000 left in the Ramsey home.

The email correspondence that led to Karr’s arrest reveals an obsession with the Ramsey case. In a series of messages Karr sent to Michael Tracey, a British academic in Colorado who produced three documentaries about the Ramsey murder, the suspect says he was “in love” with JonBenet.

In one message, sent on December 23 last year, Karr asked Professor Tracey to visit JonBenet’s old house in Boulder and recite a poem.

It read: “JonBenet, my love, my life. I love you and shall forever love you. I pray that you can hear my voice calling out to you from my darkness - this darkness that now separates us.”

Professor Tracey contacted authorities in May.

Confession reignites America’s most enduring mystery

Published
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Andrew Drummond
on August 18, 2006
in The Times
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From The Times
August 18, 2006
Confession reignites America’s most enduring murder mystery

Doubts persist as teacher admits killing child beauty queen,
by James Bone and Andrew Drummond

Shocked that a six-year-old could be dolled up like a pouting adult, the American public long suspected that her affluent parents were responsible for her grisly death.

But a chaotic confession half a world away appeared yesterday to have solved the paedophile murder mystery that has transfixed the American heartlands for a decade — and absolve the parents of blame.

John Mark Karr, 41, an American primary school teacher arrested in Thailand, claimed that he was with JonBenet Ramsey when she was strangled in her Colorado home on Christmas Day in 1996.

Speaking nervously to reporters in Bangkok, the boyish suspect said: “I was with JonBenet when she died. Her death was an accident. I am so very sorry for what happened to JonBenet. It’s very important for me that everyone knows that I love her very much, that her death was unintentional, that it was an accident,” he said.

JonBenet’s body was found in the basement of her 15-room home in Boulder after her mother discovered a handwritten ransom note demanding $118,000 (£65,000). She had been sexually abused and strangled with a garrotte made with half a paintbrush from her mother’s art supplies.

Although it was one of about 800 child murders in America that year, the killing provoked a media sensation with cable news channels repeatedly screening home videos of JonBenet posing coquettishly at child beauty pageants.

For many, the case was a replay of the first 24-hour TV news sensation — the O. J. Simpson murder inquiry of 1994-95 — in which the suspect was acquitted.
JonBenet’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, fell under what a prosecutor called the “umbrella of suspicion”. Investigators theorised that Mrs Ramsey, a former beauty queen herself, had killed her daughter in a fit of rage after she wet her bed; or that Mr Ramsey murdered her to cover up sexual abuse.

The couple became popculture symbols of killers who got away with their crime, inspiring episodes of the TV police drama Law & Order, Mad TV and South Park. At one point, police even bugged JonBenet’s grave in the hope of recording their confession.

Mrs Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in June, but she already knew that Mr Karr had emerged as a suspect. He once lived near the Ramseys in Atlanta, where JonBenet was born.

The teacher reportedly came under suspicion after e-mailing a journalism professor who made a TV documentary backing the Ramseys’ innocence. He contacted the British academic Michael Tracey, of the University of Colorado, four years ago, the Rocky Mountain News reported.

Ollie Gray, a private investigator who has seen hundreds of e-mails between the two, told the newspaper: “(The suspect) talked about being there, about doing this and doing that — he had a whole bunch of things that didn’t come out before.”

Mr Karr, who has three sons, lost his teaching job in Petaluma, California, scene of the infamous 1993 child murder of Polly Klaas, and was divorced after being charged with possession of child pornography in 2001. He went to work abroad.

Nate Karr, his brother, said he was researching a book on child-killers and it was possible that his inquiries had triggered investigators’ interest. In Bangkok, John Karr said he had written letters to Patsy Ramsey about many things.

Laura Karr, his former wife, said she did not believe that he committed the crime because she was with him at home over Christmas 1996.
Mr Ramsey said yesterday that he had been made aware that Mr Karr was a suspect under surveillance, but he added: “We don’t know with 100 per cent certainty that this is the guy.”

The alibi was one of several questions raised about the arrest. A Thai official said Mr Karr had confessed to drugging and having sex with JonBenet. Toxicology reports found no trace of drugs. Mary Lacy, the Boulder prosecutor, fuelled doubts by hinting that Mr Karr may have been arrested before the inquiry was complete for another reason. He had started work in Bangkok on Tuesday teaching six-year-olds.Asked what happened when JonBenet died, Mr Karr said: “It’s very painful for me to talk about it.”

Thai bride admits feeding ex-husband to the tigers

Published
by
Andrew Drummond
on August 2, 2006
in The Times
. 0 Comments

From The Times

August 2, 2006

Thai bride admits feeding ex-husband to the tigers

By Andrew Drummond in Petchaburi, Thailand and Simon de Bruxelles in London
 
SOME think it was premonition that led Toby Charnaud to write a short story about an English expatriate’s death at the hands of his Thai girlfriend. But even if the wealthy Wiltshire farmer had any inkling of his own fate, he could hardly have imagined its true horror.

A court in Thailand was told yesterday how Mr Charnaud, 41, was lured to his death on the pretext of collecting his son from his ex-wife on the Thai-Burma border. When he arrived at her family home neither she nor the boy was there, but others were.

fed to the tigers 02

Toby Charnaud
 
First they tried to shoot him with an ancient flintlock musket. When that misfired they attacked him with clubs and an iron bar. When he was finally dead, Mr Charnaud’s body was dismembered and cooked on a charcoal fire before being scattered across the Kaeng Krajan National Park, one of the last refuges of the Thai tiger.

Although she was not present at the killing, Mr Charnaud’s ex-wife, Pannada, was charged with murder along with three of her relatives.
Having heard the evidence the judge, sitting at Petchaburi provincial court, will announce on September 6 whether he intends to pass the death sentence on Pannada, 35, for premeditated murder.

The court was told that Mr Charnaud had met his wife when she was working as a bar girl in Bangkok and they married in 1997. They then moved to England where they helped to run the family sheep and cereal farm with his father, Jeremy, 69.

In less than two years they had grown disillusioned with life in England and decided to move back to Thailand, where they bought the Rainbow Beach Bar in the golf resort of Hua Hin, south of Bangkok.

But the marriage was short-lived because of Pannada’s gambling habit. The couple divorced in 2003 and Mr Charnaud was granted custody of their son, Daniel, who visited his mother every month or so.

After one visit, in arch last year, Pannada (below right) reported Mr Charnaud missing. But it was only because of the suspicions of his family in England that foul play was uncovered.

The Times Fed her husband to tigers 1 2

Mr Charnaud’s parents hired the services of a Scottish private investigator, based in Bangkok, who used mobile phone records to establish that Mr Charnaud had been at his ex-wife’s home on the day of his disappearance.
 
Detectives then found a knife with Mr Charnaud’s blood and hair on it. They were later led to where his body parts had been buried in the national park.
Three of Pannada’s relatives admitted murder “with provocation”. But the Charnaud family’s lawyer, Boonchu Yensabai, who is jointly prosecuting the defendants, told the court: “The only motive can be that Pannada expected to inherit everything through their son.”

In a letter read to the court Mr Charnaud’s mother, Sarah, said: “One of the worst horrors . . . is that the first attempt to kill him failed and he would have been aware of his murderers making their fatal attack.”

Mr Charnaud’s sister, Hannah Allen, believes that her brother may have predicted his own death in a short story written for a competition run by a Bangkok magazine. The story, entitled Rainfall, is about a Englishman, Guy, who falls in love with a Thai bar girl called Fon.

TobyCharnaudMurder

How the Evening Standard ran the same story

 At first he refuses to believe that she is sleeping around and gambling away his money. Even when he catches her in the act he forgives her. After a series of further betrayals, he realises that his wife has hired one of his best friends to kill him. The story won first prize.

Mrs Allen, who is bringing up Daniel, 6, said: “The story is eerie. I am sure he had his suspicions. This was a disgusting, premeditated murder which has ruined our family’s lives.”