A second-grade teacher was busted in Thailand yesterday for the long-unsolved killing of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey – a stunning breakthrough in one of the nation’s most mysterious and lurid murders.
John Karr, 41, a onetime Georgia resident, was being held in Bangkok on unrelated sex charges, according to law-enforcement officials and news reports.
He confessed to some details of the sensational 1996 Colorado murder that have not been made public, KUS-TV in Denver reported.
JonBenet’s mother, Patsy Ramsey – who died in June of ovarian cancer – knew about the out-of-the-blue suspect before she passed away, her long-suffering husband revealed.
“Patsy was aware that authorities were close to making an arrest in the case and had she lived to see this day, would no doubt have been as pleased as I am with today’s development almost 10 years after our daughter’s murder,” said John Ramsey, JonBenet’s father.
“Words cannot adequately express my gratitude for the efforts of Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy and the members of her investigative team.”
He told KUSA that he did not know the man “to the best of my knowledge.”
The stunning development in the case – one of the most highly publicized murders in American history – follows a new months-long probe spearheaded by Colorado investigators.
But the murder itself spurred a decade of speculation, titillation and second-guessing.
Ramsey and his late wife have always maintained that an intruder broke into their palatial home on Dec. 26, 1996, and committed the crime.
JonBenet – a pretty 6 year-old blonde who competed in kiddy beauty pageants – was found beaten and strangled in the basement.
Cops would later say the parents were under an “umbrella of suspicion” for the slaying, but a grand jury investigation in Boulder ended with no charges being filed against them.
But it was an umbrella that continued to hang over them in the court of public opinion.
“It’s been a very long 10 years, and I’m just sorry Patsy isn’t here for me to hug her neck,” said Lin Wood, the Ramseys’ lawyer.
Wood said he’d been told that Karr once lived in Conyers, Ga., outside of Atlanta.
JonBenet was born in Atlanta in 1990, and the Ramseys lived in the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody for several years before moving to Colorado in 1991.
The couple moved back to Atlanta after their daughter’s slaying.
Law-enforcement officials from Boulder were flying to Bangkok to present Thai authorities with documents in the slaying, officials in Washington said.
The kid-killing suspect will be brought back to the United States this weekend to face charges in the vicious crime, according to CBS News.
The murder has long captured the attention of the public – perhaps because there were so many strange clues and leads that went nowhere.
A ransom note found in the Ramsey home demanded $118,000 and said the girl was being held by “a small foreign faction.”
That led cops to think it was a missing child case. Later investigations said the police trampled all over the scene – destroying possible evidence – before finding the mangled little body in the basement.
A Court TV special just two months ago concluded that the case had completely stalled.
Another reason the murder riveted the nation was the countless disturbing images of a gussied-up JonBenet in over-the-top costumes competing in her pageants.
But possibly the biggest reason the case so transfixed people was because everyone initially thought the parents were involved.
Little over a week after the slaying, the Ramseys hired a lawyer, publicist, and their own investigators.
Their first formal interview with cops came a lengthy four months after JonBenet’s death.
But they consistently maintained their innocence, and in the past few years, the evidence seemed to favor their version of events.
In 2003, U.S. District Judge Julie Carnes in Atlanta concluded that the evidence she reviewed suggested an intruder killed JonBenet.
That opinion came with the judge’s decision to dismiss a libel and slander lawsuit against the Ramseys by a freelance journalist, whom the Ramseys had named as a suspect in their daughter’s murder. Three months after the judge’s ruling, retired detective Tom Bennett was hired by the Boulder DA’s office to lead a refocused investigation.
Lib Waters of Marietta, Ga., visited the gravesites of Patsy and JonBenet Ramsey in the Atlanta suburb yesterday immediately after hearing news reports about the arrest.
Waters taped a piece of notebook paper to JonBenet Ramsey’s headstone that read: “Dearest Patsy, Justice has come for you and Jon. Rest in peace.”
With Post Wire Services