BOULDER, Colo. – Reporters and camera crews crowded the local courthouse grounds Saturday in anticipation of the arrival of teacher John Mark Karr to face charges in the death of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey.
The intense media attention in the case that has fascinated the nation for nearly 10 years has outraged JonBenet’s father and driven him to consider moving out of the country, a family lawyer said Saturday.
After being arrested Wednesday in Thailand, Karr said that he was with JonBenet when she was killed on the day after Christmas 1996 in the basement of the family’s home in Boulder. He called the child’s death “an accident.”
Karr will face charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault.
Authorities in Thailand said Karr, 41, would leave on a flight to the United States today. “The tickets for John Mark Karr’s departure are ready,” Thailand’s immigration police chief, Lt. Gen. Suwat Tumrongsiskul, told reporters.
Suwat did not specify the route Karr would take. In the United States, neither federal nor local officials would confirm the timing.
Television crews had already pitched camp Saturday on the grounds of the Boulder County court building in this wealthy college town.
More than 30 journalists representing organizations as far away as Japan attended a meeting Friday to divvy up media seating for Karr’s first court appearance – even though the hearing hadn’t even been scheduled.
That initial court appearance is generally for the judge to advise a suspect of his rights, said state court system spokeswoman Karen Salaz. “It’s going to be three minutes, max,” she said Saturday.
Lin Wood, the Atlanta attorney who has represented JonBenet’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, for years, said Saturday the media onslaught facing John Ramsey is worse than it’s ever been.
The intense coverage has Ramsey considering a move out of the country, Wood said. Patsy Ramsey died in June.
Wood said camera crews and reporters followed Ramsey on Friday when he took his son, Burke, to Purdue University to start the college year.
“He cannot go back to his home in Michigan because it is surrounded by the media,” Wood said. “Last night, I’ve never heard him so angry. He is upset. He is worried about his son’s physical safety … I’m not sure John Ramsey will ever speak to a member of the media after what happened to him yesterday.”
JonBenet’s body was found the day after Christmas 1996 in the basement of the family’s Boulder home. She had a fractured skull and had been strangled. Autopsy results were inconclusive about whether she’d been sexually assaulted.
The girl had been in child beauty pageants, and photos and video of the heavily made-up blonde from a wealthy neighborhood helped give the mystery an appeal that created a cottage industry of books, documentaries and TV specials.
Years of investigations and grand jury hearings never produced an arrest. Police at one time declared that the girl’s parents and older brother were under an “umbrella of suspicion,” and the Ramseys bitterly countered what they termed unfair speculation, even publishing a book detailing why they said an intruder must have killed their daughter.
Legal experts have said DNA evidence will likely be key: DNA was found beneath JonBenet’s fingernails and inside her underwear. But others who worked on the case warned that DNA evidence alone will not be enough to convict Karr.
“It can only exclude or include him as the possible killer. It can never be 100 percent,” a forensic scientist, Dr. Henry Lee, said Saturday, noting that investigators only have a partial profile to work with.
“There was different DNA and mixture DNA that was hard to develop a profile from,” said Bob Grant, a former prosecutor from neighboring Adams County who was an adviser in the case.
Karr was given a mouth-swab DNA test in Bangkok, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. The results of that test were not immediately known.
Karr will be given another DNA test when he returns to the United States, the official said.
Prosecutors in Santa Rosa, Calif., said they would wait to pursue child pornography charges from five years ago pending against the suspect in the JonBenet Ramsey case. John Mark Karr, 41, worked briefly as a substitute teacher in Sonoma County until early 2001, when he was charged with possessing child pornography. He was jailed for about six months and then disappeared before his trial was due to begin in January 2002. Sonoma County District Attorney Stephan Passalacqua said Friday that the misdemeanor child pornography case will wait while Colorado authorities pursue the Ramsey case.
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