JonBenet's Murder, 10 Years Later
A Cruel Hoax? (Part Two)

by Paul Petersen

I was born in the wrong century…and so were my kids.

The vividness of JonBenet's death remains with me to this day…the damning beauty pageant image…the chilling coroner's report…the police department's bungling of the crime scene…the image of the parents defending a generational fixation on pageants. It all came swimming back to me.

Almost immediately, Karr's confession came under intense scrutiny as our global media, driven by rapacious consumer appetites, sank its teeth into the details. What has emerged is a portrait of a man who presents a clear and present danger to children everywhere on earth…but almost certainly not the person who killed JonBenet Ramsey on Christmas night, 1996.

False confessions are a fact of life in high-profile criminal cases. Nearly 200 people "confessed" to the Lindberg kidnapping. Pending the proof John Karr's ex-wife and family have promised to provide in order to destroy Karr's claim, and the DNA evidence even now being processed, I need to speak to the irrefutable facts so far presented concerning this worthless man who has laid claim to Murder…and the role that each and every one of us played in his twisted growth and development.

Years ago John Karr married his 13 year-old cousin, a marriage that was annulled after a year. John Karr then married a sixteen year-old girl. Karr's professional life as a teacher was shadowed by whispers and insinuations about his behavior around children and he could not sustain his job as a substitute teacher. In time he left his wife (and three children) and drifted to California where he was arrested on the charge of Child Porn possession. Karr skipped the country to avoid prosecution, his resume' claiming that he then taught grade-school kids in at least a half-dozen countries, most of them known as hotbeds for sexual adventurism involving children. He had just undertaken a new job teaching 2nd Graders in Thailand when he was arrested…an unimposing monster with an uncanny resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald…and the sordid story of a man consumed by his cowardly attraction to very young girls began to emerge.

Inappropriate connections to children, especially a marriage to a thirteen year-old, ought to have triggered alarm bells throughout America's law enforcement community, and John Mark Karr should have been tagged with an unmistakable symbol of his nauseating attraction to children.

Talk about Behavior Modification.

There was a time, and not so long ago, when sexual predators whose victims were children were set loose in the general population of our country's prisons. These "short eyes," as they are called in prison slang, were swiftly dealt with at the hands of their fellow inmates, most of whom had fathered children on the Outside.

Tribal Darwinism at its best.

Just think of it. No repeat offenders. No recidivism. No paroles. No serial molestations. No internet sites revealing how many molesters live in your neighborhood.

When do we get to be Mad as Hell?

Where can I buy that Collar?