Word: karr
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...turns out that John Mark Karr didn't kill JonBenet Ramsey, he won't be the first to confess voluntarily to a crime he didn't commit. The motivation for these phony admissions, says criminologist Jim Fisher, author of Fall Guys: False Confessions and the Politics of Murder, can be "mental illness or extreme guilt over another crime, or they're just yearning for the attention a big case brings, the chance to be in the history books...
Confessions are supposed to clinch a case. And then there are confessions like the one that John Mark Karr made last week in connection with the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Ten years ago, the 6-year-old beauty queen's terrible death and weirdly captivating life--the hair, the costumes, the come-hither poses--became the stuff of national obsession at the very moment the O.J. Simpson story was going stale. It even promised, like the Simpson case, to be a family affair, because from the first, suspicion fell on John and Patsy Ramsey, JonBenet's parents. But the killer...
...That piece of work experience is tellingly missing from Karr's resume. So is his experience at the Southwest School in La Esperanza, Honduras (though his tenure at another La Esperanza school gets prominent mention). Southwest's director, Caridad Pineda Ponce, recalled that John Karr lasted at her school barely a week before he was fired in 2004. He was canned, she said, for not working within the rules and guidelines of the school...
...administrators, eager for the cachet that comes with expatriate instructors, tend to turn a blind eye. Thailand is, however, a favored playground of globetrotting drifters. "You never really know who you're talking to in Bangkok," says an Australian teacher in St. Joseph's English immersion program who met Karr during his brief tenure there. "We've all got a past...
...Karr's past that now has become the object of obsessive scrutiny. He will be officially deported from Thailand this weekend, and accompanied home by the U.S. officials who raided his shabby quarters in Bangkok on Wednesday. Doubts about the veracity of his confession have only multiplied since he volunteered it to the world on Thursday. But it's probably safe to assume that Karr's fruitless quest to become a grade-school teacher has finally come...