LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An arrest has been made in Thailand in the 10-year-old murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a child beauty queen whose grisly death triggered a U.S. media frenzy, a Denver TV station said on Wednesday.

KUSA-TV said the unidentified suspect, arrested in Bangkok, was being brought back to the western state of Colorado where the girl lived. The station said the suspect confessed to elements of the crime that were unknown to the general public.

Representatives of the Boulder, Colorado, Police Department and Boulder District Attorney's Office declined to comment.

JonBenet, 6, was found beaten and strangled in the family's Boulder home on December 26, 1996, in a case that remains unsolved. Her parents came under the Boulder police "umbrella of suspicion" but a grand jury issued no indictments.



The slaying drew intense media coverage focusing on JonBenet's success in youth beauty pageants, the family's affluence and mysterious elements of the case, including a note that first led police to believe the girl had been kidnapped.

Patsy Ramsey, the girl's mother, died in June of [ovarian]cancer.

Aug 16, 2006 — By Keith Coffman

BOULDER, Colo. (Reuters) - An American primary school teacher was arrested in Thailand on Wednesday in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey, 10 years after the child beauty queen's grisly death triggered a media frenzy that transfixed much of America.

The suspect was not named by authorities but U.S. media identified him as 41-year-old John Mark Karr, a second-grade school teacher.

He was traveling in Thailand and "was arrested following several months of a focused and complex investigation," Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy said in a statement.

Karr was taken into custody in Bangkok and KUSA-TV in Denver said he had confessed to elements of the crime that were unknown to the general public.

He was expected to be returned within days to the United States, which has an extradition treaty with Thailand.

MSNBC said Karr had lived in Boulder Colorado at the time of the December 6 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet, whose body was found in the basement of the family home.

A note was left on a staircase saying she had been kidnapped by a "small foreign faction" who wanted $118,000 in ransom.

Both JonBenet's father, John, and mother, Patsy, were consulted during the course of the investigation that led to Karr's arrest. Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in June.

"So 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," John Ramsey said in a statement.

Ramsey told KUSA that to the best of his knowledge he was not acquainted with the suspect.

No charges were ever filed in the 10 years since JonBenet was found beaten and strangled. Her parents came under the Boulder police "umbrella of suspicion" but a grand jury issued no indictments.

The killing drew intense media coverage focusing on JonBenet's success in youth beauty pageants, the family's affluence and mysterious elements of the case, including the note that first led police to believe the girl had been kidnapped.

Arrest Made In JonBenet Ramsey Case
Sources Name Middle-Aged American Now In Asia
Slideshow: The Death Of JonBenet Ramsey
(CBS) BOULDER, Colo. A former schoolteacher was arrested Wednesday in Thailand in the slaying of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey -- a surprise breakthrough in a lurid, decade-old murder mystery that had cast a cloud of suspicion over her parents.

Federal officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the suspect as John Mark Karr, a 42-year-old American, and one law enforcement official told The Associated Press that Boulder police had tracked him down online.

Sources tell CBS News that the suspect will be brought back to the United States this weekend. Law enforcement found Karr because of a series of e-mails he allegedly sent regarding the case, reports CBS 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty.

ABC News reported that Karr was charged in 2001 with possession of child pornography in Sonoma County, Calif., and is also wanted in California for failing to appear in court.

CBS' San Francisco affiliate, KPIX-TV, confirmed with authorities that a man with the same name as the suspect taught in Petaluma schools at the time.

Dr. Carl Wong, Sonoma County Superintendent of Schools, says Karr worked as a substitute teacher in elementary schools in five different districts throughout Sonoma County.

KPIX-TV has spoken by phone with Nathaniel Karr in Atlanta, who says he is John Mark Karr's brother. Nathaniel Karr confirms that his brother is the one arrested in Thailand and that he did live in Petaluma.

"We have only positive things to say about my brother. We believe he is totally innocent and the evidence is circumstantial," Nathaniel Karr says.

Nathaniel says his brother grew up in Alabama with his grandparents.

The Ramsey family's attorney in Atlanta pronounced the arrest vindication for JonBenet's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey. Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer on June 24.

"John and Patsy lived their lives knowing they were innocent, trying to raise a son despite the furor around them," Lin Wood said. "The story of this family is a story of courage, and story of an American injustice and tragedy that ultimately people will have to look back on and hopefully learn from."

The attorney said the Ramseys learned about the suspect a least a month before Patsy Ramsey's death. "It's been a very long 10 years, and I'm just sorry Patsy isn't here for me to hug her neck," Wood said.

Karr was a teacher who once lived in Conyers, Ga., according to Wood. The attorney said the Ramseys gave police information about Karr before he was identified as a suspect.

Wood would not say how the Ramseys knew Karr. But 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.

A source close to the investigation said Karr confessed to elements of the crime. Also, a law enforcement source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the AP that Karr had been communicating periodically with somebody in Boulder who had been following the case and cooperating with law enforcement officials.

District Attorney Mary Lacy said the arrest followed several months of work, but she said no details would be released until Thursday.

Karr was being held in Bangkok on unrelated sex charges, authorities said. CBS reported he will be brought back to the United States this weekend.

JonBenet was found beaten and strangled in the basement of the family's home in Boulder on Dec. 26, 1996. Patsy Ramsey reported finding a ransom note in the house demanding $118,000 for her daughter.

The image of blonde-haired little JonBenet in a cowgirl costume and other beauty pageant outfits has haunted TV talk shows ever since, helping feed myriad theories about her killer, and the case became one of the most sensational unsolved murder cases in the nation.

Over the years, some experts suggested that investigators had botched the case so thoroughly that it might never be solved.

Investigators at one point said JonBenet's parents were under an "umbrella of suspicion" in the slaying. And some news accounts cast suspicion on JonBenet's older brother. But the Ramseys insisted an intruder killed their daughter, and no one was ever charged.

In the months after the slaying, Patsy Ramsey went before the cameras, vigorously defending herself and her husband, chastising the media and blasting local law enforcement as incompetent.

In a statement Wednesday, John Ramsey said: "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."

The Ramseys moved back to Atlanta after their daughter's slaying.

Wood lashed out at the frenzy that long surrounded the case, and he accused the media of "the most obscene false accusations." "I think the public's mind was so poisoned against this family that no one was able for too many years to look at the evidence," he said.

Patsy Ramsey's sister, Pam Paugh, of Roswell, Ga., said the family was celebrating the news of the arrest. "We are elated. We are elated. If this is, in fact, the killer, then we have a very heinous killer off the streets to never harm another child," Paugh said.

Lib Waters of Marietta, Ga., visited the gravesites of Patsy and JonBenet Ramsey in the Atlanta suburb immediately after hearing news reports about the arrest.

Waters, who described herself as a longtime friend of the Ramsey family, 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."

In 2003, a federal judge 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. The Boulder district attorney at the time said she agreed with the judge's declaration.

"Today is additional vindication of the family," Wood said.

Wood said he and the Ramseys "have been totally amazed and impressed with the professionalism of law enforcement" under Lacy's direction. Lacy became district attorney in 2001.

Lawrence Schiller, author of the 1999 book "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town" about the case, said Wednesday he understood the man had been on a list of sexual offenders who were suspects for a long time.

"There are a lot of facts about her actual death that the public does not know." Schiller said. "If he did confess to some facts of the murder, to reveal those facts of the case, that would finish the puzzle."

Among the facts he said were not generally known was the murder weapon and what the killer did with it.

DNA was found beneath JonBenet's fingernails and inside her underwear, but Wood said two years ago that detectives were unable to match it to anyone in an FBI database. It was not immediately known Wednesday whether investigators had any DNA evidence against Karr.

Bob Grant, a former Adams County district attorney who worked on the case, said there was never enough evidence to convince him that any potential suspect could be successfully prosecuted.

"I wasn't convinced it was an inside job, nor was I convinced it was an outside job," he said. "All the outside suspects were cleared after exhaustive investigation, and there were a whole lot of outside suspects."

"A conviction isn't necessarily going to be a slam-dunk here. All of the problems that plagued investigators and police for all these years -- the contamination of the crime scene and all that -- doesn't just go away now," CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen said.

A suspect was arrested Wednesday "for the December 26, 1996, murder of JonBenet Ramsey," the district attorney in Boulder, Colorado, said Wednesday.

But, as far as feeling guilty goes; the parents had their little girl doing
what appeared to be a strip tease on stage