Karr Crash: True Obsession, False Confession

Aug. 29, 2006 — -- In less than two weeks, John Mark Karr went from total obscurity to the darkest kind of fame.

With a vaguely worded confession at a news conference in Thailand, he became the first person ever arrested in the unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsey and the closest authorities had come to putting a face to the little girl's killer.

As the case unraveled Monday, with it came the secrets of the investigation: hours of conversations and stacks of e-mail messages between Karr and University of Colorado professor Michael Tracey.

ABC News read hundreds of e-mail messages to find the passages that had led investigators to arrest Karr, believing he might be the killer.

In those files, summarized below, were graphic descriptions from Karr's account of how JonBenet had died on Christmas night in 1996 — tall tales that were undone by his family members who said he was in Atlanta for Christmas that year and a lack of physical evidence placing him at the crime scene.

There were those who questioned whether Karr was guilty of the crimes he so graphically had described.

The small city of Boulder was rife with skepticism.

Even John Ramsey, JonBenet's father and the man with the most to gain from solving the case, reminded the public that Karr was "innocent until proven guilty."

It turned out that the skeptics were right.

There was no proof of Karr's guilt other than his own heartfelt confessions.

And his words, decided Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy, were not enough to charge him with the death of JonBenet.

At the heart of the investigation were Karr's conversations with Tracey.

It was a correspondence that lasted four years but that came to the attention of Boulder authorities only when Karr described details of JonBenet's death not known to the general public.

Those details, although untrue, would have explained some of the greatest mysteries surrounding the 6-year-old's death.

Karr described using a large flashlight to hit JonBenet over the head, causing a fracture to her skull that would turn up in an autopsy report.