Once the Boulder District Attorney decided not to charge John Mark Karr in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, it posted a document containing over four hundred pages of emails that Karr had sent to Michael Tracey, the journalism professor who has made three documentaries (or, as some think, “crockumentaries”) about JonBenet. Four hundred pages — PervScan downloaded the document and, thinking that it might be a chance to take an in-depth look at an undeniable perv, read through it with a critical eye. (Incidentally, the Boulder DA appears to have removed the document, a 20mb pdf file, from its site. There has been no public explanation as to why the document has disappeared. Possibly it contains some revealing information about the case. Possibly it was just generating too much web traffic. )

Your first impression when delving into the emails is that Karr is a surprisingly intelligent guy. Articulate, thoughtful, sometimes even a bit formal, Karr presents himself in a decent enough light that you can understand how he kept managing to acquire teaching jobs throughout the world. At the same time, though, you quickly come to understand how he kept losing those same jobs, for it only takes fifty pages of reading before you’re thoroughly sick of him. He’s long-winded, self-involved, controlling, often even “bitchy” as Tracey says. You find yourself readily agreeing with the asides that Tracey makes to investigators as he’s forwarding Karr’s emails to them: “I’m dealing with someone here who is several apples short of a picnic.” [0650 — henceforth numbers in brackets refer to the page numbers of the email document.]

So far as the murder itself is concerned, Karr claims that he and JonBenet were engaging in a consensual (!) session of erotic asphyxiation that resulted in her accidental death. Tracey expends a lot of effort trying to get Karr to reveal some telling detail that proves he was the murderer. All Karr manages to come up with was that JonBenet had a runny nose and was wearing some “special” fragrance whose specialness he won’t clarify until he can speak with Patsy Ramsey. It’s not much to go on, and meanwhile Tracey and Karr debate the meaning of the various clues that have since become famous: Karr insists no stun gun was used, in spite of the suggestive marks on JonBenet’s body; he claims that the ransom note was a diversionary maneuver full of bullshit, hence no one should try to read anything into elements like its mysterious signature, “S.B.T.C.”; etc., etc.

Often you get the impression that, far from revealing inside info to Tracey, Karr is trying to pump Tracey for any inside info that he might have. At one point Tracey calls him “a wannabe nut case,” adding that “It’s all insane, which doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.” Indeed. If Karr couldn’t prove that he committed the murder, he certainly was obsessed enough with it and vocal enough about other crimes and pedophilic obsessions that he didn’t exonerate himself either. In fact, that may have been the strongest evidence against him — that he confessed to the crime with a strange persistence, insisting over and over and over that he was guilty of it.

Clearly Karr was obsessed with JonBenet. “Though she is dead,” he writes, “I still want her in a sexual way. Have I ever told you that? She still turns me on. I still have sexual fantasies about her.” [0807] Reading closely, it doesn’t take a genius to observe that his obsession had become delusional. He often speaks about JonBenet as though she were something like Claudia, the child vampire in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. JonBenet becomes a sexually advanced woman trapped forever in the body of a six-year-old girl. Here’s his response when Tracey asks him what he and JonBenet said to each other during the fatal sex session.

It is difficult to express to you the content which was very sexual at times. It would be like me asking you to tell me what your wife said during the kinkiest sex you ever had with her. A great example is the interaction I had with JonBenet when I requested her knickers. That interaction was extremely erotic. The words, but mostly the actions, were of a sexual nature that is difficult to describe to someone who might not understand, as you said, how a six year old girl would understand such a thing. I assure you, she understood.

Her words on that night were unreal. She was an incredible little girl. She was mature beyond her years. She was very sexual in the same ways I was very sexual. We were made for each other. We were meant to be together. [0725]

When you read this, it’s difficult to believe that this guy had children of his own and spent countless hours with them as a schoolteacher. It just seems so out of touch with the six-year-old mind.

JonBenet was not Karr’s only obsession. There were other little girls — mostly pupils, but Karr also talks about Heather O’Rourke, the now deceased child actress from the Poltergeist films. And there were other obsessions that seemed to spin off from JonBenet. Karr was determined to develop a dialogue with John and Patsy Ramsey, and a solid chunk of the emails depict his efforts to convince Tracey to put him in touch with them. Unsurprisingly, he took it hard when Patsy Ramsey succumbed to cancer.

If you’re looking for a motive for Karr’s confession, no single cause emerges from the correspondence. He claims to have been a victim of incestuous relations with his mother, and this clearly conditioned his sexuality early in life. He speaks optimistically of the money that he might earn from publishing a book of his confessions, hoping even to set up trust funds for his own children. For a moment or two you wonder if the guy was crafty enough to contrive this whole thing in an effort to earn a few hundred grand from a book deal. In the end, though, you’re left with the impression that he was just incredibly lonely, lost, adrift. It’s sad when he explains how the ransom note expressed his own lonesomeness: “The ransom note started with, and I suppose you recall, ‘Listen Carefully!’ Not ‘Read Carefully’ but ‘Listen Carefully!’ with and [sic] exclamation point… It underscored my feelings that no one ever seems to listen to me.” [0640]

Meanwhile the Boulder District Attorney and Michael Tracey have both taken a lot of flak for creating this tempest in a teapot. No doubt it played into the public’s longstanding hopes to see a resolution to the case, and it also resonated with criticism of law enforcement’s earlier handling of the homicide. But once you read through these emails, you find yourself thinking that, if anything, it’s amazing they waited as long as they did to haul Karr back to America. The guy claimed in emails to have been investigated in prior pedophilic crimes, as indeed he was; he was obsessed with a child murder and spoke of other little girls, his own pupils, as though they were new JonBenets; clearly the guy needed to be put into custody. All told the Colorado government spent less than $25,000 to get Karr away from other potential victims. Isn’t that a drop in the bucket when you compare it to the prospect of future abuse?

As for JonBenet, the odds are only increasing that her murder will never be solved. It’s hard not to notice, when you look at the Boulder DA’s expense report, that it spent only $821 in 2004 and $0 in 2005 on the case. Theories will continue to proliferate. Maybe other nutcases will confess in the future. JonBenet’s father will be hounded by internet sleuths who think he killed his own daughter. Her brother will forever be haunted by the shadow of the little sister that he probably barely remembers. The public will continue to fantasize about it, just as they do the assassination of JFK or the mutilation of Sharon Tate. If anything, this may be the most disturbing lesson to be learned from the emails of John Mark Karr — the public is as obsessed with JonBenet as he is, it’s just not crazy enough to confess to killing her.

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