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The trail that led police to Karr began with an anonymous e-mail he sent four years ago to Michael Tracey, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado who has produced three documentaries about the case--films that had piqued Karr's interest. In time there would be hundreds of e-mails, which Tracey would eventually show to Boulder County prosecutors, who were sufficiently intrigued to reinvigorate their investigation. Earlier this year, not long before Patsy Ramsey's death, one of the investigators even posed as her online to engage Karr in a series of e-mail exchanges. When Karr began asking to meet with "Patricia," investigators asked the real Mrs. Ramsey whether she would meet him. She agreed but was soon too ill to do it.
So who is the real Karr? Until he was 12, he lived with his parents in Atlanta. Then, for reasons the family has not made public, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Hamilton, Ala. He attended high school there but dropped out in 1983, in the fall of his senior year. Not long after, he met and married 13-year-old Quientana Shotts. Their union was annulled in 1985 after Shotts filed a complaint alleging that Karr had forced her to wed him through "intimidation and fear." Four years later, he married again. This time his bride, Lara Knutson, was 16. By 1996, Karr was a student at Bevill State Community College in Hamilton, Ala., and was working in Marion County as a substitute teacher. But in November of that year, he was removed from the county's roster of substitutes after complaints by parents about his behavior in class. JonBenet was killed the following month.
Short-lived jobs are a theme of Karr's résumé. In the spring of 2000, while studying early-childhood education at the University of North Alabama, Karr became a student teacher at the Kilby Professional Laboratory School. But school administrators soon called him in to discuss complaints about his behavior with fifth-grade girls. Karr failed to show for the meeting. Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of North Alabama, just weeks before graduation.
By July of that year, Karr had moved to Petaluma, Calif., the city that had been gripped by the 1993 abduction and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas. According to his brother Nate, by that time Karr was working on a book about men who commit sex crimes against young girls and was preoccupied with the murders of Klaas and Ramsey. Karr and his family had moved to California so that he could take a job as a teaching assistant at a Catholic elementary school in San Francisco. That job too lasted only a few weeks, although school officials say he left of his own accord. Eventually he found work in Petaluma as a substitute teacher. But four months later, the Napa County Sheriff's Department informed school officials that it was investigating Karr for possession of child pornography. A few weeks later, he was arrested.