Prosecutor Defends Actions After Ramsey Case Falls Apart

BOULDER, Colo., Aug. 29 — District Attorney Mary T. Lacy on Tuesday defended her decision to send her investigators halfway around the globe to arrest a man in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey, after the case collapsed Monday on the disclosure that DNA tests did not link him to the killing.

“Every one of you here knows that hindsight is 20/20 and that after the game is over it’s easy to criticize what people have done and what decisions have been made,” Ms. Lacy said at a news conference on Tuesday morning, two weeks after a similar gathering she called to announce the arrest in Bangkok of the man, John M. Karr, a 41-year-old teacher who had jumped bail after serving six months in California on a 2001 child pornography charge.

Since 2002, Mr. Karr, a twice-divorced father of three sons, had engaged in a bizarre series of e-mail messages with a journalism professor at the University of Colorado, Michael Tracey, in which he told Mr. Tracey that he was a pedophile who preferred to be romantically and sexually involved with 6-year-old girls. He also said that he loved JonBenet but killed her accidentally by leaving a garrote around her neck longer than planned and then striking her on the head. Read more in The New York Times...

"JonBenet Ramsey's house" by Jennifer Boyer