New prosecutor looks at JonBenet Ramsey case

[Carnut]

New prosecutor looks at JonBenet Ramsey case

(CNN) -- The new district attorney of Boulder County, Colorado, said he plans to take a fresh look at the investigation into the 1996 slaying of JonBenet Ramsey.

 The DA's office assumed responsibility for the investigation in 2002. But District Attorney Stan Garnett told CNN that he wants to decide during his first 30 days in office whether the case should be returned to Boulder police.

"I'm trying to determine whether it's efficient to have the ongoing investigation handled by my office or somebody else," said Garnett, who was sworn in as district attorney January 13.

The DA's office is relatively small, he said, with 27 lawyers and six investigators handling between 2,000 and 2,500 felony cases a year.

Although the Ramsey case has not generated news since last year, tips and information regularly come in to authorities. Whoever is handling the investigation is charged with checking them out and deciding whether they are worth pursuing, Garnett said.

He said reports that he is considering reopening the case are inaccurate. "It's not closed. It hasn't been solved, and it's been open the whole time."

The case is one of the nation's most famous unsolved murders.

 On December 26, 1996, John Ramsey discovered the body of his 6-year-old daughter, JonBenet, in the basement of the family's Boulder home. The girl had been strangled and beaten. A ransom note was found on the stairs of the home, demanding $118,000.

Early in the case, Boulder police said JonBenet's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, were under "an umbrella of suspicion" in her death. But they were never formally named as suspects, and a grand jury refused to indict them. Patsy Ramsey died in 2006 after a lengthy battle with ovarian cancer.

In July, Garnett's predecessor, Mary Lacy, issued a public apology for the suspicion surrounding the Ramsey family after a DNA test performed using new technology showed that DNA found on JonBenet's underwear and under her fingernails belonged to an unidentified man. The test results, Lacy said, were "powerful evidence" that allows investigators to think the Ramsey family were victims, not suspects.

That same third-party DNA exonerated John Mark Karr, a one-time teacher, after he was arrested in Thailand and brought to Colorado. Authorities said Karr told a University of Colorado professor in e-mails that he was involved in JonBenet's death. He told reporters after his arrest that he was with the child when she died, although he called her death an accident and said he loved her.

Lacy was widely criticized, including by then-Gov. Bill Owens, for the handling of Karr's arrest.

Boulder police also have long faced criticism over their handling of the investigation.

But, Garnett said Friday, "I've been very impressed by the Boulder P.D. They are a fine department now and have handled a number of cases very well. ... They've done a very nice job."

The department has 24 investigators, four times as many as the DA's staff, he said.

Garnett was elected DA in November to replace Lacy, who could not run again because of term limits. Before he was elected, he served as a trial lawyer for 22 years, according to the DA's Web site.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/19/jonbenet.ramsey.update/index.html

[Carnut]

Search Warrants Issued for JonBenet Lookalike Cult Leader John Mark Karr

By Ed Barnes

Police in San Francisco have obtained four search warrants in their hunt for John Mark Karr, whose false confession in the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation created an international sensation four years ago.

Karr, who claims to have had a sex change operation and now uses the name Alexis Reich, re-emerged from obscurity in the past few weeks after the woman he once planned to marry revealed that he is trying to collect girls as young as 4 to be part of a cult group of children who resemble the 6-year-old beauty princess, who was murdered in her Colorado home in 1996.

According to Robin Sax, the attorney for Karr's former fiancee, 19-year-old Samantha Spiegel, search warrants have been issued to four technology companies: Google, Comcast, Hushmail.com and HP.

Sax, who has led an informal manhunt for the reputed pedophile who allegedly threatened her client after they broke up, says that the search warrants have raised the stakes in the search for Karr, who was last seen living in a home for battered women in Seattle.

Sax says Karr has been living the life of a phantom, supported by followers who provide him with food, money and computers to keep a network dedicated to creating a cult of JonBenet lookalikes.

She said the HP (formerly Hewlett Packard) warrant seeks to identify the computer Karr uses; the Google warrant is for access to a blog he maintains through the company; the Comcast warrant is for his IP address; and the Hushmail warrant is to track his email account and the people with whom he communicates.

“Hushmail has become the email site of choice for pedophiles because it routes communications so that they are impossible to trace,” Sax said.

Google issued a statement saying, "As a policy we don't comment on individual law enforcement requests to Google." A Comcast spokesman said any information about the warrant would have to come from the San Francisco police. Hushmail would not confirm or deny whether it received a warrant but added it only complies with warrants enforceable in British Columbia, where its servers are located.

Officer Albie Esperza, spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department, confirmed that they were "conducting an Internet investigation into Karr's death threats against a citizen. Our primary concern is the safety of the victim."

The search for Karr began when Spiegel ended her relationship with him and sought a restraining order in San Francisco courts. She had been a fourth grade student of his at a Catholic school in San Francisco, and she reconnected with him after he was returned from Thailand for confessing -- falsely -- to JonBenet's murder.

Karr and Spiegel exchanged thousands of e-mails before he proposed to her and she accepted. When her parents learned of the proposal, they sent their daughter, then 16, to rehab for 18 months.

When Spiegel returned home she told Karr that she no longer wished to communicate with him. He responded, she says, with a deluge of threats that scared her and forced her to seek legal protection.

"He said if I got in the way of him and his little girls, he would have me hunted down and killed," Spiegel said at a hearing last month at which she obtained a restraining order against Karr.

She said she was certain that he was living as a woman in order to get close to little girls. She also produced emails for the court in which Karr said: "I want to hurt you."

She responded, "You do?"

"If you deceive me," he replied, "I will kill you. I know where you live."

In one of his last messages, on April 10, Karr wrote: "If you cost me my little girls I will hunt you down and kill you."

Karr has not been charged with any crime. The original police search for him was meant to serve him with the restraining order issued on behalf of Spiegel. But as details of his life and efforts to begin a cult of underage girls emerged, the San Francisco police opened a larger investigation.

Until now Karr has played a cat and mouse game with his pursuers, using a website he apparently controls and monitoring the sites of those who have been looking for him.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/06/02/john-mark-karr-jonbenet-ramsey-search-warrants/

Carnut - - So this nutcase has changed sexes so he can now become a lesbian pedophile cult leader?