Sex, lies and e-mail in
Thailand By Richard Ehrlich
BANGKOK - A pale, clean-cut, unsmiling
American was arrested in Bangkok a decade after
the beating, sexual abuse and strangulation murder
in the United States of six-year-old beauty queen
JonBenet Ramsey - representing a rare victory for
US-Thailand law-enforcement cooperation.
On the capture of John Mark Karr, 41, in a
joint US-Thai sting operation on Wednesday, the
suspected pedophile told Thai authorities that he
was with JonBenet when she died, that her death
was accidental, and that he loved the young girl
very much.
Asked by a reporter at
Bangkok's immigration detention center if
he
was innocent of involvement in her murder, Karr
replied: "No."
The young girl's unresolved
murder nearly a decade ago set off a wild media
frenzy in the US. Homeland Security officials and
Thai police seized Karr in his modest Bangkok
apartment on Wednesday afternoon, hours after a
judge in the US state of Colorado, where the girl
died in 1996, issued an arrest warrant for murder,
kidnapping, and sexual assault in connection with
JonBenet's death.
"Upon investigation, we
were able to identify that subject, and that is
John Mark Karr," Ann Hurst, Homeland Security
attache at the US Embassy, said at Bangkok's
Department of Immigration Detention Center on
Thursday.
Lieutenant-General Suwat
Tumrongsiskul, head of Thailand's powerful
Immigration Department - which has its own jail
and interrogation techniques - gave the only
official account of Karr's reaction upon arrest:
"My officer said ... 'You are charged with
first-degree murder.' He [Karr] said, 'No no. Not
first degree. Second degree ... It was not
supposed to be ... not intentionally.'"
Sex-offender haven Lax immigration
requirements and arbitrary law enforcement have
long made Thailand a haven for globetrotting sex
offenders - not to mention criminal gangs, human
traffickers and terrorist organizations.
The country is renowned as a sex-tourism
destination, and only in 1996 did the government
enact legislation and launch a public-awareness
campaign criminalizing the sexual abuse of
children. Global sex networks still thrive in
Thailand and, according to Bangkok-based
child-rights groups, the country has recently
emerged as a hub for the production of Web-based,
sometimes live-broadcast, child pornography.
In 2003, the United States passed a law
that mandates a sentence of up to 30 years for any
US citizen caught having sex, including in foreign
countries, with minors under the age of 18.
The US Department of Homeland Security,
Interpol and the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation have since all coordinated closely
with Thai tourism and law-enforcement agencies to
investigate and arrest suspected sex offenders.
That campaign has included raising awareness among
hotel and resort staff, but suspected official
complicity and the wild and multitudinous maze of
rent-by-the-hour cheap hotels in Thailand makes it
nearly impossible to curb the trade completely.
Although there have been a few
high-profile regional arrests, including that of
former British rock star Gary Glitter in Vietnam,
an Australian ambassador in Cambodia and a concert
pianist who played at Bangkok's five-star Oriental
Hotel, the underage-sex trade still thrives and is
growing across Southeast Asia.
Since
passing the new legislation, the US has only
apprehended 25 suspected sex offenders worldwide,
about half of them in Asia, according to US
officials. The new law and public-awareness
campaigns have, according to child-rights
activists, driven more pedophiles further
underground, with an increasing number of offenses
being reported in rented condominiums, in
apartments and even aboard yachts.
Child-rights advocates say that pedophiles
and their associated global sex networks at the
same time are becoming more sophisticated in their
tactics. Sex offenders convicted in their home
countries often easily take up residence and
employment in foreign countries.
Jurisdiction hopping Karr had a
history of jurisdiction-hopping. The suspect
taught as a substitute teacher at elementary
schools in Petaluma, California, from December 8,
2000, until he was fired for undisclosed reasons
on April 2, 2001, said Steve Bolman, Petaluma
school district's superintendent of business
administration, according to Bay City News
Service.
Joan Risse, chief deputy district
attorney in Sonoma county, California, said Karr
fled that state after being charged in April 2001
in Sonoma County Superior Court with five
misdemeanor counts of possession of child
pornography. Child-pornography charges in the US
carry a US$1,000 fine and/or a year in jail.
Karr had successfully landed a teaching
job at an international elementary school in
downtown Bangkok days before his arrest. He was
not linked to any particular crime in Thailand,
and Bangkok officials are preparing to extradite
him to the US within the week.
"He has
been in Thailand possibly two months this time. He
has prior visits to Thailand. He has traveled
extensively across the world," said Homeland
Security's Hurst. "He left the country [the US]
several years ago," and had not returned, she
added. Using his real US passport, Karr flew into
Bangkok as a regular tourist from neighboring
Malaysia, according to Thai officials.
Karr was living in an apartment in an area
of Bangkok popular among budget travelers and
homosexuals, a somewhat seedy area of town that is
now undergoing gay gentrification. His rented
residence was only a short walk from the
Immigration Department where he was held on
Thursday. "To the best of our knowledge, he was
living alone," Hurst said.
Karr's apparent
mistake was maintaining contacts with the US. A
University of Colorado spokesman, Barrie Hartman,
said journalism professor Michael Tracey had
communicated with Karr by e-mail for several
months and a particular message in May prompted
Tracey to contact US authorities, who eventually
traced the messages to Bangkok. The contents of
Karr's e-mail correspondence with Tracey have not
yet been disclosed.
Tracey produced a
documentary in 2004 called Who Killed
JonBenet?
If she had survived,
JonBenet Ramsey would today be a 16-year-old
high-school student. Instead, a new media circus
is gearing up around what promises to be a wild
and woolly trial of the apparent murder confession
of an unsmiling, well-groomed and globetrotting
Karr.
Richard S Ehrlich is a
Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco,
California. He has reported news from Asia since
1978 and is co-author of the non-fiction book of
investigative journalism, Hello My Big Big
Honey! Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their
Revealing Interviews. He received Columbia
University's Graduate School of Journalism's
Foreign Correspondent's Award.
