The schoolteacher who has admitted to killing the 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey may not even have been in the same state as the child at the time of the murder, his former wife has claimed.
John Mark Karr, 41, was arrested on Wednesday in Bangkok, Thailand after a US arrest warrant was issued on charges of murder, kidnapping and sexual assault on a child.
Thai police said Mr Karr had claimed her death was accidental and that he was “in love with the girl.”
But his former wife is said to have given him an alibi, putting him many miles from the scene of the murder in 1996 at her home in Boulder, in the western state of Colorado.
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Lara Karr said she was with him on the other side of the country at the time, according to an American television station.
Ms Karr, who was married to the suspect for three years from 1989, said that on the day Ramsey’s strangled body was found, she, her husband and their three sons were together in the southeastern state of Alabama, San Francisco’s channel KGO-TV said.
Her comments were not reported directly, but paraphrased by a reporter in Petaluma, a town in northern California.
According to the report, she was devastated by the news that her former husband had confessed to the killing and that was why she did not want to appear before television cameras.
Ms Karr said her ex-husband had spent a lot of time studying the unsolved cases of Ramsey and Polly Klaas, who was abducted from her Petaluma home and slain in 1993, KGO-TV said.
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In Boulder, Colorado, Mary Lacy, the District Attorney, said that it had taken months to track down the suspect, who had begun working as a second-grade teacher in the international school system in Bangkok on Tuesday.
However, she cautioned that “we will continue to presume this person innocent until and if he is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Ms Lacy said that authorities would have preferred to conduct their investigation “out of the public eye,” but she said that circumstances can sometimes warrant an arrest “before an investigation is complete.”
“Exigent circumstances” -- such as a fear of flight or a desire to ensure public safety --“can drive the timing of an arrest,” she said.
The suspect will be returned to the United States within a week, said Ann Hurst, an attache for the US Department of Homeland Security.
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American media have reported that Mr Karr said he had picked the child up from school, but this has been denied by Thai officials who said the school would have been closed for the Christmas holidays
The Washington Post has quoted a Thai police officer who, after being briefed by US authorities, said that Mr Karr had mentioned that he had drugged and sexually assaulted the JonBenet before she died.
But the Ramsey family lawyer noted that JonBenet’s post-mortem examination showed no signs of drugs and inconclusive evidence of sexual assault, the Post said.
The murder of the little girl became national news that regularly resurfaced during the ensuing decade. For a time, suspicion was cast even on the girl’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, who died of cancer last June at the age of 49.