Decade Of Mystery: John Ramsey Speaks

JonBenet's Father Breaks His Silence Since His Wife's Passing, The Karr Arrest

(CBS) 
Royal Thai Police and American investigators followed Daxis to a Bangkok hotel. They asked Thai police to do passport checks on the hotel guests. Finally they discovered a face with a real name attached to it. "Daxis" was a man named John Mark Karr, a 41-year-old teacher and a fugitive, on the run from child pornography charges in California.

But, at this point it wasn't just about the crime against JonBenet Ramsey: authorities worried about other young victims, school children in Bangkok, whom Karr may have already harmed. But authorities didn’t know who they are or where they are, so they decided to hold off on an arrest and follow him, with any luck, to the school where he teaches.

“He talked about several children that he had been teaching, and his desire to have sex with those children. In fact, he was quite explicit about one little girl that reminded him of JonBenet Ramsey," Hurst says. “We knew we were working against the clock.”

Agents were able to locate the school where Karr taught and what they saw, as they observed him in his classroom, confirmed their worst fear. "The agents see him with this young girl on his lap,” Tracey explains.

That’s all authorities needed. He was arrested and taken out of the hotel.

Most Americans saw John Mark Karr after his arrest on television but agents Hurst and Phillips say he was a very different person in the interrogation room, especially when asked about the massive injury to JonBenet’s skull.

"He said that he hit her with a flashlight. And we said, 'Well, show us, show us what you did.' 'Well, I hit her in the head like that!'" Phillips recalls, using a water bottle as a prop. "And his demeanor completely changed when he did that."

Karr refused to provide a sample of his DNA, but he agreed to leave Thailand and head back to the United States, where he was forced to provide a sample and where some media concluded that he was guilty of murdering JonBenet.

The intensity of the feeding frenzy even got to John Ramsey, who knows exactly what it feels like.

"He was so abused and vilified and convicted in the media that I started to feel sorry for the guy, which is a bizarre feeling," Ramsey says. "Having been through what we went through, I was gonna be the last guy that leaped out there and said, 'Aha! This is the guy!'”

As most Americans now know, Karr’s DNA – tested back in the U.S. – was not a match with the DNA at the Ramsey crime scene. It was a devastating setback for Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacey.

So after months of intense undercover investigation, in four countries involving some of the world’s most elite intelligence agencies, would this end with John Mark Karr walking free?

"This was the biggest effort to find a suspect since really your daughter was killed," Moriarty remarked to John Ramsey.

"Oh yeah," he agrees. And he acknowledges that he had his hopes up. "I mean I was grateful that the effort was going on and I was hopeful that this, in fact would be the conclusion."