- Only one person has ever been arrested on suspicion of JonBenét Ramsey’s murder: John Mark Karr.
- In 2006, the former teacher (under the name “Daxis”) said he was with the 6-year-old when she died.
- But DNA evidence cleared him of involvement, and he’s been laying low in recent years.
The unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey, a 6-year-old Colorado beauty queen, has transfixed the public since 1996.
In the decades since the crime, there have been many theories about who killed JonBenét and even several false confessions. The suspect covered most widely in the media was John Mark Karr, who was arrested and later cleared of involvement in the murder in 2006.
The former teacher claimed to have had a “relationship” with JonBenét and killed her accidentally. Netflix’s new docuseries, “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey,” touches on Karr’s later debunked confession. Here’s what we know about his whereabouts today.
John Mark Karr used the name “Daxis” to send emails to a JonBenét Ramsey documentarian
Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post/Getty Images
In 2002, Michael Tracey, a media professor who has produced several documentaries on the JonBenét Ramsey case, was contacted via email by a man using the name “Daxis.” He told Tracey he was a “passionate lover of little girls,” and suggested he was with Ramsey when she died but that her death had been accidental.
They communicated via email for four years. Tracey eventually shared his communications with then-Boulder DA Mary Lacy, after Daxis appeared to know details about the murder case that hadn’t been made public, including the nickname JonBenét used for her grandmother.
Daxis tried to arrange to speak with Patsy Ramsey, JonBenét’s mother, to ask for her forgiveness before she died of ovarian cancer in June 2006. Investigators hoped to track Daxis down by setting up a phone tap, but he never called. Finally, authorities were able to trace Daxis to Thailand after Tracey offered to send him the last printed photo of JonBenét.
John Mark Karr, a former substitute teacher who’d fled the US after being arrested on child pornography charges in California in 2001, was revealed to be Daxis and was arrested after picking up Tracey’s package. After his capture, he reiterated to reporters that he was with JonBenét when she died and that her death was an accident.
Karr was brought back to Colorado but the case against him was quickly dropped in August 2006 when DNA test results showed that he wasn’t the source of DNA found on Ramsey’s underwear. His family had also said he was home with them at the time Ramsey was killed.
Where is John Mark Karr now? He’s leading a ‘covert life’
SAEED KHAN/AFP via Getty Images
After the case against Karr was dropped, he was extradited back to California, where he’d originally faced child pornography charges in 2001. Those charges were also dropped in October 2006 after investigators admitted they’d lost computer evidence against Karr.
In 2017, the Monroe Journal spoke to Karr, who said he had traveled abroad, undergone sex reassignment surgery, and was living as a woman under the name Alex Reich. Business Insider was unable to verify this report.
As “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey” notes, Karr said on his website that he was living “a very covert life outside the US” as of May 2024.
According to statements on that website, which appears to be run by Karr but was not able to be verified by Business Insider, Karr lived in the US from 2017 to 2020 before leaving the US once again in the summer of 2020. He called his brief stint back in America one of his “deepest regrets” and said that to stay safe and private he intended to remain on the move and never return to the US.
In the most recent statement posted to the website on Friday, Karr refuted John Ramsey’s claim (initially made in 2006 after Karr’s arrest but resurfaced by Ramsey in recent interviews and the Netflix docuseries) that there was evidence Karr had stalked the family’s Charlevoix, Michigan, vacation home prior to JonBenét’s death. Karr said there would have been no way he knew the Ramseys had a home there.
Joe Berlinger, the filmmaker behind “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey,” told BI that he attempted to contact the one-time suspect for the documentary but that Karr had gone off the grid since being cleared of JonBenét’s murder.
As for whether he thinks the former teacher really did kill the 6-year-old, given renewed questions over whether the DNA evidence that cleared him is valuable, Berlinger said he didn’t want to speculate and do what was done to the Ramseys. However, he said that when new DNA testing has been completed “everyone needs to be put back on the table as a suspect.”
