Murderer or Liar? A Costa Rica Resident's Story Of John Karr
After 10 years, there is now a confession in the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, one of the most infamous unsolved criminal cases in American history.

John Mark Karr, a schoolteacher living in Thailand, has reportedly told U.S. law enforcement officials that he killed Ramsey by accident, that he'd "loved" the 6-year-old.

But already some doubt has been cast on that confession.

John Hall, a Costa Rican resident for the last six years tells his story of shock and disbelief when he read the headline story of the man he rented a room in his house for some time.

This is John's story in his own words:

I have been here in Costa Rica teaching English since 2000.
During that time, I decided to help people looking for information about teaching in Costa Rica by posting my name and email address on the website Dave's ESL Cafe as a person that people could contact in order to get info about places to teach in Costa Rica.

I used to get hundreds of emails, and occasionally when I got hold of a good resume of someone interested in coming to Costa Rica, I would recommend that person to a handful of good schools here and get a very small commission for it if the candidate actually got hired.

I do not believe that my posting on Dave's ESL Cafe exists any more, but most of the info about it was copied and posted on the following website, which still exists:

You will see my name there at the top of the list of schools which I compiled.

I am not exactly sure about the dates when John Karr first contacted me by email or when exactly he arrived here, but I believe that my first contact with him was around late 2003 or early 2004.

We exchanged a lot of emails about the teaching scene in Costa Rica, and he sent me an early version of his now infamous resume.

At that time, it mentioned his teaching experiences in the U.S., Korea, and also his work taking care of children in Germany, where he claimed he was at the time.

Finally, I convinced him to do what I recommend to everyone interested in teaching here, and that was to come here first and then check out the schools that I have recommended and take the one that gives you the best offer. I told him that he shouldn't have trouble finding a teaching job here, and decided to come here and check things out.

I was also in a difficult financial situation at that time, and was looking to rent a room in the house where I was staying at the time in Vargas Araya to somebody.

John Karr mentioned that he needed a place to stay, and this was where I made a big mistake. I would not normally rent out a room to a total stranger, but we needed the money at the time, and I thought he would be okay to have in the house with my wife and her two daughters because of his previous experience with the family in Germany. Also, I thought it would help my wife and her daughters to improve their English to have another English teacher around.

At this point, nothing seemed strange about him at all. I even arranged for my wife to meet him at the airport, which she did. (He did not enter the country illegally, as I have read in another report about his time in C.R.)

My wife, Veronica, brought him back to our house, and then I started to notice that he was a little strange. He was quite a ham, who would speak in an exaggerated southern accent in order to be funny. Only problem was that this made no sense at all to anyone in my family except me, and then there were times that he tried to make jokes that I couldn't even catch. But that didn't stop him from shutting up, or going on in that stupid exaggerated accent of his. Anyhow, I brushed it off as the effects of jet lag, as he told us that he had come in from Germany.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Over the next few weeks, he continued to talk his head off and be the funny man. However, his sense of humor started to turn twisted and perverted. My wife and stepdaughters usually couldn't understand these jokes because of their limited English, but I could. I started telling him that they were inappropriate, especially in a Christian family such as ours, but he didn't stop.

Homosexuality, the Internet, Marilyn Manson, being a Southerner, and various trips he had made to different countries were all favorite topics of his. When he started talking to my wife and sometimes people who visited the house (even if they didn't understand English) about how he was "sexually ambiguous", "liked little boys and girls", and how he thought that Johanna, my stepdaughter, was cute, we started getting pretty scared. A tense week followed in the house, which it would be better for Johanna or my wife to talk about, seeing as I was at work most of the time.

At this point, I was starting to realize that I had a serious pedophile in my house. So, I decided to contact one of the references on his resume, the German woman whose daughters he had supposedly taken care of. I do not remember her complete name, although "Suzanne R." comes to mind, and for some reason, I remember that the domain of her email address was aol.com.

Anyhow, I had lots of discussions with her via email about John Karr, and how she could possible recommend him, when in fact he was such a twisted pervert. Perhaps I was not actually communicating with anyone named Suzanne in Germany though. I have a suspicion, which I cannot prove, that John Karr, who was frequently going off to Internet cafes, was actually posing as this German woman. But who knows?

Another thing that I decided to do was to do an Internet search on the name John Karr, or similar names, to see if any such person was wanted for sex crimes in the U.S. or elsewhere. I used Google, Yahoo, etc. and found that there were several men named John Karr who had been arrested for things like drunk driving, etc., but none matched the description of the John Karr that was in my house.

And this is something that makes me a bit angry. According to news reports that I have read today, John Karr had been charged with possession of child pornography in California back in 2001. Why didn't I come across that information on the Internet in 2004?

I didn't know John Karr had been in California, but I think I still would have found such information if it had existed on the Internet at that time. Because of the fact that I spent about two hours or so, as I recall, doing Web searches on "John Karr", my guess is that there was no information there at the time.

Not long after that, I heard John Karr say to my wife something to the effect that in terms of his sexuality, he was "like a wolf". He said it as if it had been a joke. For me, that was the last straw.

From work, I expressed my feelings to him in an email message, and made it pretty obvious that I was going to kick him out of the house. By the time I got home that night, he had packed his bags and left.

After that, he stayed around in Costa Rica for a few months, teaching a few company classes through one of the same organizations that I worked for. Whenever he was in the office at the same time as me, I did everything possible to avoid contact with him.

Also, on the advice of a friend that I had consulted about what to do about John Karr, I deleted all of my email correspondence with him and the supposed German woman.

My friend convinced me that people like John Karr will take you to court, where you will have to spend years defending yourself, and will use your own emails against you to sue you for wrongful eviction or whatever they think that they can get you with. Even though I had done nothing wrong, I decided to follow that person's advice. How I regret that decision now! I suppose that if I hadn't deleted that correspondence, I would be a pretty famous person now!

After living in my house, John Karr moved into the guest house where my friend Elaine Gower was living at the time. After staying there a few weeks, he must have moved somewhere else for a while, before leaving the country.

John V. Hall
Canadian passport # PC610952