Prurient Interest

We were avoiding posting on this -- but given the local angles and our own horrified fascination with it, here goes. Authorities in Thailand, working with the Department of Homeland Security, have arrested John Mark Karr (at right), a former substitute teacher with a history of questionable behavior around children, for the murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey almost 10 years ago. As the story develops, though, people are starting to wonder if he's actually guilty, or if he's just a nutjob who made the whole story up.

We assume you know all the lurider and lurider details about this, so we're not going into it here. But what's the local angle? Karr used to be a substitute teacher in San Francisco and Sonoma County . Aaaaaaaagh! Convent of the Sacred Heart in SF swiftly released a statement that Karr only worked for them for four weeks and was supervised at all times. The Napa County school system said that Karr worked for them as a student teacher for fourth graders for four months, until he left suddenly. Turned out he'd left because he'd been arrested for having kiddie porn on his computer. Again: aaaaaaagh! (Also, he was obsessed with the Polly Klaas case, to the point where he was writing her killer in jail and had a copy of her death certificate in his house. Dude, that's weird.)

However, we can offer you some good old fashioned blogger fun about the situation, at least. Before all the news about Karr's credibility problems broke, C.W. Nevius wrote kind of a sanctimonious blog post for the Chron about how we all owe the Ramseys an apology for assuming they'd killed JonBenet. Scroll on through the angry commenter responses, noting that it's kind of hypocritical of Nevius to get mad at everyone else for assuming the Ramseys did it when he's busy assuming that Karr's the right guy, too. Media circus! (Our favorite is the woman who, out of nowhere, complains about Nevius's misuse of an apostrophe.)