Why would anyone confess to a crime they didn’t commit?
That’s a rhetorical question to those who believe that John Mark Karr’s bizarre public confession should put an end to the JonBenet Ramsey investigation.
But the real answer to this loaded question doesn’t always follow the laws of logic … or the law itself.
His true connection to the crime remains to be seen, but if Karr’s confession isn’t credible, it won’t be the first time that people have admitted to crimes they didn’t commit. In what was deemed the case of the century, 200 people confessed to kidnapping Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1932. Fifty years later, Henry Lee Lucas beat this record single-handedly by confessing to hundreds of unsolved murders and became the most prolific “serial confessor” in history.
Karr won’t break any records, but his confession has already achieved greater notoriety than anything Lucas ever said. A frail 41-year-old school teacher, Karr admits that he “was with JonBenet when she died.” Asked whether he was innocent of the murder, Karr even seems to close the books on his own defense, ending all doubt as to the true culprit behind the crime by firmly saying, “No.”
Having thrust himself into the center of the greatest murder mystery of the last decade, one has to wonder why Karr would so freely confess to this crime, whether he did it or not.
“Sometimes people make false self-incriminating statements on their own, without prodding or pressure,” says Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. As one of the nation’s top experts on false confessions, Kassin finds that “people volunteer false confessions for any number of bad reasons.” Some confessions, Kassin notes, may reveal “a pathological craving for attention; a conscious or unconscious need to punish themselves for prior transgressions, real or imagined; or a confusion of reality and fantasy. This may turn out to be the story line in the case of Karr.”
Do these words amount to a credible confession, or the results of a diabolical obsession? Karr’s family claims that he became obsessed with the 6-year-old beauty queen from the time of her death in 1996, researching the case, interviewing her grandparents for a book on young murder victims, and attempting to speak with her parents as well. For the last four years, Karr has sent e-mails about the case to a journalism professor at the University of Colorado.
Confessions should never be taken at face value, according to Kevin Mahoney, a Massachusetts criminal defense lawyer who recalls many instances of police coercion and other misconduct designed to extract them. “As far as my instinct goes, you’d have to prove it to me.” Considering inconsistencies in Karr’s account, Mahoney doesn’t “put a whole lot of stock in it” without corroborating evidence. And, though authorities claim that Karr revealed facts that were not publicly available, Mahoney says that he has seen many cases where “police fed [his clients] the information and they signed the affidavits,” reciting facts that had not previously been disclosed.
Yet, after a decade-long manhunt, “one of the things that makes me think that this is a credible confession that they actually have the guy is that 10 years have gone by and there’s no rush here.” Indeed, if Colorado authorities are wrong, Mahoney observes that “a lot of people will be embarrassed” by their investigation.
They alreadyare.
Irwin Kramer is a managing partner of the Owings Mill, Md., law firm Kramer & Connolly is lead legal analyst for LegalNews.TV.
