John Mark Karr So Wishes He Was Bruno Hauptmann Right Now
JonBenet Ramsey may not have been beaten to death by John Mark Karr, but the John Mark Karr story has certainly been beaten to death by us.
What? Too soon? It's been ten fucking years. Besides, we have no idea how many more years we're going to have to wait for Little Miss Sunshine to reappear in the news, so we've got to MILK IT.
Anyway, hot on the heels of our unbreaking JonBenet Ramsey coverage, Slate offered up an analysis of just what might have been going through Karr's sick, innocent mind. After the jump.
When the story first broke, Daniel Engber explained that people sometimes make false confessions to gain attention—or because they are obsessed with a case. He wrote, "Someone might make a voluntary false confession if he wanted to be famous. Several hundred people claimed to have abducted the Lindbergh baby, for example, and more than 30 confessed to the Hollywood 'Black Dahlia' murder in the 1940s. ..."
And not that their analysis is wrong, but we find it pretty hard to believe that there haven't been any notable cases of copycat confessions since the 1940s. Still, we do like to imagine Karr in a fedora sitting in front of a fan on his banker's roll-top desk, with his sweat-floppy head in his hands, going "I gotta get a name, see. Coppers think they so smart, see. Wish that Lindbergh baby was still around, see..."
False Confessions 101: Why John Mark Karr Pretended He Killed JonBenet [Slate]