Colorado- The “Wolf” suspected of killing JonBenet Ramsey was cooling his claws last night in a Colorado jail.
As John Mark Karr waited to find out whether he will be charged with raping and killing the 6-year-old beauty pageant princess, investigators in Alabama were checking whether he may have molested any children when he ran a licensed day care center out of his home from 1997 to 1999.
Meanwhile, a former landlord said that when Karr lived at his home in Costa Rica two years ago, he bragged that he was a “wolf” who “liked little boys and girls.”
“I had to kick him out because he was obviously a pervert and I was worried about the safety of my wife and my stepdaughters,” John Hall told The Associated Press.
Dressed in street clothes and handcuffs, Karr completed the last leg of a journey that began when he was arrested in Thailand last week and flown to California on Sunday.
Unlike Karr’s first-class flight from Bangkok, there was no .champagne or fried jumbo shrimp on the three-hour jaunt from a Los Angeles-area airport to Colorado. He was later booked into the .Boulder County Jail and issued a red jumpsuit.
“He came in quiet, just looking straight ahead. He didn’t say anything. He just kind of had that empty look,” said Kelly Hondorf, 22, of Boulder, who said she watched Karr being booked as she was being released from the jail on a minor charge.
“It was a little creepy. Just his eyes – it looked like he had black eyeliner on,” she said.
Karr will be kept segregated from the other 500 inmates and probably won’t go before a judge until Monday, giving District .Attorney Mary Lacy the weekend to decide whether to charge the 41-year-old ex-schoolteacher with murder.
In court documents filed yesterday, the DA’s office said its investigation of Karr is in the “very early stages” and hinted there may be more incriminating e-mails such as those he sent to a local journalism professor.
Prosecutors also insisted they learned of Karr’s existence just five days before he was nabbed, even though California cops told them in 2001 that the man had an “apparent. fascination” with the JonBenet murder.
The Boulder DA’s office took heat for botching the initial investigation into the horrific murder that riveted the nation when JonBenet was found strangled in the basement of her family home on Dec. 26, 1996.
So far, its case against Karr appears to hinge heavily on his e-mails – and bizarre public claims that he was with JonBenet when she died. His ex-wife insists Karr was with her in rural Hamilton, Ala., at the time of the crime, while his family contends he was with them in Georgia. So far neither has provided proof.
Alabama records indicate Karr opened a private day care center in his house seven months after JonBenet was murdered.
“We don’t have a firm number of how many children went through there,” said John Bradford, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Human Resources. “We can confirm there were at least three children there and \[that\] he was licensed to care for no more than six at a time.”
There were no complaints before Karr’s license expired in 1999, Bradford added.
Nevertheless, detectives from the Marion County sheriff’s department, which did the background check enabling Karr to get the .license, were calling parents of children who were enrolled at the school, sources said.
Karr went on the lam in 2001 after he was accused of possessing kiddie porn. He was weighing a sex-change operation when he was arrested in Thailand.