John Mark Karr bragged to his landlord’s family that “sexually, I am like a wolf” and said he preferred girls to women when he worked in Costa Rica as an English teacher, his former housemates told The Associated Press.
Karr, now jailed in Los Angeles after his arrest in Thailand, faces a Colorado warrant for the 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey.
Karr traveled around the world in recent years, including brief stays in Honduras and Costa Rica, where he rented a room in 2004 from Canadian John Hall, who teaches at a private university in the capital of San Jose.
Hall, 42, told AP in an exclusive interview that he rented a room to Karr through an Internet posting, but asked him to leave after about five weeks because Karr was saying “rude and inappropriate things” to his Costa Rican wife and stepdaughters, then 16 and 20.
“I threw him out because he was causing problems for them,” Hall said.
‘Only small ones’
One stepdaughter, now 22, told AP that Karr said several times that he liked girls.
“My mother asked him whether he was looking for a girlfriend in Costa Rica and he answered that he didn’t like adult women, only small ones,” she said, speaking on condition her name not be published. “I thought he meant young women, and never imagined he meant girls.”
During his stay with the family, Karr would often either talk incessantly, or sit in his room and listen to dark rock music, like that of Marilyn Manson, something that also bothered the Halls, who are Pentecostal Christians.
After kicking Karr out, Hall remained suspicious enough to do a computer search to see if he was a sex predator.
“I suspected he was a pedophile. I looked on the Internet to see if there was something on him, but I didn’t find anything,” he said.
‘A lot of discipline’
The following year, Karr taught for eight months at a small primary school in La Esperanza, Honduras, 60 miles from the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, a former co-worker said.
Renan Marquez said Karr taught second grade, but left because he had a contract with a school in another country; he didn’t know which. Marquez told AP by telephone that Karr was always “reserved, shy, responsible, organized and punctual.”
Karr “required a lot of discipline” of his second-grade English students, Marquez said. “I never saw anything strange in his treatment of the children.”