John Mark Karr's confession shocks the Shoals and nation

The TimesDaily's top story of 2006 not only gripped the Shoals area and northwest Alabama, it also startled the nation and brought attention back to a 10-year-old murder investigation.

In mid-August, Hamilton native and former University of North Alabama student John Mark Karr told authorities that he "accidentally" killed JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old beauty queen, inside her Boulder, Colo., home on Dec. 26, 1996.

Ramsey's mysterious death in 1996 has been one of the most highly publicized investigations in recent memory, but until Karr's surprising arrest linking him to the child's death, there had been few breaks in the case.

Karr was working as a schoolteacher in Bangkok, Thailand, when he was arrested and transported back to the United States.

In statements to television reporters while in handcuffs, Karr said that he killed Ramsey but that he loved her.

Suddenly, media outlets around the world began looking into Karr's past and how he would have crossed paths with a 6-year-old Colorado girl.

That led many of them to Hamilton, the small Marion County town where Karr lived with his grandparents as a teen, and to UNA, where Karr had studied to be a teacher.

Marion County schools Superintendent Bravell Jackson said the news caught the community by surprise.

"It was a shock to find it out," said Jackson, who taught Karr at Hamilton.

Jackson said he first heard of Karr's confession from a television reporter in Birmingham, but soon afterward media outlets from across the nation, and even one British network, came to visit.

"It was a constant thing for about a week," Jackson said. "We finally set up a place in the library for everyone to go to look at yearbook photos. We didn't allow interviews with students and we tried to keep everything as normal as possible."

Records from area schools showed that Karr worked as a substitute teacher in Marion, Winston, Franklin and Lauderdale county schools.

He lived in Sheffield while attending UNA from 1998 to 2000. At that time, Sheffield authorities were contacted by a law enforcement agency in California that was working on a case involving Karr.

He later left the area and had apparently been working in various foreign countries when he was arrested in Thailand.

Tests would later reveal that Karr could not have been Ramsey's killer. But the man who grew up in Hamilton and made international news has not made public comments on why he made false statements leading the world to believe that he had killed the little girl.

For a brief time, however, the quiet Marion County town of 6,700 found itself in the national spotlight and a region was left wondering if a child killer had been in their schools.

"It's kind of gone away now," Jackson said. "It's just one of those things that we had to deal with, but we wouldn't want to do it again."

Jonathan Willis can be reached at 332-0140 or jonathan.willis@timesdaily.com.