There's one thing you have to say about John Mark Karr: the frequently fired 41-year-old schoolteacher who was arrested in Thailand on August 16, after having confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey—the six-year-old beauty queen with the inappropriately sexy wardrobe—in Boulder, Colorado, 10 years earlier, managed to capture the attention of most of this country, if not the world. I happened to be walking by a television set in my house when Dan Abrams, the general manager of MSNBC and chief legal correspondent for NBC, came on the air himself to break the news. I knew right away this was the beginning of a big story. The old, familiar videos of JonBenet, dancing and singing and posing in a limitless array of dazzling costumes and elaborate hairdos, were once again aired around the clock. Karr, who loved little girls, and who knew every detail of JonBenet's death, on Christmas morning 1996, knocked the Iraq war out of the headlines and became the lead story on every newscast. He didn't get just 15 minutes of fame. He got 13 days of it.

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From the moment I saw John Mark Karr on television, looking like a dainty Lee Harvey Oswald in a pale-blue Nautica shirt and high-waisted trousers, I felt strongly that he hadn't done it, but I wanted to believe that he had. That would mean that John and Patsy Ramsey, JonBenet's parents, who had long been suspected of having an involvement in the violent crime, were cleared of suspicion. Like the Ramseys, I am the parent of a murdered daughter, and for many years I served on the board of directors of the National Victim Center, which is now called the National Center for Victims of Crime and is located in Washington, D.C. During that time, I met many parents of murdered children in the immediate aftermath of their tragedies. It wasn't easy, but it helped me. They usually fell into two categories: those so bereft that they were helpless in their grief, and those so enraged that they wanted to kill their child's killer. The Ramseys acted quite differently. They hired attorneys and a publicist, refused for four months to be questioned by the Boulder police, and thereby aroused a lot of suspicion. As the years went by, however, and I would see them interviewed on Larry King Live and other shows, my suspicions lessened. After Karr's arrest, it was reported that Patsy Ramsey had known before she died this past June that a fresh suspect, living in Thailand, had been able to reveal undisclosed details of the crime scene. Even though Patsy was dying of cancer, she and her husband traveled from Atlanta to Boulder to meet with Mary Lacy, the local district attorney. When Patsy died, Lacy attended her funeral, in Atlanta.

John Mark Karr had written hundreds of e-mails to a journalism professor at the University of Colorado named Michael Tracey. In them he described his romantic feelings for JonBenet and went into the circumstances of her death. In one of the late e-mails, he said he had been in the Ramsey house that night. He told how he had accidentally killed JonBenet by strangulation, then hit her on the head. That's when Tracey went to Mary Lacy with the e-mails. (Some smart publisher should bring out The Collected E-mails of John Mark Karr, along with all of Professor Tracey's replies.) Lacy thought that the information Karr possessed relating to the crime warranted an arrest, and so the international drama of his extradition from Thailand to Boulder was put in motion.

John Mark Karr makes Michael Jackson, whom he admires, look like a tough guy. I was not surprised to later hear reports that while he had been teaching in Thailand he was also undergoing sexual reassignment, which is the new expression for a sex change. Reportedly he had his beard removed by laser.

Watching him move slowly toward a plane in the Bangkok airport, surrounded by Thai authorities, who were dying to get him out of the country, police from Boulder, and a mob of reporters, I had the distinct impression that he was experiencing bliss. Probably for the first time in his life, he felt important. The eyes of the world were on him, and he knew it. He looked into the camera as if he were having a screen test. His only comment on the fact that his ex-wife had said he was home in Georgia that Christmas and therefore couldn't have been in Boulder on the night of the murder was "It's normal that people in a family protect you." He went along with the whole charade that he had made happen, right up until the DNA results came in, proving that he was not the killer. That is how much he wanted to be part of the JonBenet story.

On the plane returning him to the United States, he was carefully dressed. He had made it known that he did not wish to go in front of the media in a prison uniform. He picked out his own clothes, a short-sleeved maroon shirt and brown tie. He looked neat but not natty, like the floorwalker at a Wal-Mart store. He seems to have a rather high opinion of himself and clearly thinks he is better-looking than he is. In one of the e-mails he told Michael Tracey that he thought Johnny Depp should play him in the movie. "He reminds me so much of me," he wrote. "And he looks like me. He would play the part perfectly." He also bragged about his talent for imitating people and said he was quite proud of his impersonation of Katharine Hepburn.

His life has hardly been a normal one. He has been married twice, first to a 13-year-old girl, then to a 16-year-old. Neither speaks well of him. He personally delivered his second wife's twin daughters, Angel and Innocence, who died almost immediately. Little attention has been called to this strange circumstance. The couple subsequently had three sons, but Karr evidently didn't spend much time with his family. Before the plane landed in Los Angeles, he spent a substantial amount of time in a washroom, primping for his arrival, with the door kept partially open so that the police could see what he was doing. When he walked off the plane, every strand of his thinning hair in place, he was ready for his close-up.

Maybe I'm stupid, but if John Mark Karr is sexually obsessed with five-and six-year-old girls, why did he want to become a woman? Was he planning on becoming a lesbian as well? Actually, I can picture him as a woman in the front row of one of those beauty pageants for little girls. I'd never seen such a beauty pageant until I went to the wonderful film Little Miss Sunshine, which ends with one. What a tacky event: hordes of cute little girls tarted up in homemade adult costumes, looking cheap.

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Shirley Temple's, who could sing, dance, and act, but who was always a child. Unlike the little girls in this movie, and unlike JonBenet—who at six was the supremely confident superstar of this pageant world—Shirley Temple was never provocative or sexual. At the risk of sounding snooty, I submit that people with money don't ordinarily enter their six-year-old daughters in beauty pageants. For one thing, the pageants are clearly a pedophile's paradise. In Little Miss Sunshine, in the audience watching the little girls model and perform, there is a guy with tattoos and studded leather bracelets who somehow reminded me of Karr.

Unlike JonBenet, Shirley Temple was never provocative.

After it was announced that Karr's DNA didn't match the DNA in JonBenet's panties, the authorities waited two weeks to transport him to California to face the child-pornography-possession charge that had sent him fleeing to Thailand. If he is sentenced to jail, it won't be an easy ride for him, for pedophiles are generally hated by the other inmates. As for the once highly praised Mary Lacy, she was promptly held up to public mockery for all her efforts to bring charges against Karr with insufficient proof. His new lawyer complained on-camera about how the district attorney had dragged his client back from Thailand. Completely untrue. John Marie Karr was a more-than-willing captive. He had the time of his life. Nothing will probably ever be as exciting for him again. Within a day, however, the public had lost all interest in him and shifted its attention to the newly captured Warren Jeffs, the polygamist who had been arrested in Nevada after having been on the run for two years.

Several sources called me independently to report that John Ramsey, JonBenet's father, had gone off on vacation the day Karr was arrested in Thailand, and he was not seen once during the whole media blitz that followed. I find that very odd.

Forgive me for bragging, but I have to share a great cheap thrill I experienced recently. In early September, the writer Jane Stanton Hitchcock—who in 2005 wrote a best-seller called One Dangerous Lady, in which I am a character named Larry Lockett, who gets bludgeoned to death by the title character over something he wrote about her—called me from Washington. She told me to watch the premiere of the new Fox TV series called Justice, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, about a team of defense lawyers, one played by Victor Garber, who is a favorite actor of mine. It's a good show, and I was sitting back and enjoying it when, as the trial in the script is about to start, Victor Garber's character says, "Dominick Dunne called. He wants a seat at the trial. I'm going to give him one of ours." A colleague says, "But you hate Dominick Dunne." And Garber replies, "Yes, he writes terrible things about us, but the publicity gets us more business." That was a treat to hear. Thanks, guys.

The Skakel case continues to add more chapters, even though five years have passed since a guilty verdict sent Michael Skakel to prison for 20 years for the murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1975, when they were both teenagers. A year after that verdict, an African-American man named Gitano "Tony" Bryant—who made much of the fact that he was a cousin of the basketball star Kobe Bryant, who was being charged with sexual assault in a sensational case in Colorado—came forward to say that Michael Skakel had not killed Martha Moxley. Tony Bryant and Skakel had both attended Brunswick, a private boys' school in Greenwich, but apparently they had not been friends. Three years ago, Bryant made a videotape on which he said that two friends of his, one also African-American, had been in the exclusive gated community of Belle Haven on the night of the murder. He said that they had told him they killed Martha Moxley. On the basis of that tape, Skakel's lawyers, Hope Seeley and Hubert Santos, are attempting to have the 2001 verdict overturned and to get a new trial for Skakel.

Evidence that was not known at the time of the earlier trial could be used to get a new trial. On September 7, I was on a panel on Nancy Grace's show on CNN, and I said that I would dearly love to view Bryant's tape, but it is not available. If Bryant kept the shocking new information to himself for 25 years, why did he wait until a year after the trial to reveal it? A person I know who has seen the tape told me that on it Bryant says that early on the evening of the murder he stopped by the Skakels' house and talked to Julie Skakel, Michael's sister. If that is so, why hasn't Julie Skakel mentioned this guy somewhere along the way? It seems very odd that not a single person in that rich, gated, and very white community ever spoke of seeing any African-American high-school students there on the night Martha Moxley was murdered. There's no way anyone could have forgotten. The Moxley murder has been in the news for years. It seems to never go away. To further complicate matters, Bryant and the two men he has implicated have all pled the Fifth, invoking their rights against self-incrimination. Lawrence Schoenbach, the lawyer for Adolph Hasbrouck, one of the men fingered by Bryant as the killers, has also said that his client is considering a lawsuit against Bryant for slander and libel. Bryant, who started the whole thing, has declared that he will not testify. None of us on the panel on Nancy Grace's show thought there was any likelihood of a new trial. Since the supreme court of Connecticut turned down Skakel's lawyers' request for the verdict to be overturned, they have now taken it to the United States Supreme Court.

"How long are these attempts for a new trial going to go on?," I asked a member of the Greenwich Police Department.

"As long as the Skakel money holds out," he replied.