JonBenet suspect a patient at Thai sex-change center

BANGKOK, Thailand — The man who confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey had another bizarre secret up his sleeve in the months before his arrest: he was visiting a surgical center that specializes in sex-change operations.

Staff at the Pratunam Clinic, Thailand's top transgender center, said Saturday that John Mark Karr, 41, was a patient but wouldn't say how close he was to getting "sexual-reassignment" surgery.

"Yes, he had treatment here," a representative said. "He was our patient. He came a number of times. But we cannot give out details on his treatment as we are ethically bound to keep these things private."

The disclosure came a day after it was discovered that Karr sought cosmetic surgeons' help changing his face in Bangkok. In his nine months there, he made 12 phone calls from his hotel room, nine to plastic surgeons.

Two calls were to the Pratunam Clinic, which specializes in putting men under the knife to become "ladyboys," as they are called locally, and sponsors the annual World's Most Beautiful Transsexual competition. It charges $1,600 for the surgery, which could cost $25,000 in the West.

Karr, a divorced father of three, was arrested in Bangkok last week in connection with JonBenet's 1996 slaying, telling police and reporters that he accidentally killed the girl in an assault motivated by his obsessive love for her. Doubts have been since raised about the confession.

He was to be flown back to the United States today on a Thai Airways flight scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles tonight, an airline official said. He will eventually be returned to Boulder, Colo., where he will face charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault in connection with JonBenet's killing, officials said.

Colorado authorities tracked him down after reading four years' worth of e-mail messages between Karr and Michael Tracey, 58, a University of Colorado journalism professor who has produced documentaries about JonBenet's slaying — and who tried to draw out more details about Karr through their hundreds of messages.

"You told me once that your mother tended to raise you as a girl," Tracey wrote in one exchange obtained by the Rocky Mountain News. "This must have had a powerful effect on your developing sexuality — confusion maybe?"

Karr wrote back under an alias: "Michael, I will not discuss my sexuality as if it is a psychological disorder."

The e-mail exchanges began four years ago, after Karr met a Boulder writer when they were both staying in the same hostel above a Paris bookstore. The e-mail immediately revealed his fixation on JonBenet's mysterious death.

"Until he started talking about the Ramseys, he seemed perfectly normal," Michael Sandrock, 48, said Saturday outside his Boulder home, remembering his 2002 encounter with Karr.

"I didn't get the feeling that he might have done it. I just thought he was obsessed about it," Sandrock said. "I thought he was just someone who was fanatic about the case. But when I saw he got arrested, I wasn't surprised."

Karr, who identified himself only as "John," said he had been to Boulder in the past and had come to Paris from Amsterdam.

When he learned Sandrock was a sportswriter for the Boulder Daily Camera and was a friend of Tracey, he wouldn't stop talking about the case until Sandrock left a few days later, mentioning Boulder landmarks, obscure pieces of evidence, even the names of reporters on the story.

"I'm really not interested in the case, and when I told John Karr that, he was kind of surprised," Sandrock said. "I said, 'I think the parents did it.' He kind of just smiled and said, 'The parents. Heh.' "

Sandrock put Karr and Tracey in touch by e-mail, starting their four-year exchange.

Investigators working for the Ramseys used routing information attached to the messages to track Karr to the Paris area this year, and they briefly considered tracking him down there to surreptitiously obtain a DNA sample from him.

"We had traced this guy back to France, and we were getting to the point where getting DNA was a possibility," investigator John San Agustin said.

The Boulder County district attorney got involved in the case before they could travel to France, though, setting last week's arrest in motion.

Meanwhile, the arrest has unleashed an onslaught of unwelcome attention on the Ramseys that has incensed the slain girl's father, a longtime family lawyer said Saturday.

Her father was hounded by camera crews Friday as he took his son to college at Purdue University, attorney Lin Wood said.

"He cannot go back to his home in Michigan because it is surrounded by the media," Wood said. "Last night, I've never heard him so angry."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.