John Mark Karr

Alexis Reich

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Alexis Valoran Reich (born December 11, 1964), who is a male-to-female transgender person formerly known as John Mark Karr , is an American citizen who in 2006 falsely confessed to the unsolved murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey. He has, on other occasions, faced a number of other criminal charges.

Childhood

Karr was born in Conyers, Georgia and spent his early childhood in Atlanta. His father, Wexford Karr had married Patricia Elaine Adcock (John's mother) on August 21, 1958, when he was 37 and she was 18. Wexford filed for divorce in 1973, eleven years into marriage, saying the marriage was "irretrievably broken," and that John and his older brother, Michael, were in his custody. Soon after, Wexford Karr, then 52 years old, married 29-year-old Susan Simpson, his neighbor in the same apartment complex. His marriage with Simpson ended in divorce six months later.

A family friend, George McCrary, has said that Karr's mother believed John Karr was possessed by demons. His mother allegedly built a pyre of kindling around him and attempted to burn him alive as an infant. Adcock was committed to the Central State Hospital, a mental hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, and later lived in a group home, according to her stepmother Shirley Adcock.

Karr moved to Alabama to live with his grandparents when he was about 12 years old. He grew up in Hamilton and graduated from Hamilton High School in 1983. After graduation, Karr returned to live in Atlanta at least twice: once to attend one semester at Riverwood High School in Sandy Springs from January to May 1981, and again some years after graduating from high school.

Marriages

In 1984, Karr married 13-year-old Quientana Ray Shotts. Karr evidently told Quientana to lie about her age, and took her out of Alabama, where they both lived, to marry her. Karr and Shotts lived together as a couple in Hamilton after their wedding, and Karr "was abusing her every way there was," according to Melissa Shotts. Court records show that, in 1985, a 14-year-old girl sought an annulment of what the records call a "ceremonial marriage," saying she had feared for her life when she agreed to marry Karr in 1984. Karr admitted to the court that she was a minor, but disputed she had been 13. The marriage was annulled in 1985. Shotts later remarried and now bears a different surname.

Karr married Lara Knutson in Alabama on May 19, 1989, when he was 24 and she was 16 and pregnant. She was carrying twin daughters who were delivered via a home birth on September