John Mark Karr, the schoolteacher who made worldwide headlines by confessing to one of America's most notorious unsolved crimes, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey (6), was abruptly cleared last night after the case against him collapsed.
Colorado prosecutors dismissed the arrest warrant against Mr Karr hours before he was due for his first Colorado court appearance in the decade-old case, saying that DNA tests had failed to link him to the girl's body.
The hearing in JonBenet's hometown of Boulder was cancelled, but Mr Karr (41), was taken back to jail because authorities in Northern California asked that he be sent there to face child pornography charges.
Mr Karr's claims that he was with JonBenet when she died had been greeted with growing skepticism, and prosecutors said in legal papers that, without a DNA match, they had no evidence against him other than his "repeated insistence" that he committed the crime.
John Mark Karr arrives back at the Boulder County Jail in Boulder, Colorado
JonBenet's body was found in the basement of her Boulder home on December 26th, 1996. The child beauty queen had been strangled to death, her skull fractured and mouth duct-taped. Forensic evidence suggests she was sexually assaulted.
The DNA taken from JonBenet's underwear, which was found to be the saliva of a white male mixed with her blood, has never been matched to a suspect in the murder - a crime that has baffled police and fascinated Americans for nearly a decade.
JonBenet's parents, who were once said by authorities to be under an "umbrella of suspicion" in their daughter's death, were also excluded from having left the DNA.
The collapse of the case against Mr Karr left authorities without a suspect in the murder.
Mr Karr has been arrested in Thailand and extradited to Colorado based largely on suspicious e-mails he had sent to Colorado University professor Michael Tracey.
Mr Karr, using the pseudonym "Daxis" had told Prof Tracey that he "accidentally" killed JonBenet while asphyxiating her during sex, then delivered a severe blow to her head.
After his arrest, Mr Karr publicly repeated his claims to have loved JonBenet and assertions that she died by accident.
But members of his family have insisted he was out of state at the time of JonBenet's murder and could not have been involved.
JonBenet's father, John Ramsey, found the girl's battered body about seven hours after her mother stumbled on a bizarre letter claiming that she had been kidnapped and demanding $118,000 ransom. The Ramsey family has since moved away from Boulder and her mother, Patsy, died in June of ovarian cancer. The house where the former Little Miss Colorado died stands empty.