The suspect in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey is being held in Los Angeles today pending extradition to Colorado for questioning in the 10-year-old unsolved case.
Teacher John Mark Karr (41) landed in California last night after travelling for 15 hours in business class from Bangkok, Thailand, with US police.
Karr sipped champagne, ate heartily and chatted to officials accompanying him on the Thai Airways flight, according to Fox News. US officials later turned Mr Karr over to Los Angeles police.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said it would detain him for up to 48 hours pending an extradition hearing to send him to Boulder, Colorado, where the murder occurred.
Karr was arrested in Bangkok on Wednesday on suspicion of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault. He told reporters he had been with the six-year-old when she died at Christmas a decade ago but that her death was an accident.
Some of his statements were at odds with details of the crime, however, leading some to believe he may not have been involved in the child beauty queen's murder.
The arrest was a surprise development in a case that has drawn intense media coverage focusing on JonBenet's success in child beauty pageants, her family's wealth and mysterious details of the murder, including the bizarre ransom note.
JonBenet was found December 26, 1996, in the basement of her home in Boulder, strangled with a garrote made from a stick and cord and her skull fractured. Her father discovered her body hours after the girl's mother stumbled on three-page letter claiming she had been kidnapped for a $118,000 ransom.