Boulder, Co. ? After eight days of tantalizing admissions, speculation and a marathon trip from Asia, a suspect in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey arrived in Colorado to face an investigation prosecutors admit is still in its infancy.

John Mark Karr, the enigmatic former schoolteacher who claims he was with 6-year-old JonBenet when she was beaten and strangled 10 years ago, was locked up in solitary confinement late Thursday. He arrived hours earlier on a flight from Los Angeles.

Formal charges were pending and the date of Karr’s first court appearance will probably be announced today, the district attorney’s office said.

Questions still abound

Questions about Karr’s involvement have arisen since he told reporters following his arrest in Thailand that he was with the beauty pageant contestant at the time of her death, which he said was an accident.

Prosecutors have refused to detail any evidence they might have, but in a court filing this week said investigators didn’t learn of Karr’s name until Aug. 11, five days before his arrest. They also said he was arrested in part because they feared he might get tipped off and vanish.

“It is like this guy fell out of the sky for them and they’re trying to figure out what they have going,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School and a former federal prosecutor. “They can’t really let him go or proceed to convict him until they have the evidence. It’s in a bit of a limbo now.”

The court filing conflicts with the Sonoma County, Calif., sheriff, who said his office alerted Boulder authorities about Karr in 2001 after he was arrested on child pornography charges. The sheriff and Boulder prosecutors declined to comment on the apparent discrepancy.

A van carrying John Mark Karr arrives Thursday at the Boulder County Jail in Boulder, Colo. Karr was arrested in Bangkok last week and flown over the weekend to Los Angeles, where he didn't fight extradition to Colorado on a warrant listing charges of murder, kidnapping and sexual assault on a child in JonBenet Ramsey's 1996 slaying.

Karr, 41, has professed love for JonBenet in e-mails with a Colorado professor and told a California woman, Wendy Hutchens, he believes the little girl was tortured before she was strangled.

‘Apparent fascination’

Sonoma County sheriff’s Lt. Dave Edmonds said Karr expressed an “apparent fascination” with 1993 murder victim Polly Klaas and JonBenet, and “presented ideas about what the murderers of Polly Klaas and JonBenet Ramsey must have thought and felt.”

But there was no confession, Edmonds said, or anything else to suggest Karr played a role in JonBenet’s slaying.

The Boulder arrest warrant and supporting affidavit remain sealed and the district attorney is fighting media requests to open them. Prosecutors said in Wednesday’s court filing that the affidavit contains evidence never before disclosed publicly.

“To a large extent, the evidence from the investigation in the affidavit has to do with Mr. Karr and it was only developed recently,” wrote Bill Nagel, an assistant district attorney. “Furthermore, the investigation of Mr. Karr is in its very early stages.”

Karr was arrested in Bangkok last week and flown over the weekend to Los Angeles, where he decided not to fight extradition to Colorado on a warrant listing charges of murder, kidnapping and sexual assault on a child in JonBenet’s slaying.

He landed Thursday in Colorado, a few miles from the upscale Boulder home where JonBenet’s body was discovered by her father the day after Christmas 1996. The plane ride offered none of the prawns, wine and champagne that accompanied Karr’s Thailand-to-California flight, but the former schoolteacher was allowed to wear dark slacks and a red shirt instead of a prison jumpsuit. His short drive to the Boulder jail was followed by news helicopters.

Solitary confinement

Karr’s first few hours at the jail will include physical and mental evaluations, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said. He will be locked alone in an 8-by-10-foot cell, away from the other 480 inmates.

“Anybody that’s in jail in our population that faces these kinds of charges, charges against children, faces some danger,” Pelle said.

The county public defenders’ office asked to meet with Karr, Pelle said, though there was no indication of when the meeting would take place.

After John Ramsey found his daughter’s body in the family’s basement on Dec. 26, 1996, police collected DNA from blood spots in her underwear and from under her fingernails.

Investigators have said some of the DNA was too degraded to use as evidence, but some was of sufficient quality to submit to the FBI in 2003. The sample did not match any of the 1.5 million samples in the agency’s database at the time, according to the Ramsey family attorney.