John Mark Karr Once Confessed to Killing JonBenét Ramsey and Is Now Living a Very Different Life

Content warning: This article mentions child sexual abuse and pedophilia.

People of a certain age will remember seeing the face of JonBenét Ramsey in almost every magazine and supermarket tabloid in America. It was hard to miss the cloud of curled blond hair sitting atop a cherubic face with enormous blue eyes. Every single picture was professionally shot because the tiny angelic 6-year-old was a child beauty pageant queen. She was also a victim of a horrific crime.

On Christmas night in 1996, Ramsey was murdered in the sprawling Colorado home she shared with her parents and brother. Her body wouldn't be discovered until the following morning. When police were called, they famously mishandled the case in several shocking ways. Unfortunately, it was never solved, though one man falsely confessed to the murder. Where is John Mark Karr now? Here's what we know.

In 2006, Karr came forward with his lies about killing Ramsey. Four years later, Diane Dimond tracked Karr down for a piece in The Daily Beast. She found that Karr was now going by the name Delia Alexis Reich, which was legally changed in December 2008. Moving forward, we will be using she/her pronouns and referring to Karr as Reich.

Reich was what we might call a keyboard warrior because she spent a great deal of time sending out emails to various individuals, including Dimond, whose previous work included breaking the news that Michael Jackson was under investigation for child molestation. Dimond let Reich know that her ex-fiancee had accused her of "encouraging others to recruit a cult of young girls for sex." Reich balked at this accusation.

"Do you make a difference in the lives of children with your research or do you only blast pedophiles and talk the rhetoric of the severe punishment they deserve?" she asked Dimond in an email while denying it was true. She stopped communicating after that, which prompted Dimond to fill in the blanks using other people in Reich's orbit.

Before she confessed, Reich was being investigated in 2001 by the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office for possession of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). An informant had also told police about email from Reich, who was working at an elementary school at the time, where she openly discussed his attraction to the young female students at her school.

In April 2001, a woman going by the initials Q.S. told investigators she was only 13 years old when she married Reich. They were married in Alabama after Reich changed her age. This was in June 1984. The marriage was annulled less than a year later. Details of this time are shocking and include allegations of Reich wanting Q.S. to defecate and urinate on the basement floor of their house, so they could have sex in it.

The 2001 CSAM case was dropped after it was discovered that investigators mishandled evidence, which allowed Reich to get engaged to a 23-year-old cocktail waitress named Brooke Simmons, who had a 4-year-old daughter. Reich ended up on Inside Edition, where she said Simmons wanted her to stop her sex-change hormone treatments. It's unclear when this relationship ended, but in April 2010, Reich was "engaged" to a former elementary school student named Samantha Spiegel.

Reich allegedly asked Spiegel to "be on the lookout for suitable candidates for 'the Immaculates,' writing of his desire to 'taste young sex again.'" The Immaculates were what Reich called her "little girl cult." She wanted them to be brunettes who were under the age of 6. The Daily Beast article was updated in 2017 when then-19-year-old Spiegel shared her story. She had no idea what she was doing at the time.

In November 2017, Reich spoke with the Monroe Journal from her home in Aberdeen, Ala. Regarding Spiegel's allegations, Reich said, "I haven’t thought about that in a long time." She went on to say that Spiegel made the whole thing up after stumbling upon similar stories online. Reich said she used to get calls from Spiegel, who claimed she was wandering the streets doing drugs.

Reich also revealed she underwent an orchiectomy, which is a surgical procedure to remove one or both testicles. "Testosterone drives. Without a sex drive, these people are deveined," she said about child rapists. Because of the surgery, Reich revealed she no longer has a sex drive and has never been happier. "I don’t want to live here and just go through the motions of being alive," she said. "People in Aberdeen, I mean nothing but good. I’m trying to make a house beautiful again."