Doubts continued to swirl around the arrest of an American school teacher who confessed he was with 6-year-old beauty pageant princess JonBenet Ramsey when she was strangled to death in 1996 in the basement of her parent's Boulder, Colo., home.

"I loved JonBenet very much," said John Mark Karr in a startling admission Thursday morning during a news conference in Bangkok, Thailand.

When asked if he was innocent, Karr shook his head and replied, "No."

"I was with JonBenet when she died," Karr said. "The death was an accident."

Boulder authorities say they spent months working with international law enforcement agencies to identify, locate and finally arrest Karr Wednesday morning in Bangkok for the Dec. 26, 1996, murder. But they have declined to comment on the facts surrounding Karr's arrest and warned the public Thursday not to jump to conclusions.

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"The analysis of evidence in this case continues on a day-by-day, on an hour-by-hour basis, as we speak," said Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy.

Karr was calm and forthcoming about his feelings for JonBenet, but had no comment on how he was able to gain entry into the family's house, or what led to her death.

"It would take several hours to describe that," Karr told an Associated Press reporter. "There's no way I could be brief about that, it's a very involved series of events ... it's very painful for me to talk about it. It's not at all what it seems to be."

Karr's confession, also, may not be what it seems.

A senior Thai police officer says Karr told investigators that he drugged JonBenet before accidentally killing her, but her autopsy report indicates that a blood screening test detected no drugs in her system.

A Petaluma woman who said she was Karr's ex-wife told KGO-TV in San Francisco that she was with her husband in Alabama at the time of the killing. Records obtained by the AP show that Karr was a student at Bevill State Community College in Hamilton, Ala., from fall 1996 to winter 1998.

Lara Karr said her ex-husband read up on the cases of Ramsey and Polly Klaas, who was abducted from her Petaluma home and slain in 1993.

Karr's brother told Fox news that he believes DNA testing will vindicate Karr, whom he claims may have an interest in child murders, but was not a murderer himself.

"I think that he actually had correspondence with the gentleman that was involved in the Polly Klaas case," Nate Karr said to Fox news Wednesday. He said his brother was in contact with subjects for a book he planned to write about men who commit crimes against children.

"I mean, it sounds like a horrible topic, but those kinds of things sell books, you know? And that's probably, you know, what he was interested in, getting into the nitty-gritty, into the minds of these people to write a real expose kind of manuscript," Nate Karr said. "And I think that he just got in too far and too deep without explanation and the FBI or whatever picked up on it."

Karr moved his family to Petaluma in 2000 and was arrested in April 2001 on five misdemeanor charges of possessing child pornography. His arrest records were sealed Wednesday morning, but the San Francisco Chronicle cites a divorce petition filed by Lara Karr in Sonoma County shortly after Karr's 2001 arrest, which notes that the couple married in 1989, when John was 24 and Lara was 16.

The suspect told reporters in Bangkok that he also wrote to Patsy Ramsey, Jon Benet's mother, who died of ovarian cancer in June.

"I conveyed to her many things, among them that I am so very sorry for what happened to JonBenet. And it's very important for me that everyone knows I loved her very much and that her death was unintentional," Karr said in an AP interview.

Karr was also exchanging e-mails with University of Colorado Journalism Professor Michael Tracey, who produced documentaries on the JonBenet Ramsey case.

In May, Tracey contacted police about their e-mail exchanges, according to the AP, leading investigators to seek Karr out as a suspect.

Boulder DA Lacy said Karr began work as a second-grade teacher in Bangkok on Tuesday and that he was arrested Wednesday at 6 a.m.

Lacy asked the public to heed the "poignant advice" of JonBenet's father, John Ramsey. "He said, 'Do not jump to conclusions, do not jump to judgment, do not speculate, let the justice system take its course.'"

Karr could be sent to Colorado within the week where he faces possible charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault. Authorities stressed that no charges have been filed at this time.

Karr still has an outstanding arrest warrant in California for failing to appear at a December 2001 court hearing on the child pornography charges, according to the Sonoma County district attorney.

A note and a child missing

On Dec. 26, 1996, Patsy Ramsey headed to the kitchen of her Boulder, Colo., home and found a ransom note on the staircase addressed to her husband.

"Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your business but not the country that it serves," the note began. "At this time we have your daughter in our posession [sic]. She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter."

The note demanded $118,000 in $100 and $20 bills, to be placed in a brown paper bag. It told Ramsey to await a phone call between 8 and 10 a.m. the next day for ransom delivery instructions.

"Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter," the note said.

Patsy Ramsey said she ran upstairs to her daughter's bedroom to discover JonBenet was missing.

She called out to her husband John and they called 911, believing JonBenet had been kidnapped.

Hours later, John discovered his daughter's body in the basement.

When she was brought to the coroner, according to the pathologist's report, she was wearing a long-sleeved white knit collarless shirt decorated with silver sequins, white long underwear, and white panties printed with rosebuds and the word "Wednesday."

Around her neck was a cross on a gold chain, and a white cord that was cinched up in a double knot. A similar white cord was tied around her right wrist.

JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in 1996.

The blond, green-eyed girl weighed 45 pounds. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled, beaten and had suffered head trauma.

Patsy and John Ramsey endured years of suspicion and speculation about their culpability in JonBenet's death. In police interrogations, Patsy was asked if she ever considered whether John was involved in his daughter's murder.

"Absolutely not," Patsy Ramsey said. The couple expressed frustration with the authorities and hired their own private investigators.

In 2001, they filed an $80 million libel suit against an ex-detective who accused Patsy of accidentally killing her daughter and John of helping to cover it up. The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum. More suits followed.

In 2003, a judge in a civil case ruled that the evidence suggested it was more likely that an intruder killed JonBenet, just as her parents always insisted.

Working with children

While the Ramseys were fighting speculation about their involvement in their daughter's horrific murder, John Karr was apparently teaching and working as a nanny across Europe.

Karr's resume, posted on The Smoking Gun, cites his mission to nurture and prepare students "for a successful future."

In 2002 and 2003, he claims to have been a caretaker in Germany and the Netherlands for three different families with children aged 9 months to 12 years, whom he tutored, fed, bathed and read bedtime stories.

He says he graduated magna cum laude from Regents College in Albany, N.Y., and lists reading music, playing instruments, acting, singing and writing poetry among his interests and abilities. A spokesman from Regents College, now Excelsior College, has confirmed that Karr received a bachelor of science degree in liberal arts in 2000 from the distance-learning institution.

From 1996 — the year of JonBenet's death — to 2001, Karr's resume notes work as a primary school teacher "in some of the most prestigious schools in the United States, working with the children of high profile families."

Bangkok police told the Associated Press that Karr arrived in Bangkok on June 6 from Malaysia to look for a teaching job. They said he had been living in a dormitory-style guesthouse called The Blooms in a neighborhood of massage parlors and travel agents that cater to expatriate residents and sex tourists.

John Ramsey was informed Wednesday morning of Karr's arrest.

"Patsy was aware that authorities were close to making an arrest in the case," he said in a statement, "and had she lived to see this day, would no doubt have been as pleased as I am with today's development almost 10 years after our daughter's murder."

Ramsey family attorney Lin Wood confirmed that Karr tried to correspond with Patsy Ramsey in the months before she died of ovarian cancer. Wood says she did not reply, but handed the information over to investigators, and that it helped link Karr to the case.

It's not clear if the Ramseys ever crossed paths with Karr. JonBenet was born in Atlanta in 1990, and the Ramseys lived in the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody for several years before moving to Colorado in 1991. Karr once lived in Conyers, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, according to Wood.

Karr's father, Wexford Karr of Atlanta, told The Denver Post that he feared his son may have been dead before Wednesday's arrest because he hadn't heard from him in several years.

Patsy Ramsey's sister, Pam Paugh of Roswell, Ga., said the family was celebrating the news of the arrest. "We are elated. We are elated. If this is, in fact, the killer, then we have a very heinous killer off the streets to never harm another child," Paugh said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.