I have a confession to make: I am the Zodiac killer, that elusive serial murderer who haunted the Bay Area back in the days of peace, love, and dope. Granted, I wasn’t yet born when the Zodiac was killing and sending creepy letters in the late 1960s, but the local authorities may be so overjoyed to put the cold case to bed that they may accept my confession anyway, perhaps arranging an extradition circus and booking a free trans-Pacific flight with jumbo prawns and bubbly if I first flee to Asia. Cross-checking the DNA from the backs of stamps and edges of envelopes on those old Zodiac letters? An afterthought.

I’m not very convincing, right? Such is the case with John Mark Karr, the creepy pervert who overnight became the elusive sensational killer of little beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey — even though his description of the crime didn’t match the forensic evidence; the guy who snuffed out her young life in the family’s Boulder home — even though it wasn’t substantiated whether he’d even set foot in the state of Colorado. After a ridiculous two-week-long media circus, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens is livid, the Boulder district attorney’s office is trying to backpedal at full speed, and the world — and Boulder D.A. Mary Lacy, apparently – knows more than it ever needed to about this voluntary false confessor.

False confessions are nothing new, and don’t have to arise from any sort of interrogation or even having been fingered as a suspect. After Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped in 1932, more than 200 people “confessed” to the crime. Before Karr, others had confessed to the Ramsey murder shortly after her 1996 death. The murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in 1994 brought their own flock of voluntary false confessors as O. J. continues to search for the “real killers.” Even convicted killers may try to prove themselves the biggest, baddest, and most notorious by falsely beefing up their own resumes — one-eyed drifter Henry Lee Lucas (basis of the 1986 movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) confessed to between 350 and 3,000 murders, depending on whom you talk to, and most were deemed to be baloney.

Back in college, one of my criminology professors explained that Jeffrey Dahmer was motivated by a natural impulse — not wanting to be alone — but took it to the far extreme by keeping his lovers in vats and the freezer. To understand the voluntary false confessor, take the desire for attention and multiply it an extreme. There is publicity to be wrought from applying your name to a truly infamous unsolved crime, as opposed to walking in and confessing to the latest hold-up at the corner gas station. Karr’s Thailand press conference looked more like a guy hyping his latest film than a long-lost killer turning himself in to face the music.

And did this previously unknown teacher succeed at gaining that attention he evidently lusted after? He now has his own Wikipedia page, had hours of cable-news discussion devoted solely to him, and has even made the British tabloids. “Prosecutors dropped their case against John Karr hours before the weirdo was due in court in Colorado,” reported the U.K.’s Sun today.

When Karr was flown from Thailand to Los Angeles, the media attention was unlike that for a rock star or head of state. We learned about everything he ate and drank on the plane, when he used the loo, which Tom Cruise flick he watched — even that he crushed his empty beer can with his hands (ooh, the mark of a true killer!). “Other experts called the royal treatment a brilliant strategy intended to get the suspect relaxed enough to talk more about the crime,” the Associated Press reported after their in-flight observance of Karr. Now the Boulder DA’s office is just stuck with a royal bill.

When Karr touched down at LAX, the live news coverage was on par with that special treatment reserved for high-speed police pursuits or wildfires. All the while, the parade of pundits continued, including highly respected experts in criminal behavior who agreed that Karr was just another creepy guy in need of attention. But, still, when it came to that note, many thought they had it in the bag: Just before the DNA mismatch was made public, handwriting experts who hadn’t even studied the original ransom note were declaring Karr’s penmanship to be a match.

You can say after this sensational sideshow that the JonBenet murder investigators are back at square one, but the credibility hole could have the DA even worse off than before. Why wasn’t Karr’s DNA tested in Thailand? Why did the probe of Karr only really begin after his arrest, as the Denver Post reported? Lacy has said Karr’s arrest came after “several months of focused and complex investigation.” What was this investigation? Apparently, Karr’s Christmas alibi put forth by his ex-wife and other family members wasn’t checked out. Was their case based on twisted e-mails to the journalism professor? Lacy is to explain more about their decision to drop the case at a press conference today.

After his free Colorado vacation, Karr faces misdemeanor child-pornography charges in Sonoma County, Calif., where he didn’t offer himself on a plate to the authorities but skipped town in 2001 and had a warrant issued for his arrest. But the hoopla afforded John Mark Karr is undoubtedly offering inspiration to other wannabe false confessors out there, fame junkies who can too latch onto an unsolved case just long enough for the press to christen them catch of the year, thus hampering investigators and wasting precious time.

What are the lessons we have learned from this fiasco? Checking out the evidence against your suspect before letting the cat out of the bag is a good rule of thumb. Thailand could learn to screen its teachers better. Every parent could learn that parading a child around with more makeup than Tammy Faye may attract the wrong sort of admirers — Karr unfortunately isn’t the only sick guy who fantasizes about six-year-olds. And we learned that everybody who thought Karr was full of bunk from the get-go — that would be nearly everybody but the prosecutors — have good instincts.

– Bridget Johnson is a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. She blogs at GOP Vixen.