The DNA didn't match - Is John Mark Karr a chimera?

John Mark Karr / Alexis Valoran Reich

 
• The Dutch sprinter Foekje Dillema was expelled from the 1950 national team after she refused a mandatory sex test in July 1950; later investigations revealed a Y-chromosome in her body cells, and the analysis showed that she probably was a 46,XX/46,XY mosaic female.
• In 1953 a human chimera was reported in the British Medical Journal. A woman was found to have blood containing two different blood types. Apparently this resulted from cells from her twin brother living in her body. More recently, a study found that such blood group chimerism is not rare.
• Another report of a human chimera was published in 1998, where a male human had some partially developed female organs due to chimerism. He had been conceived by in-vitro fertilization.
• In 2002, Lydia Fairchild was denied public assistance when DNA evidence showed that she was not related to her children. After hearing of a human chimera in New England, Karen Keegan, it was eventually found that she too was a chimera and thus had two sets of DNA.
• Cyclist Tyler Hamilton, whose blood was found to have a "foreign blood population" in an anti-doping test, initially claimed it was natural, and his defense team suggested he could be a chimera. However, this defense was rejected

What does any of this have to do with John Mark Karr (now known as Alexis Reich)?

Karr "confessed" to the 1996 murder of Jon Benet Ramsey in August of 2006 when he was arrested while on the run in Thailand on computerized child pornography charges. However, later that month authorities announced that no murder charges would be files when it was discovered that his DNA profile did not match the profile of the DNA samples found on Jon Benet's body.

However, if Karr were a chimera, he very well could have committed the crime, yet a particular portion of his DNA would not have matched. In the above-mentioned case of Lydia Fairchild, oral swabs taken in four separate DNA tests showed that she was NOT the mother of her four children. However, a cervical swab produced her "other" DNA, which was a match. Apparently, chimeras' differing DNA manifests separately in different parts of the body, making it necessary to swab the "correct" part of the body in order to obtain a match.

Fraternal twins begin with two separate eggs being fertilized (as opposed to paternal or identical twins, who are the result of a single fertilized ovum which splits in two). Since the eggs at the onset are separate, fraternal twins (non-identical twins) can be male-male, female-female, or male-female.

A chimera is a person who began as two... fraternal twins who are "fused" into a single entity in the early stages of development. One twin "consumes" the other. The result is four separate sets of chromosomes  - and two distinct sets of DNA - coming together.

Since the bodies of chimeras contain both sets of DNA of each individual twin, the result can be a "pure" female (both twins female), a "pure" male (both twins male) or a mixture of male and female, as in the case of Nathine Tereana Goldenthal, a PhD who runs the excellent website http://www.transgenderchimera.com

A family friend, George McCrary, has said that John Mark Karr's mother believed her child was possessed by demons. Karr's mother allegedly built a pyre of kindling around her infant child, and then attempted to burn him alive.

Could Karr be a male-female chimera, born with hermaphrodite sexual organs? While such a condition may be rare, it could not only explain Karr's mother's desire to "burn him alive" as an infant (perhaps having witnessed hermaphroditic organs and, being devoutly religious, believing the defect to be caused by "demons"), it might also explain Karr's effeminate mannerisms and the subsequent desire to become a woman.  (He apparently began hormone replacement therapy years ago and is now living as a woman under the name Alexis Valoran Reich. Is that, as some claim, simply to make it easier for him to approach the little girls he seems obsessed with? Or could it be his desire to physically manifest the "female" portion of his chimerism?)

It is interesting to note, as well, that twins apparently run in Karr's family.