John Mark Karr aka Alexis Reich

John Mark Karr, the supremely creepy former grade school teacher who falsely confessed to the JonBenet Ramsey murder in 2006, graduated from Hamilton High School in Hamilton, Alabama in 1983. The photo presented above is from his junior year in 1982.

Karr, who married a 13-year-old in 1984 (the marriage was annulled the following year), continues to have a disturbing obsession with young girls. In 2001, after a stint as a substitute teacher in Petaluma, California, he was arrested for possession of computerized child pornography. After pleading not guilty, he jumped bail and did not surface until his arrest in Thailand in 2006. It was because of Karr's Ramsey-obsessed e-mail correspondence with a University of Colorado journalism professor, that he became the subject of interest of the Boulder, CO District Attorney's office. As a result of his televised "perp walk" in Thailand, he quickly became a freakish cable news sensation and earned a business class flight (albeit handcuffed) back to the United States to face further examination by the authorities.

Karr's admissions, however, turned out to be nothing more than the fantasies of a deeply troubled person. But even after a DNA test eliminated him as a suspect in the Ramsey murder, he continued to maintain his guilt. He was then extradited to Petaluma where child porn charges were still pending. However, the computer seized in his 2001 arrest had been lost by police, so the case was dismissed. At this point, Karr was free to enjoy a brief period making the talk show rounds and then he largely disappeared from view. In 2007 he was charged with battery and obstruction in a domestic altercation with his girlfriend at his father's residence near Atlanta, Georgia.   

In 2009 it was revealed by the National Enquirer that Karr had undertaken hormone replacement surgery and was living as a woman. According to a 2010 restraining order taken out against him by Samantha Spiegel, Karr's legal name is now Alexis Valoran Reich. Spiegel's legal action was prompted by Karr's alleged threat to kill her if she revealed his plans for starting a child sex cult called "The Immaculates."

If ever there was a mascot for this blog...

Further reading (if you must): Alexis's website and resume.

Donald Rumsfeld

Donald H. Rumsfeld graduated from New Trier High School (whose diverse alumni also includes Charlton Heston, Bruce Dern and Liz Phair) in Winnetka, Illinois in 1950. In high school, he met his future wife, Joyce Pierson. He also pursued football, swimming, and track, but excelled in wrestling, the sport in which he would win many medals. A New Trier classmate named Ned Jannotta is quoted in the Rumsfeld biography, Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait, citing wrestling as a key to the future two-time Secretary of Defense's personality: "Wrestling is, after all, a sport in which there is no such thing as second-place money. You go head to head, winner take all."

After high school, Rumsfeld attended Princeton University on a Navy ROTC scholarship and graduated in 1954. The nation, though, would have to wait several more decades for the "Rummy" we all know and love to truly emerge on the national stage (at some point on his rise to the top, he found time to shake hands with Saddam Hussein). As President George W. Bush's wartime General Jack D. Ripper-esque Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld became a household name and a star of numerous press briefings. As the Iraq War descended into chaos largely because of the minimal American troop presence he recommended, he offered cheery reassurances such as "stuff happens." As the war on terror got worse, the quotes got better. Many of them can be read here.

Rummy is now busy writing his memoirs. 

Charles Whitman

Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower mass murderer, killed 15 people and wounded 32 others on August 1, 1966 in Austin, Texas. The night before these shootings he killed his wife and his mother, making his total death count 17. His rampage was finally ended by an Austin Police Officer who shot and killed the sniper. Whitman, an Eagle Scout and former Marine, was enrolled at the university as an engineering student at the time of the murders.

Before joining the Marines, Whitman attended St. Ann's High School in West Palm Beach, Florida. He studied piano and was a pitcher on the school's baseball team. As a child, he was an altar boy at the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church. From his earliest youth, Whitman was fascinated by firearms--an interest encouraged by his troubled, abusive father.

Today Charles Whitman is perhaps best known for being one of the subjects of a rant by drill instructor Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) in the 1987 Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket. In a scene set near the rifle range, Hartman attempts to inspire his soldiers by praising the marksmanship of former Marines Lee Harvey Oswald and Whitman. Summing up, Hartman says, "Outstanding! Those individuals showed what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do! And before you ladies leave my island, you will all be able to do the same thing!"   

George Tenet / Ron Jeremy

Long before former CIA Director George Tenet helped enable the Iraq War with his infamous statement that the case for weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk," he was an overachieving student at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Bayside, New York.

One of his fellow players on the Cardozo soccer team was none other than Ronnie Hyatt, better known by his nom de porn, Ron Jeremy. Jeremy recalled his high school relationship with Tenet to TMZ in 2007 thusly: "We didn't speak much, and didn't have much in common..." 

   
Since stepping down from his seven-year term as head of the CIA in 2004, Mr. Tenet has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, written a memoir, and is now the managing director of the investment bank, Allen & Company. Ron Jeremy, on the other hand, has honored his alma mater by being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for "Most Appearances in Adult Films."

 

Eric Schaeffer

Eric Schaeffer (not to be confused with the film historian or theater director of the same name) attended Brattleboro Union High School in Vermont in the late 1970s where he impressed at least one classmate with his budding narcissism. In addition to being active in the school's theater program, the diminutive student also played on the basketball team. According to a 2000 New York Observer profile, Schaeffer also attended the Calhoun School and Columbia Preparatory School before going off to Bard College. At Bard, he earned a degree in drama and dance after which nine years of driving a cab in New York City awaited him. During this period, the energetic grad allegedly wrote two stage plays, a novel and twenty screenplays--all of which he seems hellbent on turning into awful movies.

The sins of Eric Schaeffer are too numerous to explore in one blog post, but most of them have been dutifully indexed by Gawker. However, if you are short on time, the trailer for his misbegotten film Fall, embedded below, tells you just about all you need to know...

James O'Keefe

James Edward O'Keefe III (aka the Acorn pimp guy) is the self-proclaimed "investigative journalist" and youthful ward of conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart. He graduated from Westwood High School in the township of Washington, New Jersey in 2002.

O'Keefe's intense, vaguely McVeigh-ish senior year portrait--complete with Nietzsche quote--are more than counterbalanced by other, cheerier photos in the yearbook. Indeed, the shots of the future activist reporter singing and dancing in the school's musical, Crazy for You, make the reader totally forget about Hitler's favorite philosopher. O'Keefe's early interest in the theater certainly helps to explain the pimp outfit (if not the duplicitous video editing).

Unfortunately for him and his fans, it appears that Mr. O'Keefe's career as a would-be muckraker has pretty much petered out. His "investigation" of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu's office's telephones (or something?) resulted in a misdemeanor conviction and a mild rebuke from Michelle Malkin - but no real story. O'Keefe's latest "scoop" concerns census workers and his "findings" helped land him and his primary benefactor, Mr. Breitbart, on Good Morning America. The host George Stephanopoulous, though, seemed to regret inviting them on approximately a minute into the interview.

Well, O'Keefe can always go back to his roots...

Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy (1946-1989) graduated amoung a class of 800 students from Woodrow Wilson High School in Takoma, Washington in 1965. According to Ann Rule's definitive biography, The Stranger Beside Me, academic records of Bundy's time at the school have long since vanished, but several classmates remember the future serial killer. One woman quoted by Rule said: "He was well known, popular, but not in the top crowd--but then neither was I. He was attractive, and well dressed, exceptionally well mannered...He was kind of shy--almost introverted." According to Rule, Bundy consistently earned a B + average and upon graduation was given a scholarship to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. In a friend's copy of Wilson High's yearbook, The Nova, he wrote the following creepy bit of verse: 

Dearest V.,

The sweetness of the spring time rain runs down the window pain [sic.] (I can't help it. It just flows out).

Theodore Robert Bundy
Peot [sic]

After graduating from college Bundy became more involved with the Republican Party and volunteered on the re-election campaign of Washington Governor Dan Evans, who would later write a letter of recommendation for young Ted when he applied to law school. He was accepted at the University of Utah Law School in 1973, but backed out at the last minute. Bundy wound up attending law classes at night at Pugent Sound. During the day he worked as an assistant to the chairman of the Washington State Republican Party. It was around this time that Bundy's long killing spree began--his first victim was an unknown hitchhiker in May of 1973.

Prior to his execution in Florida's "Old Sparky" electric chair in 1989, Bundy confessed to thirty murders, but he was sentenced to death for only two. Specifically, the gruesome killings of sorority sisters Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman at Florida State University in 1978. He gave his final, exclusive death row interview to Christian psychologist and radio host, Dr. James Dobson, the founder of the conservative organization Focus on the Family. Dobson soon exploited, for his own idealogical purposes, Bundy's previously undisclosed contention that his crimes were influenced by exposure to violent pornography. Dobson has video clips from his execution eve interview entitled Fatal Addiction on the Focus on the Family website.