Thailand- In the series of e-mails that prompted cops to arrest him, John Mark Karr said he identified with Michael Jackson’s attachment to children and, just like the weirdo singer, compared himself to Peter Pan.

“I am trapped in a world that does not understand,” Karr wrote to a Colorado journalism professor during a four-year correspondence. “I can understand people like Michael Jackson and feel sympathy when he suffers as he has….I do think that he is sexually attracted to certain children but could never divulge this.”

Karr’s e-mails to Prof. Michael Tracey, which began after he saw one of Tracey’s documentaries about the murder, displayed a twisted obsession with JonBenet Ramsey and grandiose delusions about his own notoriety, claiming falsely to be the subject of “a four-state federal investigation for child murder.”

Karr, who claims to have killed JonBenet in 1996, even wrote a poem for the tiny beauty queen.

“JonBenet, my love, my life. I love you and shall forever love you,” it read. “If there is to be a life for me after this one, I pray that it will be with you – together forever with you and other little girls who are gone now from my life forever. That would be my Heaven.”

The e-mails, several of which were revealed by the Rocky Mountain News yesterday, helped convince prosecutors to nab Karr in Thailand.

“Sometimes little girls are closer to me than with their parents or any other person in their lives,” Karr wrote. “When I refer to myself as JonBenet’s closest, maybe now you understand.”

The meandering, effete prose in Karr’s e-mails is markedly different from the punchy, slangy sentences of the three-page ransom note left behind by JonBenet’s killer.

Karr lost his job, wife and contact with his sons after a child porn arrest in 2001. He moaned, “I lost every friend, contact and family member as a result of this investigation. Some of my closest little girls were questioned by the authorities which broke my heart into pieces. I will never have contact with anyone in my past ever again.”

The Boulder Daily Camera, meanwhile, reported that Tracey’s students recall him describing a chilling photograph he received from Karr: a childhood picture of Karr holding a white Santa Claus teddy bear. It was chilling because a similar white Santa bear – which no one in the Ramsey family recalled seeing before – was found in JonBenet’s bedroom after her murder.

The bear was not seized as evidence and apparently vanished before cops realized it was important. The district attorney had to make a public appeal for information about the bear using police photos taken of JonBenet’s room before the crime scene was released.

Tracey told his students that Karr’s photo, sent early in their e-mail relationship, made the child-obsessed teacher stand out from other maniacs who wanted to talk about JonBenet.

The e-mails also touch on Karr’s childhood.

Tracey: “You told me once that your mother tended to raise you as a girl. This must have had a powerful effect on your developing sexuality – confusion maybe?”

Karr: “Michael, I will not discuss my sexuality as if it is a psychological disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

In another echo of Michael Jackson, Karr said he only feels at home among kids.

“My peer group has not changed since I was a little boy, and girls were the people I was with always,” he wrote. “I can only say that I can relate very well to children and the way they think and feel.”