Thailand- The verbose resume aspiring grade-school teacher John Mark Karr posted on the recruiting website Job 4 Teacher.com omits any mention of his obsession with molested and murdered girls. But if that document even approximates the truth, the current prime suspect in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey had hopped between enough jobs and countries over the past decade – glorified nanny in the Netherlands, homeroom instructor in Honduras, to name but two – to raise a bouquet of red flags in any principal’s mind.

But Thailand’s headmasters, it seems, sweat not such details. In fact, at least one Thai school administrator thought Karr’s variegated experience an asset.

That currently embarrassed administrator is Banchong Chompowong, assistant director of the English immersion program at Bangkok Christian College, where 100 expatriate teachers see to the education of more than 5,000 boys. Karr worked at the school for two weeks in June as a first-grade English teacher. He seemed both polite and articulate, says Chompowong, but was fired at the end of his two-week trial for being a tad too strict.

This wasn’t Karr’s first shot at teaching Thai kids. Saint Joseph’s Convent, an elite elementary and high school a short drive from the Christian college – where parents who drive late-model BMWs shell out $7,400 a semester to get their daughters educated – had hired Karr for a two- or three- week trial period earlier this year as a grade-school English teacher. “We were just seeing if he passed our standards,” a senior school official who declined to be identified told TIME. “He didn’t, so I fired him.” She recalled that officials at Bangkok Christian College had called earlier this year to follow up on a reference Karr had given them. She said she told them that Karr hadn’t passed muster.

Nobody has suggested yet that Karr behaved inappropriately with his students in Thailand. The same cannot be said for his stints as a teacher in the U.S. Gary Williams, assistant superintendent of Alabama’s Franklin County School System, confirmed to TIME that John Mark Karr worked as a substitute teacher there on December 17, 18 and 19, of 1996, just days before JonBenet Ramsey was murdered. He continued as a substitute teacher until May of 1997. While there, the elementary-school principal reprimanded Karr for behaving inappropriately with students. “She suspected some things and confronted him,” said Williams. “He made corrections.”

That piece of work experience is tellingly missing from Karr’s resume. So is his experience at the Southwest School in La Esperanza, Honduras (though his tenure at another La Esperanza school gets prominent mention). Southwest’s director, Caridad Pineda Ponce, recalled that John Karr lasted at her school barely a week before he was fired in 2004. He was canned, she said, for not working within the rules and guidelines of the school.

It wasn’t long after his stint in Honduras that he made his way to Thailand, entering and re-entering that country mainly on tourist visas. These visas prohibit paid work, but many foreigners flout the rule, and school administrators, eager for the cachet that comes with expatriate instructors, tend to turn a blind eye. Thailand is, however, a favored playground of globetrotting drifters. “You never really know who you’re talking to in Bangkok,” says an Australian teacher in St. Joseph’s English immersion program who met Karr during his brief tenure there. “We’ve all got a past.”

It’s Karr’s past that now has become the object of obsessive scrutiny. He will be officially deported from Thailand this weekend, and accompanied home by the U.S. officials who raided his shabby quarters in Bangkok on Wednesday. Doubts about the veracity of his confession have only multiplied since he volunteered it to the world on Thursday. But it’s probably safe to assume that Karr’s fruitless quest to become a grade-school teacher has finally come to an end.

From the NY Daily News: BANGKOK – John Mark Karr was changing his face in the months leading up to his capture this week in Thailand.

Phone records show that in the nine months the self-confessed killer of JonBenet Ramsey was holed up in a grubby room in one of Bangkok’s seedy apartment buildings, he made just 12 calls – nine of them to some of the city’s legions of cosmetic surgeons.

Records indicate he had work done by doctors at the Piatunum Poly Clinic in March, and went to the Pruk Shin Care Centre for more work the next month.

By the end of April, the ice-faced 41-year-old was signing up for a series of laser treatments to remove facial hair at the Pruksan Laser Centre – treatments that would continue on a regular basis up until the start of this month when Colorado police began tracking him down.

The revelations fit the picture that emerged in Bangkok yesterday that this is a perv with many faces.

Staff at the Blooms Residence – where records show Karr checked in on Dec. 18 before being led out shamed and in handcuffs Thursday night – said he was a model patron.

“He was very quiet,” said Blooms receptionist Kewaree Tungkam. “He never had any guests – no ladies like some of the other guests do. He paid on time and only got angry when the storms stopped him watching CNN. Then he would get angry and yell.”

Records show Karr paid 52,060 baht Р$1,385 Рfor his nine-month stay at Blooms, a notorious, grubby haunt for sex tourists. Staff said he ate quietly on his own in the hotel caf̩, and never bothered anyone.

He apparently also drank alone. The only thing left behind in his room besides the hotel’s dreary furniture were empty booze bottles in his bedroom and the bathroom.

But fellow Blooms resident Bijan Fadjad had a different story to tell.

“You could tell he was a creep just by looking at him,” said the 27-year-old American. “He never looked anyone in the eye and was always sneaking about on his own. It gave me the chills.”

Fadjad has spent the past three months in a room three doors down from Karr with the same sparse, bleak fittings.

“People stay here because it is cheap – and you are left alone,” he said. “For a guy like this one, it makes sense why he would be here.”

Karr’s ex-employers at the all-boys Bangkok Christian College also described the sometime teacher as a quiet man who went about his business. But the mothers of his ex-pupils were casting him in a different light entirely.

“He worked for us for two weeks at the start of June,” said Dr. Banchong Chompoowong, the school’s assistant director. “He was a nice man with a nice philosophy about why he wanted to teach – he liked children.

“Some students loved him, but some thought he was too strict. That is why we had to let him go.”

One mother, whose 6-year-old son was in Karr’s class, spoke outside the school while her little boy held her hand.

“He was there for about a month,” she said, before refusing to offer her name for fear of recriminations from the school. “There were many complaints about him and about how he treated the children. He was very harsh, and he made the kids uncomfortable.”

Karr had begun work at another international school in Bangkok just days before he was arrested.

While the world speculated about Karr’s story, the man who has been interviewing him in his Bangkok detention cell for the past few days said Karr continues to cut a solitary figure.

“He is alone,” said Maj. Supachai Paladech, the inspector in charge of deportation at Thailand’s immigration department.

“He is relaxed and said he has no friends in Thailand. He said he had made a lot of money working in Europe and Central America. He has spoken to no one – not even his family. I think he just wants to go back to the United States.”

“To us he was just a good guest,” said Blooms’ Tungkam. “But I guess you never know.”