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In 1996 Karr began working as a substitute teacher at his alma mater, Hamilton High School – the first of more than a dozen teaching jobs in several states and at least three different countries, many of which ended with Karr being dismissed for erratic behavior. "He was scary," says one former student. "He had a very nice side, and if you forgot your lunch money he'd give you a dollar. But he was always yelling and he had a short fuse." At another school "there were reports that students were terrified of him," says a teacher. "One kid got so scared he wet himself."
After moving his family to Petaluma, Calif., in 2000 – apparently to get closer to the Polly Klaas case – Karr worked as a substitute teacher at a half-dozen elementary schools in the Bay Area. In April 2001 Napa County sheriffs summoned him from his classroom at Pueblo Vista Elementary School. He was arrested for possessing child pornography and served six months in jail before being released. "He was in correspondence with Richard Allen Davis [the man who murdered Polly Klaas] and that was disturbing," says Julia Freis, the former Sonoma County Deputy District Attorney who prosecuted Karr. "The whole case was strange and kind of twisted."
Karr lost his teaching credentials and his wife filed for divorce and asked a judge to suspend Karr's visitation privileges. Karr soon skipped town, missing a court date relating to the child-porn charges and becoming a fugitive. But he wasn't done teaching young children. By 2004 he had turned up in Honduras, where he worked at two schools; in 2006 he taught at three schools in Thailand. A colleague at Bangkok Christian College says Karr "was famous for kicking chairs in class because the kids weren't picking up English fast enough."
