The JonBenét murder: did the brother do it?

Burke Ramsey, who a CBS documentary has named as the “probable” killer of his sister JonBenét, always kept to himself, according to his college classmate Morgan Hodges.

“He didn’t really open up to anyone,” Hodges tells WHO. “He kept to himself. He talked about JonBenét the same way he’d talk about a homework assignment or the weather. It’s just his way.”

Nearly 20 years after the child beauty pageant queen was found dead in her family home in Boulder, Colorado, a panel of experts on the documentary The Case of JonBenét Ramsey have put forward evidence they say implicates her then 9-year-old brother in the murder—and parents John and Patsy as having covered it up.

Among the evidence revealed in the documentary is audio from Patsy’s 911 call from the early morning of Dec. 26, 1996, during which she said her daughter was missing and a ransom note had been found. The expert panel claim to hear Patsy asking someone, after she thought she had hung up, “What did you do?”

The panel theorised that Burke, who once hit JonBenét with a golf club, struck his sister with a torch after she took a piece of his pineapple from a bowl (an autopsy uncovered pineapple in JonBenét’s stomach).

“In my opinion, the Ramsey family did not want law enforcement to solve this case and that’s why it remains unsolved,” retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente says on the program.

Burke, now 29, denies the claims. In an interview with Dr Phil McGraw that aired in the US in three parts beginning on Sept. 12, Burke insisted he had not killed his sister, whose beaten and strangled body was found by her father in the family’s basement, duct tape over her mouth, a garrotte tied tightly around her neck: “I know that’s not what happened,” he said. “Look at the evidence. Or lack thereof.”

Burke told McGraw he believes JonBenét was killed by “a paedophile who saw her at a pageant” and dismissed the idea that Patsy, who died in 2006, could have done it: “She never spanked us. Not to say she never got upset, but nothing near laying anger on us, let alone killing her child.”

Meanwhile the case remains cold. “[Burke’s] interview has not changed anything,” Boulder police spokesperson Shannon Cordingly tells WHO. “We’re continuing our investigation.”

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