Shortly before 6 a.m. on December 26, 1996, Patsy Ramsey called 911 to report that she’d found a ransom note and her 6-year-old daughter, JonBenét Ramsey, was missing. Later that day, JonBenét’s father, John Ramsey, found her body in the basement of the family’s home in Boulder, Colorado. The cause of death was strangulation, but an autopsy revealed JonBenét also had a fractured skull and showed signs of sexual assault.
Two possible theories took hold: an intruder had entered the home or someone in her own family hurt JonBenét. This uncertainty, combined with images from JonBenét’s child pageant activities, captivated the public. The latest look at the unsolved case is Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey?, a three-part Netflix documentary that released in late November.
JonBenét’s older brother, Burke Ramsey, was just 9 years old when his sister was killed. He has lived with the horrific loss of his sister and the public fascination with her death for almost his entire life. Here’s what you need to know about Burke, who has been questioned by police, accused by the media, and exonerated by the district attorney.
Burke was part of JonBenét’s murder investigation
One of three people known to be in the house on the day JonBenét was killed (the others were Patsy and John), Burke became a witness and possible suspect. His parents told police Burke was sleeping when they’d discovered their daughter was missing, and Burke said he’d stayed in bed during the initial frantic search for his sister.
Police talked to Burke, reportedly without his parents’ permission, on the day of the murder. Shortly after, the killing triggered the Boulder Department of Social Services to evaluate Burke. Their report noted, “It is clear Burke was not a witness to JonBenét’s death.”
Even so, his DNA and handwriting were among the samples compared to clues from the crime scene. He wasn’t a match to the DNA found under JonBenét’s fingernails and in her underwear. A handwriting expert concluded Burke hadn’t penned the ransom note, which had been written on a pad from the Ramsey household.
Authorities interviewed Burke twice more: in June 1998 then again during the grand jury investigation into JonBenét’s death.
Controversy over Patsy’s 911 call involved Burke
Burke’s whereabouts when JonBenét was discovered missing were eventually called into question. In 1998, a transcript of an enhanced version of Patsy’s 911 call leaked to the public. At the end of the call, Burke could supposedly be heard asking, “What did you find?” This would mean his parents were lying about Burke being asleep at the time.
However, investigative journalist Paula Woodward wrote in her 2021 book Unsolved: The JonBenét Ramsey Murder 25 Years Later, “The 911 call audio information has been discredited numerous times as not reliable because audio testing doesn’t detect Burke’s voice on the end of that emergency call.”
The district attorney twice said Burke wasn’t a suspect
After Burke’s 1999 appearance before a grand jury in Boulder, tabloids reported his parents were negotiating a plea bargain. In response, the district attorney’s office announced Burke wasn’t a suspect in his sister’s murder.
In 2008, then-District Attorney Mary Lacy issued a press release saying, “The Boulder District Attorney’s Office does not consider any member of the Ramsey family, including John, Patsy, or Burke Ramsey, as suspects in this case.” Lacy noted that after new testing looked at touch DNA—the trace amounts of DNA that can be deposited via someone’s touch—on the long underwear JonBenét had on when she died, “The unknown male profile previously identified from the inside crotch area of the underwear matched the DNA recovered from the long johns.”
Lacy’s exoneration of the family was controversial. Stan Garnett, a successor as district attorney, later told People, “I didn’t feel the exoneration was warranted based on the state of the evidence and the complexity of the case.”
In 2016, a forensic pathologist explained to ABC News that while the touch DNA analysis didn’t provide enough of a profile to match the evidence in the long johns with that in the underwear, the markers were “consistent,” and male DNA from an unknown source was present. “Lacy did the right thing,” he said.
Lacy also defended her decision to ABC News, stating that Boulder police had focused on the Ramsey family to the point of ignoring potentially exculpatory evidence.
In 2016, Burke gave his first public interview about JonBenét’s death
Twenty years after his sister’s murder, Burke spoke publicly for the first time in a three-part interview with Dr. Phil McGraw. In this 2016 interview, he said, “I know people think I did it, that my parents did it… I know that we were suspects.”
“People still can’t get that in their head that we didn’t do it,” Burke added.
He explained why he stayed in bed on the morning of December 26: “I guess I just felt safer there… I guess part of me doesn’t want to know what’s going on.” He also said he “would remember” if he’d been there when his mother called 911.
Burke was adamant that while he once accidentally hit his sister while swinging a golf club, he never behaved violently toward her. He theorized that JonBenét was targeted by a pedophile who saw her in a pageant. When asked if he thought his sister’s murder would be solved, he said, “I don’t know, but you got to never give up.”
Burke sued after a documentary accused him of killing JonBenét
The two-part docuseries The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, which aired on CBS in September 2016, assembled a team of investigators who alleged that Burke killed JonBenét.
In the documentary, expert investigators used noise reduction techniques to newly decipher the unintelligible portion at the end of Patsy’s 911 call. Yet what they claimed to hear—three voices, including one they said belonged to Burke—closely matched the leaked call transcript from 1998.
A review of JonBenét’s autopsy also led the team behind the documentary to speculate on what happened in her final moments. “Fragmented pieces of yellow to light green-tan vegetable or fruit material which may represent fragments of pineapple” were found in her stomach. A dish of pineapple in the Ramsey home had Patsy’s and Burke’s fingerprints on the bowl and spoon, so the documentary team concluded JonBenét had eaten a piece of her brother’s pineapple. They posited that Burke subsequently struck his sister with a flashlight discovered in the house.
Shortly after the documentary aired, a lawyer for the Ramsey denied that Burke was involved in JonBenét’s murder. “CBS juxtaposed lies, misrepresentations, distortions and omissions with very few grains of truth to falsely accuse Burke Ramsey of killing his sister,” L. Lin Wood told Rolling Stone.
In December 2016, Burke filed a defamation lawsuit against the network and several people involved with the documentary for $750 million. He reached a settlement, the terms of which weren’t made public, in 2019.
Today, Burke maintains a low profile
For the most part, Burke has shied away from the spotlight. In John’s 2012 book The Other Side of Suffering, he wrote that his youngest son attended Purdue University, got a degree in computer information technology, and found a job with a medical records software company. Today reports the 37-year-old now lives in Michigan.
Aside from his 2016 interview with Dr. Phil, Burke hasn’t spoken with the media. While his father and his older half-brother, John Andrew Ramsey, participated in the new Netflix documentary, Burke did not.
Sara Kettler is a Connecticut-based freelance writer who has written for Biography.com, History, and the A&E True Crime blog. She’s a member of the Writers Guild of America and also pens mystery novels. Outside of writing, she likes dogs, Broadway shows, and studying foreign languages.
