JonBenet Ramsey Doc Director Slams Claims Brother Burke Is ‘Guilty’

Documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger put online sleuths on blast for their “ludicrous” speculation that Burke Ramsey allegedly was responsible for sister JonBenét Ramsey‘s murder.

During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly about Netflix’s Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, Berlinger recalled attempting to contact Burke, 37, about taking part in the three-part docuseries.

“We reached out through the family [to Burke]. We know where he is but we want to respect his privacy,” Berlinger explained. “He was really deeply affected by all of the accusations that are still happening.”

Berlinger specifically called out true crime fanatics spreading rumors about Burke, adding, “If you go down the Reddit rabbit hole, you’ll see people on discussion boards still postulating that he’s guilty. It’s just ludicrous.”

After researching the case, it couldn’t be more clear to Berlinger that Burke had nothing to do with JonBenét’s death. (He was 9 years old at the time.)

“All you have to do is look at the autopsy results — that no one disputes — to determine how this young girl died,” he noted. “And it’s just impossible to think that a 9-year-old is going to torture his sister with a garrote around her neck that is designed to slowly strangle somebody to death.”

JonBenét was found dead at age 6 in 1996 in the basement of her house hours after she had been reported missing. She had sustained a broken skull and a garrote was tied around her neck. JonBenét’s official cause of death was asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma and her death was ruled a homicide.

The Boulder police looked into many suspects and theories — including Burke and JonBenét’s parents, Patsy and John Ramsey. A grand jury voted to indict the pair in 1999 but the indictment was never signed by the Boulder district attorney due to a lack of evidence. The couple were exonerated in 2008 and continued to advocate for JonBenét’s murderer to be found. (Patsy died of ovarian cancer in 2006.)

Burke, meanwhile, was also accused of being involved in her death. He has denied any involvement and three years after JonBenét’s death, the police and Boulder district attorney publicly stated that Burke was not a suspect. He eventually took a step back from the public eye and hasn’t participated in any documentaries about the nearly 30-year-old murder investigation. Berlinger, however, had the opportunity to work with John and JonBenét’s half brother, John Andrew Ramsey.

“Normally I don’t like having subjects of a show watch it. But in instances where there’s extreme sensitivities, I wanted the family to have the option to watch it a few days before we aired the show. John Andrew Ramsey saw it, liked it and had no negative comments. He thought it was very fair,” the director told Us. “John told me he wasn’t gonna watch it and doesn’t want to watch it when it’s on TV.”

John found the subject matter “too painful to rewatch” after filming his interviews.

“So he didn’t watch it. But interestingly enough, people still want to fixate on this idea that John Ramsey is guilty. But when we agreed to do this [doc], I told him, ‘I have to have the final cut. You will not have any input into the content of the show,’” Berlinger recalled. “But there were no questions that were off limits. He didn’t tell me anything that he wouldn’t talk about.”

Berlinger continued: “He didn’t want to see the final product and still hasn’t had [any] editorial input at all. That is of course essential for somebody like me. I have to have final cut on my shows or I won’t do them. So that says a lot about him — in my opinion.”

John used Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey to explain the obstacles he faced while trying to get justice for his daughter’s death.

“What we are advocating for — and have been doing so for the last year or so, aggressively, is we know there’s five or six items that were taken from the crime scene. They were sent into a lab for DNA sampling and were not sampled,” he told the camera. “We want those items sampled. We want what has been sampled to be retested. Then use the public genealogy database to look for — not only a match — but a similar relative. That’s been used very successfully in the last few years by police departments to find the killer of very old cold cases.”

While making the docuseries, Berlinger found himself believing now more than ever that JonBenét’s case could be solved with the proper resources.

“If the Boulder Police Department does the right thing and does some DNA testing that the family has long been demanding with the advances in technology, the case can be solved. Also I’ve gotten to know John Ramsey as a result of doing this show and he’s like the most brutalized man in American history,” Berlinger said about how widespread the coverage of JonBenét’s murder — and family — has been. “This is because of inexperienced police who did not know how to secure a crime scene and locked into this idea that the Ramseys are guilty and did not move off that idea. A lot of investigative leads were poorly handled.

A spokesperson for the Boulder PD told Us in a statement earlier this month that they are “aggressively investigating the case and pursuing all avenues.” Meanwhile, a source connected to the authorities shared with Us that there have been “new sets of eyes” on the case in an attempt to find “anything that could have been overlooked.”

“No one is off the table. This case is still wide open,” the insider noted. “We are after the truth, whatever that is. We are going to leave no stone unturned. The kindest thing we can do for the Ramseys is to solve this.”

Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey is currently streaming.

With reporting by Leanne Aciz Stanton