The brother of murdered beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey has broken his silence in an explosive new interview.
Talking to TV host Dr Phil, Burke Ramsey remembered the morning his frantic mother burst into his bedroom, after first noticing the six-year-old was missing.
But despite it being undoubtedly one of the darkest moments of the then young boy’s life, Burke smiled as he recalled that tragic day.
‘The first thing I remember is my mom bursting in my room, really frantic, saying, “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!” running around my room – now I know looking for JonBenét,’ Burke recalled to Dr Phil.
‘The next thing I remember is a police officer coming into my room and shining a flashlight.’
As the twentieth anniversary of one of America’s most compelling cold cases draws near, Burke Ramsey sat down with Dr Phil for his first ever interview.
In a preview of the interview which aired on the Today show on Friday, Burke recalled his memory of the morning his sister was first reported missing and a ransom note left behind on the stairs.
He was nine years old at the time.
Hours later, Burke’s father John would find his little girl strangled to death in the basement of the family’s upscale Boulder, Colorado home.
For years, John and Patsy Ramsey, as well as Burke, were all suspected of killing JonBenét.
A grand jury even voted to indict the couple in 1999, but the then-district attorney never signed the indictment because he didn’t believe there was enough evidence to convict the Ramseys.
The three Ramsey family members were eventually cleared of suspicion in 2008, when DNA pegged the crime on an unidentified male with no familial relation to JonBenet.
‘I know people think I did it; that my parents did it. I know that we were suspects,’ Burke says in the interview.
Speaking about the interview, Dr Phil said the thing viewers will notice about Burke is his bizarre demeanor.
‘He’s a software engineer. He works remote. He doesn’t go into work everyday.
‘For 20 years he has been off the grid. And my impression is he’s socially awkward,’ McGraw told Today.
‘People are going to be very interested in his demeanor, and they’re going to find his demeanor atypical. He might be talking about some pretty dark aspects of this story and smiling while he’s talking about that.’
When asked why he is speaking out now, Burke said he wanted to ‘honor [his sister’s] memory’.
‘I don’t want anyone to forget,’ he says, adding that he still misses JonBenét very much.
However, he says the years he spent unwillingly in the public eye has caused him to largely distrust the media and has made him a private person.
He says his Dr Phil interview will be his first and last since he has ‘no reason for speaking to the media again’.
‘For a long time, the media basically made our lives crazy. It’s hard to miss the cameras and news trucks in your front yard. And we’d go to the supermarket sometimes and there’d by a tabloid with my picture, JonBenét’s picture, plastered on the front. They would follow us around.
‘Seeing that as a little kid, that was just kind of a chaotic nightmare. So I was pretty skeptical of any sort of media. It just made me a very private person.
‘As to why I’m doing it now, it’s the 20th anniversary and there’s apparently still a lot of attention around it,’ Burke said.