Burke Ramsey, the brother of JonBenét Ramsey, has filed a $150 million lawsuit against a forensic pathologist who claimed he is responsible for the death of his child beauty queen sister two decades ago.
The lawsuit was filed on Oct. 6 and argues that forensic pathologist Dr. Werner Spitz defamed Ramsey’s character with false statements in an interview promoting the CBS documentary, “The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey.”
The finale of the documentary concluded that then-9-year-old Burke accidentally killed his sister when he hit her over the head with a flashlight after a quarrel over pineapples. The documentary also theorized that the Ramsey family tampered with evidence and obstructed justice by misleading investigators. The family were exonerated by DNA evidence in 2008.
Prior to the Sept. 19 airing of the CBS documentary, Spitz reiterated his findings of the case in an interview with CBS Detroit.
“If you really, really use your free time to think about this case, you cannot come to a different conclusion ...It’s the boy who did it, whether he was jealous, or mentally unfit or something...I don’t know the why, I’m not a psychiatrist, but what I am sure about is what I know about him, that is what happened here,” Spitz said.
The interview has since been removed from the CBS Detroit website.
Following the interview, Ramsey’s lawyers asked Spitz to retract his statements, but he refused.
The complaint, which was filed in Wayne County Circuit Court in Detroit, alleges that Spitz’s conclusions were made “without ever examining JonBenet’s body, without viewing the crime scene, and without consulting with the pathologist who performed the autopsy on JonBenet.”
Ramsey’s suit also accuses Spitz of being an attention seeker who has a “history of interjecting himself in high profile cases,” including the murder case against Casey Anthony. Anthony was accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee Anthony, but she was found not guilty in 2011.
In a three-part interview with Dr. Phil McGraw on his eponymous show, Burke addressed the speculation that he killed his sister.
“I don’t know what to say to that, because I know that’s not what happened,” Burke, 29, said, reported Entertainment Tonight. “There’s been people who have said that’s not even physically possible for a 9-year-old to do that. Look at the evidence or the lack thereof.”
To this day, the case remains unsolved.
