JonBenet Ramsey's brother settles lawsuit with CBS: attorney

[January 05, 2019]  By Keith Coffman

DENVER (Reuters) - The brother of slain Colorado child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey has settled the lawsuit he filed against CBS Corp <CBS.N> over a documentary theorizing that he killed her, both sides said on Friday.

Burke Ramsey's attorney, Lin Wood, said the case had been settled but declined to disclose the terms.

"I can only comment that the case has been amicably resolved to the satisfaction of all parties," Wood told Reuters in a telephone interview from his Atlanta office.

A spokesman for CBS confirmed that the lawsuit had been settled but declined further comment.

JonBenet Ramsey was found bludgeoned and strangled in the basement of their parents’ Boulder, Colorado, home on Dec. 26, 1996, touching off a media frenzy.

No one has ever been charged for the murder, but in 1999 a Colorado grand jury seated to examine the case voted to indict the parents for child abuse resulting in death.

The district attorney at the time, Alex Hunter, declined to move forward with a prosecution, citing a lack of evidence.

The four-hour CBS documentary aired in two parts in September, 2016 amid a flurry of media accounts ahead of the 20th anniversary of JonBenet’s death.

At the conclusion of the CBS show, a panel of experts said it had formed the opinion that Burke Ramsey, who was 9 at the time of the killing, struck JonBenet in the head with a heavy object.

The group said it believed the parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, then staged the crime scene to make it appear an intruder was the culprit.
 

Burke Ramsey arrives for the burial service of his mother Patsy Ramsey in Marietta, Georgia on June 29, 2006. REUTERS/Tami Chappell /File Photo

Two months later Burke Ramsey sued CBS, the production company that produced the show, and the experts who re-examined the case, seeking $250 million in compensatory damages $500 million in punitive damages.

In an interview on the “Dr. Phil” talk show that aired before the CBS documentary, Burke Ramsey, now 31, denied harming his sister and said he suspected she was killed by a pedophile who stalked beauty pageants.

Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in 2006 at the age of 49. Her husband, John Ramsey, has since remarried and in 2004 ran unsuccessfully for the Michigan state House of Representatives.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman in Denver; Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Leslie Adler and David Gregorio)

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