Last month, the CBS documentary The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey titillated viewers with supposed new details of the infamous 1996 murder case, and became a ratings juggernaut in the process.
The documentary placed Burke Ramsey, the brother of murdered child beauty queen JonBenét, squarely back the public eye, and he is not at all happy with the intimation that he played a part in his sister’s death.
Overnight, it emerged that Burke has filed a $US 150 million defamation lawsuit against pathologist Werner Spitz, who appeared in promotional interviews for the show, and flat-out accused him of being a killer.
In an interview with CBS Detroit, Spitz claimed that Burke bludgeoned his sister with a flashlight, and that subsequent interference with her body – including the duct-taping of her mouth and binding of her hands – was an attempt to cover this up.
The interview appears to have been scrubbed from the CBS Detroit website, but a transcript of Spitz’s comments read:
“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.”
A lawsuit, filed Thursday in Michigan’s third circuit court, called the accusations “outrageous”, and said that Spitz is a “publicity seeker” whose comments “have no place in an orderly society.” The filing continued:
“”Defendant Spitz made this accusation without ever examining JonBenét’s body, without viewing the crime scene, and without consulting with the pathologist who performed the autopsy on JonBenét … This lawsuit is the first step to holding Spitz accountable for his wrongdoing … [he has] once again interjected himself into a high-profile case to make unsupported, false, and sensational statements and accusations.”
Spitz has previously testified as a defence witness in the murder trials of O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector and Casey Anthony, and was involved in the autopsies of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Burke Ramsay’s lawyer L. Lin Wood said that he has asked CBS to retract the story, and that if they do not do so before the appropriate window of time closes, he will also file a suit against them.
Source: Rolling Stone.
Photo: Dr Phil.
