@Elvis: Having followed the Ramsey case for a while, I am incredibly dubious of Burke-did-it (BDI) theories. Especially when so much of the purported evidence is based around attempts like these to analyze his behavior during interviews. I don't believe you can lay expectations of a "normal" response on somebody who (1) had his younger sister brutally murdered while he was only 9 years old (2) ended up under public scrutiny for decades, with numerous people believing that he or his parents killed his sister (3) was part of a wealthy family whose patriarch was likely involved in or at least connected with child abuse. This last point is especially important, because I think some of the alleged weirdness around Burke's demeanor could be explained by the fact that he, like his sister, was a child abuse victim (and this would also explain his alleged problematic behaviors like smearing feces in the house). Not to mention, if his parents were involved in this activity, there is a good chance that they coerced him and manipulated his own statements, thus introducing even more potential discrepancies/anomalies in his testimony.
By and large, there seems to be nothing implicating Burke in his sister's murder other than general impressions of "weirdness" on his part. Another major indicator that Burke was
not a murderer being covered for by his parents, as the BDI scenario tends to go, is that on the morning of the 26th (when JonBenet was still just "missing"), John and Patsy allowed Burke to go over to the home of their family friend Fleet White. If their son had just committed a murder and they were trying to protect him, why would they let him out of their sight, into the home of another family where he might make any number of unsupervised disclosures? (Unless the Whites were in on it too, in which case there is a much bigger picture than Burke...see below.) Curiously, this family told a blatant lie to police, having one of the women
pretend to be "Burke's grandma", so that police were allowed to interview him.
@Grizzly: Yes, back in 2019, John Ramsey released a number of photos of his daughter that had never been made public before. And one of them featured JonBenet in the presence of a person whose side profile does look curiously like that of Ghislaine Maxwell, though there isn't enough to really tell. A number of other "coincidences" link the Ramsey and Epstein cases, like Ghislaine using the same Denver law firm (that of Democratic Party powerbroker Hal Haddon) that John hired for his family's defense team, rumors of Ghislaine hiding out in Colorado at one point, plus the likely overlaps between Epstein's network and a pedophile ring in the Denver area overseen by former Arapahoe County sheriff Pat Sullivan.
If the photo of JonBenet does depict Ghislaine, I suspect this was a preemptive strike on John's part, to leave enough ambiguity while sending a message to others in the pedophile ring he was involved in that "If I go down, we all go down". All the evidence from the Ramsey case over the years suggests to me that JonBenet was victimized by a group of pedophiles with the complicity of her family. There are various key figures worthy of suspicion in that regard (like her pageant photographer Randy Simons, who was concerned about "inappropriate" photos of JonBenet getting out, claimed to be followed by a "paramilitary" group that was trying to steal his negatives, and was ultimately arrested on child porn charges in 2019), but other than her father John Ramsey himself, the aforementioned family friend Fleet White deserves the most. His name has come up in two separate out-of-state pedophile ring cases (one in Texas and one in California; see the prior pages of this thread for more info), his family is impressively well-connected (Fleet's father working for Occidental Petroleum; the family oil company
being in business with the very prominent Gettys; Fleet's mother and sister coincidentally being on a trip to China right as the Tiananmen Square protests broke out; Fleet's son and daughter both attending the Naval Academy, with the son wheeling John McCain's mother at McCain's funeral, and serving stints as the Secretary of the Navy's liaison to both the White House and Senate under Trump), and Fleet himself is rumored to have some kind of CIA connection. One of these pedophile ring cases involving the White family described abuse practices (ligature strangulation, head beatings, heightened abuse on holidays) that are disturbingly similar to the circumstances of JonBenet's murder.
Ever since JonBenet's murder, the Ramsey and White factions have basically been sniping at each other, trying to throw the other under the bus. As mentioned above, Fleet's sister-in-law flagrantly lied to police on day 1 to allow the 9-year-old Burke to be interviewed by them. The very same day, Fleet reportedly told his extended family member / future Internet attack dog Tal Jones (note that Jones was the adopted son of an OSS officer and claimed to be connected with the seamy underside of Colorado's legal system) that Burke killed JonBenet, in contradiction to his police statement around the same time stating that he had no suspicions about the Ramseys. During JonBenet's funeral shortly thereafter, the families had a blowout confrontation (by some accounts, Fleet pulled a gun) and the friendship ended. The White family spent the next couple years writing very public missives about how the investigation had been corrupted by the political ties of the lawyers that the Ramseys hired (e.g. the connections of the Haddon law firm to the Boulder County DA's office), hinting but not outright claiming that the Ramseys perverted the justice system to protect themselves. Meanwhile, the Ramseys' private investigative team (made up of various former cops like Lou Smit and Ollie Gray) were willing to probe into a lot of the pedophile underworld, including people like Fleet White, yet wedded themselves to the ludicrous intruder-did-it (IDI) theory of what happened to JonBenet.
Both factions effectively tried to lay sole guilt on the other, emphasizing valid points but cutting out the parts of the picture that made them look guilty as well. With the court of public opinion generally holding that someone in the Ramsey family was involved in the murder, I could see John releasing a photo with Ghislaine as a way to swing the balance back, trying to ensure that he and his family don't take the fall alone.