In the Netflix documentaries 2024 Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?JonBenét’s father John Ramsey and her brother John Andrew Ramsey spoke about the still-unsolved murder of the little beauty pageant winner.

However, JonBenét’s brother Burke, who was 9 years old when his sister was found murdered in the basement of their Boulder, Colorado home in December 1996 and was accused of having something to do with her death, chose not to speak about the case , due to his “past treatment by the media and online web sleuths,” as mentioned in a statement at the end of the last episode. Burke and his family vehemently denied these allegations. Burke was never charged and claimed an intruder killed his sister.

“I’ve committed a lot of true crimes,” documentary director Joe Berlinger tells PEOPLE. “I tried to be very responsible about my true crime. But you always have to remember that there are people on the other side who are real victims of every story. The callousness with which people still point the finger at this family, still point the finger at the brother (Burke). It is absurd to believe that the brother was the murderer for so many reasons. Even the investigators say it’s not the brother. We live in a society of armchair detectives who analyze cases until they die. Sometimes they are helpful and sometimes they are detrimental to both the outcome of the investigation and the people who are victims of these terrible tragedies.”

Berlinger told Today.com that they “didn’t want to pressure Burke and he didn’t want to talk to us and just didn’t want to participate. So we respected that.”

Burke, he said, was “doing well.”

Burke, the son of John and Patsy Ramsey, who died of ovarian cancer in 2006, has remained largely private over the years.

However, the Purdue University graduate in computer and information technology came into the spotlight in 2016 when CBS aired the docuseries. The case of: JonBenét Ramsey.

In the docuseries, investigators theorized, without hard evidence, that Burke accidentally killed JonBenét and his parents covered it up.

To learn more about John Ramsey’s fight to solve JonBenét’s murder while he was still alive, subscribe to PEOPLE now or pick up the new issue of People, on newsstands next week.

The series cited, among other things, Burke’s outwardly emotionless demeanor during police questioning, which legal analyst Scott Robinson and Boulder Police told PEOPLE was not evidence of his guilt.

“You’re not going to find any evidence because that didn’t happen,” Burke said during a three-part series on the allegations Dr. Phil Interview that aired after the CBS docuseries. He later added: “It blows my mind. What other evidence do you need that we didn’t do it?”

On the show, Burke said he decided to take part in an interview because, “I know people think I did it; that my parents did.”

He said the media circus that surrounded his family in the years after his sister’s murder made him wary of the spotlight.

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“Seeing as how it was just a chaotic nightmare as a little kid, I was pretty skeptical of any kind of media. It just made me a very private person,” Burke said. “What I’m doing now is the 20th anniversary and there’s obviously still a lot of excitement. I think I wanted to remember her in some way and not just another news story.”

Burke and his family later filed a $150 million defamation lawsuit against Dr. Werner Spitz, a forensic pathologist quoted in the docuseries, and a $750 million lawsuit against CBS for defamation.

CBS said in a statement to PEOPLE that they would stand by their programming, and in January 2019 both parties agreed to an undisclosed settlement, according to Reuters.

While Burke rejected the Netflix offer, his older brother John Andrew defended him in the series.

“It’s just not fair to him (Burke). When you look back at pictures of 9-year-old Burke … it’s just absolutely absurd to think, ‘Oh yeah, he could have killed his sister and done that level of violence,'” John Andrew said.