JonBenet Ramsey's father: 'We tried to shield our son'.

Almost two decades later, John Ramsey has answered some uncomfortable questions about his daughter’s murder.

On Boxing Day in 1996, six-year-old pageant star JonBenet Ramsey was found dead in the basement of her family home.

For 19 years, questions have lingered about how much the young beauty queen’s family knew about her assault and murder — a crime that shocked and intrigued not only the US town of Boulder, Colorado but the entire world.

No charges were ever filed over JonBenet’s death, but speculation has been rife over the years about whether her brother Burke may have been in some way involved in the crime.

Now, JonBenet’s father John Ramsey has finally addressed those rumours.

In an exclusive interview forming part of journalist Barbara Walters’ new true crime series American Scandals, John Ramsey dismissed the rumours as unfounded and said he and his late wife Patsy tried everything they could to protect Burke from learning he was being accused of the murder.

“We tried to shield him from that,” John said of the media rumours about Burke’s so-called involvement, which saw several tabloids print the boy’s face on their front covers.

“Friends would ask us, ‘What can we do to help?’

“We said, ‘Next time you go in the supermarket, call the manager over when you see our child’s photo on the front cover, and ask him to remove it.’ A lot of them did that.”

John also said he still believes the killer will be found.

“I think we will have two ways that will happen,” John said.

“It will either be a DNA match or someone who knows something will become angry or bitter against this person and will tell.”

The Walters interview, which aired in the US on Monday, follows an explosive revelation in 2013 that a grand jury indicted John Ramsey and Patsy Ramsey in the 1990s for child abuse resulting in death and for being an accessory to murder.

The document claims that both parents intended to delay or prevent the alleged killer’s arrest. Although it does not name the alleged killer, the Courier Mail reports that the suggestion of a family cover-up fuelled suggestions that person could be Burke.

But the prosecutor decided not to pursue those charges, and the case remains unsolved to this day.

Burke spoke with police officers briefly after JonBenet’s death, but his parents packed the 10-year-old boy off to stay with relatives soon after the murder.

Now a software developer in his late 20s, the young man has declined to be re-intervewiewed by police ever since.

The upcoming Barbara Walters interview follows revelations by former Colorado police chief Mark Beckner that the Boulder Police Department may have made errors in its handling of the case.

Earlier this year Mr Beckner held an “Ask Me Anything” forum on Reddit, where he admitted the department could done a better job of securing crime scene and interviewing the Ramsey parents.

“I wish we would have done a much better job of securing and controlling the crime scene on day one. We also should have separated John and Patsy and gotten full statements from them that day,” he said.

“Letting them go was a big mistake, as they soon lawyered up and we did not get to formally interview them again until May of 1997, five months after their daughter was murdered.”

JonBenet was found assaulted and strangled in the family basement just hours after her mother called 911, saying she’d found a random note demanding US $118,000 for her daughter’s return.

Patsy and John Ramsey were originally declared to be “under an umbrella of suspicion” by authorities, although the couple insisted an intruder carried out the attack. They spent 10 years denying their guilt before Patsy Ramsey died in 2006.

In 2008, DNA testing found evidence linking the crime scene to an unidentified “third party” — evidence that appeared to exonerate the Ramsey family from involvement in the death.