I'm new but have done quite a bit of reading here. When this crime first happened, I wondered if perhaps there was a jealous sibling. After all, this little girl got a lot of attention. Sure enough, turned out there was an older brother. However, when it came out that he was only 9, I became doubtful that he could have done it. Another reason I thought it was a close family member was that PR and JR stuck together to protect the person. Patsy wrote the note--that's mostly as far as I got.
But that CBS program with the kid demonstrating the ability to do it, brought me full circle--along with Burke admitting on Dr Phil that he was up during the night while everyone was supposedly asleep.
Burke must have hit her (circumstances are vague so I won't even speculate) and he may have dragged her down to the basement. I don't know about the strangulation--whether he would have done that and why. It's possible that in his rage, he wanted her deader than dead. Or that he was starting to stage it so no one would know he'd hit her and it would look like an intruder.
Again, I don't know.
But I think that at some point he went to his parents and told them. Patsy either found JBR unconscious from the blow to the head or found her strangled in the basement. Probably she went and got John. They didn't call 911--why? Was it because Burke had already committed the strangulation and that would be so obviously purposeful and deviant?
I think PR and JR told Burke to go back to bed. John staged it or finished what Burke had started. Patsy wrote the note with some help from John. They told Burke that he must have had a terrible nightmare. What a bad dream--that he killed his sister! Now go back to sleep, you've had nightmares before, this will be okay. Burke wasn't so easily convinced so when he heard his parents in the kitchen making the 911 call, he hung around out of curiosity. "What DID you find?" He now knows something has happened and wants to know more.
They may have told him that YES, it wasn't a total nightmare, that he probably did hear something in the night. That's what caused his nightmare. That would have made sense to a 9 year old. That he DID hear "the intruder" and it woke him up enough so that when he went back to sleep he had a nightmare about it. In the morning he hears that JBR is missing. He is clueless though because they've convinced him he was dreaming. But they've told him that, indeed, there was commotion in the night. He is really wondering now.
John can't disguise his anger at Burke and says, "We're not talking to you." (We are talking to the police!) Burke goes back to his room in a state of confusion but not a state of guilt. All he knows is something happened during the night--an intruder?--and his sister is now missing. She could just be hiding or outside for all her knows--and that's what he says later, in all honesty. Later on, he's escorted to the White's home, still feeling innocent. He really doesn't think he knows what happened--he did have a bad dream that night, that's for sure, in his mind. The parents brainwash him some more later on so that he is 100% convinced that it was an intruder. He's 9 yrs old, he believes them. If he ever had any inclination that he did it, he could have repressed it so deeply that he actually has no memory of it today.
Today he KNOWS that there are people out there who speak of pineapple and such. So when he is interviewed, he knows that he'd better say that he doesn't know what a bowl of pineapple looks like. He knows he'd better act dumb when it comes to suggestions that he could have done it. Burke did it but I'm not 100% certain that he even knows he did it.