Teen Killer Kidnaps The “Wrong” 13 YO Boy | The Disturbing Case of Thad Phillips
– Police! Thad? – I’m here, it’s me. – I’m sorry it took us so long. Sorry! Oh god… – On July 14, 1995, 13-year-old Thadius Phillips moved into the city of Baraboo, Wisconsin. Two weeks later, he was laying on his neighbor’s bed with almost every bone in his body, fractured or crushed as he had become the latest victim of the Bonebreaker.
– And what did your foot look like? – Backwards. – He enjoyed breaking bones. He enjoyed the sound of breaking bones. – What do you mean backwards? – Facing up to a direction it shouldn’t have been facing. – There were three sheets of paper. There were three lists. One was called “get to know”, one was called “can wait”, and one was called “leg thing”.
– I just got a call from a kid. Says he’s been kidnapped. He’s in a house on Highway U, Both his legs are broken and his ankles. – He was so calm and collected that I felt he was playing a prank. – This better not be a joke, I tell you that… – Here he says no, no. He says: “Just get me outta here, as soon as you can.
” – I can’t believe somebody was kept in this closet. I can’t believe the kid busted outta there. I can’t believe he’s still alive. – 13-year-old Thad Phillips, kidnapped, tortured and left for dead was the last victim of the infamous Baraboo Bonebreaker. – The bone is being bent this way and that’s what we see here, but to a much greater degree.
– Killing a young boy every summer in the worst way possible, the killer terrorized the small community for years. – We all started to feel that. I don’t know how else to explain it, it was just a sense of evil. – For almost 50 hours, Thad Phillips survived on his own against the Bonebreaker. – In one moment, his whole world changes and then we unleashed the monster.
– But when Thad learned that he wasn’t his first victim, he knew he had to find a way out, a way back to his family, and in doing so, make sure that he would be his last. – Thad is a pretty straightforward kid, and he didn’t wanna die, so he was willing to do what it would take. – In the rural town of Baraboo, Wisconsin after the 4th of July celebration 14-year-old Christian Steiner went to bed early.
Around 10:00 p.m. his father took a minute to check on him and he was sleeping in his bed. But the following day, Chris was nowhere to be found. His parents fearing something might have happened to him contacted the police. Their initial thought was that he probably snuck out, as it was the 4th of July weekend after all.
But after they noticed that the usually locked patio door was left open a detective was sent to investigate their house. Within minutes, he spotted more signs of foul play like the screen from Chris’s window being cut up. On top of that, there were muddy footprints in and outside the house, of a shoe size bigger than what Chris wore, but without any other leads, the hours turned into days, until the 10th of July, when the police made a grim discovery.
– We found a body floating partially submerged. It was immediately apparent that the body was in very poor condition. It was in an advanced state of decomposition. The pathologist told us that he was ruling a death by drowning and the manner of the death he was leaving as undetermined at that point. – From then on, the small community was in a panic and a full fledged investigation was put in place, since the initial leads were already pointing toward a potential abduction.
But during the week following his disappearance Chris’s parents took it upon themselves to ask around. And one name kept coming back amongst the tattle and suppositions of their friends and neighbors. Joseph Clark, a local teenage bully with a taste for trouble. – It was all hearsay. Nobody could give me something that directly stated that, yeah, they heard from Joe Clark directly that this is what he said, or this is what he did.
– We were basically at a dead end. We had no further information coming in and we had exhausted all leads. – Soon enough, the case went completely cold and nothing major happened in Baraboo until just a little over a year later, Connie and Donald Phillips had just moved into the town with their children. Amongst them, their 13-year-old boy Thadius, had just started school the week before.
On July 28, the family decided to watch a movie after dinner, and Thad fell asleep in front of the TV. Later that night, Thad was picked up by what he assumed to be his father. – And I opened up my eyes a little bit and I’m being carried through the… my den in our new house. And it’s nothing really new to me because my mom and dad carried me to bed when I’d fall asleep before.
– Dozing off, thinking he would be tucked into bed any minute, Thad didn’t realize what was happening before it was too late. When he opened his eyes, he was outside in front of the house of one of his neighbors. Then his abductor dropped him on the ground and asked him to follow him inside. Scared and confused, Thad obliged.
Once he passed the door, he finally caught a glimpse of his abductor. And he was just a teenager, maybe around 17 or 18, even though he was almost twice his size Thad thought he was just a fellow kid, probably a friend of his brother and didn’t feel threatened at first. The teen asked him to follow him upstairs.
And, to this day, Thad still wonders why he accepted. – I don’t know how to explain that. I can’t explain that. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know why. You know, I was looking around. He was being the nicest guy in the world, talking about models and baseball cards and football cards and that’s what I was into at the time.
We were sitting on his bed, he was sitting next to me and just all of a sudden he stood up. – At this point, his kidnapper completely shifted his mood and suddenly became enraged and frantic. He grabbed him in his arms and threw him back on the bed, even sat down beside him and reached for his leg. Thad started kicking and fighting back as much as he could, but eventually he grabbed a hold of his right foot and twisted it so hard that the bone snapped.
In shock, Thad stopped fighting back and his abductor took a step back. He put his hands around his face and started mumbling to himself, realizing that the kidnapper was distracted. He tried to make a run for it. – Kinda looked away, and as soon as he looked away, I got up and ran as fast as I could down the stairs.
Can’t run very fast with a broken ankle. But I got down the stairs and through his living room into the kitchen before he finally caught up to me got behind me and put me in a hold, drug me back into his living room. – And this is when he learned the extent of his abductor’s brutality as he went on to break his right leg femur and hip bone.
This sent Thad reeling in pain and he passed out. When he came back to himself, the kidnapper was sitting beside him, acting calmly and friendly again. He began talking to him, explaining that he always had a fascination with bones. He then laid down on the couch and told him to get some sleep, but Thad didn’t lose a minute.
After the teenager fell asleep, he started to look around, searching for something he could defend himself with. But the house was mostly empty. The only things he had at hand were piles of trash, moldy leftovers, and dirty clothes. So he tried to get off the couch, but this is when the pain really kicked in, sending his entire body into tremors.
And that’s how he spent the remainder of the night paralyzed by pain and fear, with his eyes wide open, waiting. – A little bit of me maybe thought that maybe he was gonna let me go the next morning, but that was never his intention. I was pretty much aware that there was people like that in the world. But I just didn’t think they’d live half a mile away from me.
– The next morning when he asked him if he could call his parents, his abductor immediately told him yes. When he handed him the phone he frantically started to dial his parents’ number. He then pulled it next to his ear, waiting breathlessly for the line to pick up. But when he heard the teenager giggle in the corner of the room, his high hope fell crashing down.
He cut the phone cord before handing it to Thad. He was resentful, but knew better than to make him angry. So instead he tried to befriend him, to buy himself some time and fend off the next attack. – That’s exactly what I was trying to do is to talk to him, maybe kind of be friends with him so he wouldn’t wanna hurt me no more.
I was just hoping to hear a knock on the door, and it’d be my dad at the door. But that never happened. Not his fault, how was he supposed to know? – And his strategy worked for a while, but after they spent around two hours in the living room watching TV, the kidnapper turned around and riveted his eyes on Thad.
He recognized that stare. It was the same unprovoked, enraged look he had in his eyes the day prior. The teen then picked him up and carried him upstairs where he repeated yesterday’s ordeal. But this time with his left leg. When he heard the bone snap a rush of adrenaline filled Thad’s body during which he was able to lift his upper body up to his attacker’s level.
– I punched him in the back, and he turned around and put a pillow over my face and told me that if I didn’t stop fighting, he’s gonna break my back or my neck. So I was trying to slow it down. Everything was just happening so fast. I didn’t want a broken neck or broken back. I just basically did what he wanted me to do.
I just wanted to get outta the house and back to mine. – After the attack, his abductor started to act differently. Up to that point, he would either be friendly or completely out of his mind with anger. But he had a third side to his personality one that he hadn’t shown before. He told Thad that as much as he liked to break bones, he loved to try and fix them even more.
So he gathered a bunch of elastic bandages he had laying around, and then pulled out a drawer filled to the brim with brand new white socks. – There was some childlike almost fascination with making him right, so then he could just again, continue to torture. He had that, forgive the term, captive audience, for as long as he wanted.
The fun is in making him dysfunctional again. – He wrapped those ace bandages around my legs and he had these leg braces from hospital or something I don’t know, putting those on me. He had socks and he put layers and layers of socks on my feet, and it had to be just perfect every single sock. – As the day went on, alternating between torture and mending sessions, his abductor eventually told him that he would be going out for the evening.
When he left to get ready, Thad noticed something strange down the stairs, maybe in the kitchen. His kidnapper was talking to someone, and he kept listening for any signs pointing towards someone else being in the house. But he heard nothing. So Thad deduced that there was probably a phone somewhere. His mind was now set.
He had to find a way to access that phone no matter how. But somehow his abductor knew something was up, and did his worst to dissuade Thad from even trying to escape. – Before he left Saturday night, he made sure that he busted me up pretty good so that I wouldn’t try to leave. I thought if I didn’t get outta here yet, I was gonna die.
But I knew that that wasn’t gonna happen. I was gonna get outta there. – Once he heard him go outside, he crawled down the bed and dragged his body up to the staircase. Then he tried to slide in his legs first, the same way a toddler would do. But the pain was so intense that he had to give up. And he knew there was only one way down.
– Threw myself down the stairs, and I dragged myself in the living room. And this took, I don’t know how many hours it took but I kept passing in and out, in and out. And I got almost to the kitchen doorway, right before it, and then he came in with his girlfriend. I’m thinking, be smart, you know, don’t make him mad.
So I’m laying there and I’m listening and I’m being quiet as hell. They’re in there talking and kissing. I can hear him and stuff, then she leaves and he comes walking in the living room and his eyes just bulged out of his head to see me down there like that. – As this was going on, Thad’s parents, Connie and Donald Phillips started to get worried about his disappearance.
From the early morning, mere hours after his kidnapping, to late in the evening, they searched the whole town and the surrounding area for their son. – We drove around and looked around. We went out to the river, and I searched the fairgrounds. – Just, there was no Thad, my son was gone. – They did their best to find him on their own but it was a fair weekend, and thought that maybe he was just out with some friends somewhere.
There were no signs of foul play in their house. The only weird thing they noticed was that the light in the kitchen was left on, and usually they turned it off before going to bed. But in retrospect, Donald admits that he committed one crucial mistake. – I just never thought to check house to house ’cause we didn’t know any of the neighbors very close.
So if I would’ve, I would’ve probably found him before he was hurt as bad as he was. – On Sunday morning, 24 hours after their son’s disappearance they finally accepted the dire reality. Their son was gone. So they filed a missing person report with the county police. Officers received the order to keep an eye out, but with no evidence to be found in the Phillips house, there wasn’t much they could do, so they had to send them home and told them to stay close to the phone.
– I was looking out the window, waiting for the phone to ring. I just couldn’t believe it was going on, or what was going on. I didn’t know what to think. I just wanted to hear from him. It was just hell. – That same day, Thad woke up late in the morning. The first thing he thought of was what his abductor told him the night before, that what he went through so far was only a warmup.
And that soon enough he would have to pay for attempting to escape. – He’s really trying to do some damage now because of what I did the night before. I almost got away. He’s jumping on my legs with his knees and I was just trying to talk to him and keep him away from me. Stop from busting my legs up some more.
And I asked him if he’d done this to anybody else. And he said, “Yeah.” – Probably assuming that Thad wouldn’t survive another day under his watch, he told him the names of some of his past victims, but then his eyes filled up with rage. – Thad just shut down, and blocked in his mind what was going on. And all he was focused on was surviving.
What did he have left? He had his mind. – He was waiting for his girlfriend to come. And I knew this, I don’t know how I knew, can’t remember how I knew. And I’d say, “Oh, I hear, I can hear something, I can hear something.” He’d jump up, he’d go run over to another window and go look out. Oh, she wasn’t there.
– Unbeknownst to Thad, the internal damage done by the repeated fractures and displacement of his bones caused internal bleeding to build up inside his legs. This condition can rapidly become deadly if left unchecked. So Thad continued to pretend he heard her arrive, to create some moments of respite in between the attacks.
This stalled his attacker, until he actually heard her coming into the driveway. So he grabbed him and locked him up in a closet. Trapped, Thad was out of options. After an hour or so, he noticed how the pain in his legs kept getting worse and worse. He needed to find a way out of the closet. So he started looking around at the piles of trash and junks surrounding him.
– I wanted to get out of the closet to get back down the stairs to that phone. I started looking around and digging through stuff and I found an old wooden electric guitar. I busted a panel off the door and was able to unlock it. And I remember when I busted the panel off the door first thing that went through my head, was “Oh, you busted the door.
” No hesitation about making a break for it. – From this point on, Thad knew what he needed to do. He repeated the same exact step he did the day before but this time with absolutely no hesitation, even when he had to face a staircase again, he went all in, knowing this was probably his last chance at survival. – Pulled myself out, threw myself down the stairs again.
Moved myself a foot, pass out, moved myself a foot, pass out. Finally, I’m into the kitchen. Luckily for me, he had a big long, windy cord on the phone that hung way low. I jiggled the cord, just jiggled the cord real hard, and the… And the receiver came down. But luckily for me, the buttons are on the phone down here, instead of up there.
So I was able to call 911. – I just got a call from a kid. Says he’s been kidnapped. He’s in a house on Highway U. Both his legs are broken and his ankles. And… – This better not be a joke, I tell you that. – Here he says, no, no. He says: “Just get me outta here as soon as you can.” – Minutes later, the police arrived at the house.
– Okay the officers are there, Hold on, stay on with me though, okay? – Okay. – Police! Thad? – In here. – Wait, is anybody else here with ya? – Nope, just me. – Yeah, I can’t believe somebody was kept in this closet. I can’t believe the kid busted outta there. I can’t believe he was still alive. – In the ambulance, Thad was informed that, due to internal bleeding, he would’ve died in about two hours if his injuries would’ve been left unchecked.
Once at the hospital, he was reunited with his parents. And the first thing Thad told them was that he wasn’t the first of his victims. – I couldn’t remember, but I knew it started… I think I remembered it was Chris, and it started with an S. So me and my dad were flipping through the phone book and he’s reading off all the S last names and he said, “Steiner.
” And I said, “Yep, that’s it, that’s the one.” – Later that night, police arrested a suspect in a bar. 18-year-old Joseph Clark. The same person they suspected to be involved in the murder of Chris Steiner about a year earlier. Following this event, his case was reopened and his body was exhumed, so the police could produce x-rays of his legs.
– This would be Thad, and this would be Chris. These two fractures have almost identical mechanisms of injury, in a sense that the bone is being bent this way and that’s what we see here. But to a much greater degree. – Due to the reopening of Chris’s case, the procedures took over a year to get to trial. During that time, Thad went through multiple surgeries as the doctors were trying to put his broken legs and hips back together.
But during the entirety of his treatment, he only had one thing in mind. – I couldn’t wait to get up there and testify against him. I wanted to do it. I wasn’t scared at all. – At the trial, he revealed everything, starting with Joe’s mention of his past victim, Chris Steiner. Then he went on to explain his own ordeal.
– And what did your foot look like? – Backwards. – What do you mean backwards? – Facing up to a direction it shouldn’t have been facing. – Joe’s attorney chose to plea for an insanity defense. Under oath, Joe told the jury that he had no recollection of any of the events mentioned, and that Thad broke his own bones.
Bringing in psychiatric experts to ascertain that his memory loss and disillusion were signs of insanity, his defense team was caught completely off guard when Patricia Barrett pulled out a dirty school notebook from the evidence bag. This book contained proof that Joe had been lying all along. – There were three sheets of paper.
There were three lists. One was called “get to know”, one was called “can wait”, and one was called “leg thing”. There were lists of boys on each of those. – This, on top of Thad’s testimony, and the recent discoveries made in Chris’s case provided enough evidence to find him guilty of attempted murder and kidnapping.
He was originally sentenced to 100 years in prison, but a lot can happen during one sentence, and Barrett needed more if she wanted to be sure he would stay behind bars. So she asked Thad to testify against him a second time, in a trial focusing solely on Chris’s case. But in a grim twist of events, Joe Clark’s front door neighbor, 15-year-old Michael Huebsch, went up to Thad’s door and shot him twice in the back with a hunting rifle, right before the trial.
Allegedly Huebsch and Clark were good friends, and he was resentful toward that after the results of the first trial were released to the public. But nonetheless, Thad showed up at the second trial, injured, but determined to take him down. In the end, Joseph Clark was sentenced to 100 years in jail, plus a life sentence without parole, and a 21 million dollar debt towards Thad and his parents to help them pay for his costly medical bills.
To Kevin Heimerl, the detective in charge of Chris’s case, at only 13, Thad truly accomplished the impossible by not only surviving, but also bringing closure to Chris’s family. – Unbelievably strong for that age. And to think that what he lived through over the course of one weekend is something that many people, probably even adults, would’ve rolled over and given up, and allowed themselves to die sometime during that weekend.
And to have to tell that story in front of so many people. Not only once, but a second time, is remarkable. He’s a true hero. – Now in his 40s, Thad got to grow up with his family and now even has his own. But sadly, due to the complexities of his injuries, he still walks with a slight limp, a constant reminder of the weekend he had, to look death in the eyes and live to tell the tale.
Even if the Bonebreaker left his mark on him he continued to move forward. Today, he holds the love he received from his family as the main contributor to his survival. – I was thinking about my family constantly through it. – He carries this love with him, and continues spreading it as a father to his own children.
– I survived because I wanted to be with my family. I didn’t wanna leave my family and I know they wouldn’t wanna lose me.
