The Case That Made Police Physically Sick | True Crime Documentary

“Her name is Maddie, she goes…”

“Is Natalie her last name?”

“Clifton.”

“How old is she?”

“She’s 8 years old.”

“A neighbor calls police to her home across the street from Maddie’s home. She’s made a gruesome discovery in her 14-year-old’s bedroom. A body is stuffed in his waterbed.”

“We found Maddie Clifton this morning at about 7:30 a.m. She was dead.”

“I’m here to announce the arrest of Joshua Earl Patrick Phillips.”

Jacksonville, Florida.

It’s here that we find 8-year-old Madeline Rae Clifton, known as Maddie. She lived with her dad, Steve, her mom, Sheila, and her older sister, Jessie.

Maddie loved sports, especially basketball, and was always outside doing something; you couldn’t keep her in. She just wanted to play with everyone all the time. As well as her love of sports, she was also great at dance and played music too, showing real talent for the piano. One minute she was performing on stage, a poised and graceful ballerina, and the next she was on the pitch playing football, ready to get stuck in. One thing her family said stood out about her was her kindness and empathy that showed itself from a young age. She hated seeing people by themselves; anyone that looked lonely or uncomfortable, you could always rely on Maddie to walk right over, introduce herself, and get them included.

The Lakewood neighborhood on Jacksonville’s southside, November 3rd, 1998.

At 5:00 p.m., Maddie, as usual, was outside. Her choice of sport for that day was golf, and she was hitting balls up and down the street. All the residents in the area were close; everyone knew everyone, and Maddie was a frequent face at most people’s doors, asking if other kids could come out to play. At 6:30 p.m., it was time for dinner, and Sheila called Maddie and Jessie inside. Jessie walked in alone and said she hadn’t been with Maddie and didn’t know where she was. Everyone she would normally be playing with also had no idea; none of the parents had seen her either. After only a short while calling out and looking around, Sheila called 911.

“Her name is Maddie, she goes…”

“Is Natalie her last name?”

“Clifton.”

“How old is she?”

“She’s 8 years old.”

“Where was she playing at?”

“Around… right around the house here. She had on a pair of shorts and a red t-shirt.”

“When’s the last time anybody saw her?”

“4:30 to 5:00… about 5:30 was the last time we saw her, and I was letting the kids play out here for a little while and then she just… she disappeared.”

Later that night, just about everyone in the area was out with flashlights. All you could hear was Maddie’s name being called over and over. As the temperature dropped and the sky darkened, the search only gathered more people. Neighbors said Maddie was everyone’s daughter, everyone’s sister, everyone’s friend, with so many other young children in the area that all played out together all the time, it was hard for this not to resonate.

As the sun rose, it was now lighter and slightly warmer and it brought a fresher and clearer state of mind and vision, but frustratingly there were no clues anywhere, no items of clothing, nothing that linked anything to Maddie. By the 24-hour mark, residents said it was almost circus-like; if you weren’t at work or school, you were out searching.

Cars were being stopped coming in and out. National Guard troops were called in to go through the sewer system, dumpsters, open manhole covers, and check miles upon miles of woodland and ponds.

The FBI were also soon involved and a $100,000 reward was on the table, and neighbors’ houses were being turned upside down. One neighbor of Maddie was quickly honed in on: a man named Larry, who lived five doors down from the Cliftons. They kept coming back to him when it seemed he might have been one of the last people to see her. When he told police that he was chipping golf balls in his yard, he saw Maddie, who was doing the same thing just between his house and other neighbors’. She had walked off to get more golf balls and he never saw her again.

He was interviewed by officers about 10 times, once for 8 hours. Larry had been arrested almost 20 years beforehand in two separate incidents for sexual battery; in both cases, the charges were dropped. He admitted that he had failed the lie detector test but insisted he had nothing to hide. Even said he would give them whatever samples they needed and turn everything over.

“I’m a prime suspect. I’m 45 years old, I play with children, and I have a criminal record that makes me a suspect,” Larry said.

Police had spoken to every neighbor, but six people more intensely. However, after 4 days, they ended the neighborhood search and they started to concentrate on following leads that took them out of the area. Lieutenant Mark Foxworth, a police homicide detective, said they did not have any evidence that anyone had kidnapped her.

“We’re not looking at this right now as an abduction or sexual abduction. The child could simply have walked away. We just don’t know right now. But as time passes, it becomes more possible that foul play was involved,” he said.

It was now a week since Maddie went missing, and a neighbor across the street was about to make an awful discovery. 14-year-old Joshua Phillips and his family had been out looking day and night for Maddie. Joshua and Maddie played together a lot.

“Hey, hi.”

“So she’s across the street and then she’s also from across the street.”

“Oh my God!”

His mother, Missy, had been walking past his room lost in thought when she peeked inside. It was such a mess and full of rubbish. She couldn’t have him sleeping like this, so she grabbed a bag and started cleaning up. Maddie’s missing person’s flyer lay on one of his bedside tables. Joshua had a waterbed, and as she picked things up off the floor, she saw a wet spot. Missy had been smelling something odd for a couple of days and this had to be the cause of it: leaking water that was creating damp and thus a horrible smell. She pulled up the mattress and noticed that the frame was collapsing. How on earth was he even sleeping on this? The bed was clearly broken, so she started lifting everything off it to fix it. She saw a small sock intertwined in the frame, but when she went to pull it out, it was stuck. Getting down on her hands and knees, she looked under the bed frame before recoiling in horror. A small foot was in front of her. She said her eyes knew what she was looking at and what this meant, but her brain was fighting connecting the dots. In a panic, Missy ran right out of the front door and straight over to a police officer and pulled him upstairs. Within minutes, tape was going up everywhere and Missy’s house was full of people. She had just found the decomposing body of Maddie Clifton under her 14-year-old son’s bed. As they removed her tiny body, her hand was found clutching the frame.

The police had searched the Phillips house a couple of times and also noticed the weird smell, but everyone put it down to the fact that Joshua had several birds as pets.

“A neighbor calls police to her home across the street from Maddie’s home. She’s made a gruesome discovery in her 14-year-old’s bedroom. A body is stuffed in his waterbed.”

As news that a body had been found started to spread, an impromptu prayer circle formed on the street. Onlookers, neighbors, and friends then tuned in to a televised press.

“Executive clemency or parole, I would support it—not for it to be done today, but for reconsideration of the life sentence.”

When death happens, especially a death like this, everything big changes and everything you might see once so small changes too. The silence is often deafening. Jessie said it moved the course of her life and she started to lose her identity. She described herself as a nerdy kid growing up, never wanting to be with the popular kids, often being picked on, but suddenly with the murder of her sister, everyone wanted to know her. She felt as though she was no longer Jessie Clifton; she was Maddie Clifton’s sister. And being stuck in that place of never wanting to forget she was her sister, but also grieve her sister, and then try to navigate growing up and being her own person, it must have been so challenging. Missy Phillips, Joshua’s mom, had a very similar journey, one that even ended up bringing her and Jessie together. 2 years after Joshua was sentenced, his dad, her husband, would be killed in a car crash. Missy just wanted to pull away from society and split her time between Jacksonville and North Central Florida, hoping she could reinvent herself. But Jessie, much with the same energy that Maddie had, started turning up at her house to walk the dog for her. She would sit at the window waiting for Missy to pull up in the driveway with her shopping so she could run outside and help her carry it all in, no matter how anyone looked at Missy as she walked past. Jessie just, the way her little sister always did, would not have anyone feel alone. Jessie said she was such a sweet, kind person; she didn’t deserve what happened.

“I feel like she feels everyone was against her. She found Maddie and I cannot even imagine that, and then to realize what her son did—that is a lot for one person to handle.”

Missy would send the family a Christmas card each year, and through a lot of the earlier court hearings, both Sheila and Missy would sit together.

“She’s a mother. She’s a mom,” Sheila said.

Missy said:

“We have a shared sorrow, but I think as mothers we understand each other’s position. I think if the situation was reversed, she would be doing the same thing that I’m doing. I can’t change what was; I can only move forward and help my son because he is still here, and he is worth saving.”

And Maddie’s mom and dad, Sheila and Steve, would divorce after 25 years of marriage and having known each other since high school. Jessie said:

“Put simply, they handled grief differently in such a way that they couldn’t stay in sync.”

Jessie said that getting used to pulling only three plates, three forks, and three knives from the cupboard instead of four was awful. Every time, it took her 3 years to stop automatically grabbing things in fours. And then Sheila, unable to live in the same house anymore, moved out, so Jessie had to get used to putting everything in twos now, for her and her dad.

“Then there’s a neighbor from across the street.”

“Hey, hi.”

“So she’s across the street and then she’s also from across the street.”

“Hi, guys.”

When you think of the reason that Maddie Clifton knocked on his door that day, to let him know that she was there to be his friend, it makes an already sad case even more so. It seemed that Maddie was really a little light in that small community. She clearly brought a lot of love and joy to people’s lives. Maddie’s selflessness, her kindness, her emotional maturity shone at such a young age; she just wanted to be a friend to everyone. And what started as such a pure intention and interaction on November 3rd turned into the most unthinkable tragedy for so many people.