ACCIDENT OR INTENTIONAL?
‘IGNORE IT, IT WILL GO AWAY’
On 3 November 1998,
Madelyn “Maddie” Clifton, eight, was playing baseball with her 14-year-old neighbour Joshua Phillips in Jacksonville,
Florida, when he accidentally struck her in the face with the ball. With her eye bleeding, she cried and screamed. When she didn’t stop, the teen panicked, fearing the reaction of his strict dad, as he was not allowed to have friends over when his parents weren’t home.
Dragging Maddie inside his house – claiming that her shorts and underwear came off as he did so – he tried to silence her by hitting her with the baseball bat, before slitting her throat and stabbing her in the chest 11 times. He then kept her half-naked body under his bed as police and a 400-strong team of volunteers searched for her for six days. His mother finally found Maddie’s body after noticing a suspicious liquid under her son’s bed. He was arrested at school and confessed immediately.
“The entire time, I was putting myself in a fantasy world that nothing had happened,” Phillips said in 2008. “That was my defence mechanism for everything when I was a kid – if something was wrong, ignore it and it will go away. And it worked a couple of times, that’s why I wanted to believe it.” Phillips’ lawyer said Maddie’s death “began as an accident and deteriorated through a panic that bordered on madness”. But Phillips’ version of events was disputed at his trial, where the then-15 year old was tried as an adult. Prosecutors argued that there was no physical evidence to support his story that they played baseball together or that she got injured during it – there was a lack of dirt and sand on Maddie’s body, and no blood was found in the garden or on the baseball he claimed he had hit her with.
Phillips was found guilty of first-degree murder after a two-day trial in July 1999, and sentenced to life without parole. A “model prisoner”, he has since tried to appeal his sentence several times. His latest appeal was turned down in 2020. Phillips, now 37, said, “I don’t know if I deserve [to be released] or not. Maybe I deserve to die in prison.”
Maddie’s mother Sheila hopes he will never be freed, saying, “Should he ever be released, I pray I will no longer be on this earth.”