14-year-old Josh Phillips killed Maddie Clifton and Kept Her Body in His Room For Days

On November 3, 1998, Maddie, who was eight years old, disappeared from her home in Jacksonville, Florida. No one knew where she went. Hundreds of volunteers joined search parties.

Then, after a week of hard work, Clifton's body was found under the bed of her 14-year-old neighbor, Josh Phillips. She had been hit over the head and stabbed.

When the police found her body, Phillips told them that he had hit Clifton in the face while they were playing baseball, and then killed her by accident when he hit her with a bat to stop her from crying. But Phillips only told half of the story about Maddie Clifton. The real story was much darker.

Even though Clifton had been hit, that wasn't what killed her. Josh Phillips killed her with a utility knife after beating her up. Worst of all, he slept on top of Maddie Clifton's rotting body for a whole week while he and his family were part of the search party.

The Horrible Murder Of Maddie Clifton

Maddie Clifton was born on June 17, 1990, in Jacksonville, Florida.

Joshua Phillips was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on March 17, 1984. In the early 1990s, his family moved to Florida, right across the street from the Clifftons. His father, a computer expert named Steve Phillips, was very strict and violent with his wife, Melissa, and with Josh. Steve also did not allow other kids into their home.

Phillips says that Clifton asked to play with him when he was just playing baseball on Nov. 3, 1998.

Since he knew his parents were out of town, he reluctantly agreed. But he hit her in the face with his ball by accident. She screamed, and Josh was afraid of what would happen if they came home and found another child in the house. To keep her quiet, he took her inside, strangled her, and hit her with a baseball bat.

Then, before his parents got home, he pushed her body, which was already dead, under his waterbed. Sheila Clifton told the police around 5 p.m. that her daughter was missing. Before nighttime, Phillips took off his waterbed and cut the girl's throat.

He stabbed Maddie Clifton seven times in the chest with his Leatherman multi-tool knife and then put his water-filled mattress back on the bed frame. For the next week, tabloids and news stories about Clifton's disappearance were all about the Lakewood neighborhood. Even the Phillips family helped her look for her.

On November 10, Steve and Sheila Clifton were putting the finishing touches on a TV interview that they hoped would help them find their missing daughter. Melissa Phillips was cleaning her son's room at the time, and she thought she saw that his waterbed was leaking. When she looked more closely, she saw Clifton's dead body and ran outside to call for help.

Inside Josh Phillips's Court Case

Police were shocked because they had searched the Phillips' home three times and thought the smell of Maddie Clifton's dead body was just the smell of the birds they kept as pets.

In fact, so many people in Maddie Clifton's close-knit neighborhood were shocked when they heard about her killer that a judge sent the trial to a county halfway across the state to try to avoid jury bias.

Richard D. Nichols, Phillips' lawyer, didn't call any witnesses to the stand because he wanted his closing argument, in which he said Phillips was a scared child acting out of desperation, to be the main part of his defense.

The trial, which got a lot of attention, started on July 6, 1999, and went on for only two days. Josh Phillips was found guilty of first-degree murder after the jury talked for just over two hours. On August 26, the judge gave him a life sentence with no chance of getting a parole.

References and Further Reading:

Harrowing story of child murderer Joshua Phillips who killed his eight-year-old pal Maddie Clifton aged just 14 and left Susanna Reid in tears on ITV’s Children Who Kill.

The chilling case of Joshua Phillips and how the teen murderer was finally caught as his story airs on Children Who Kill.

A Look Back: The disappearance and murder of Maddie Clifton