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Thadius “Thad” Phillips & his family relocated to the apparently safe & serene area of Baraboo, Wisconsin & on the evening of Saturday, July 29, 1995, 13-year-old Thad fell asleep on the couch with his sister. The front door was left unlocked since it was their belief that the area was safer than most. Thad remembers briefly waking up to the sensation of being lifted from the couch & at the time, he made the assumption that his father was bringing him to his room as he often did.
Instead of feeling the familiarity of his bed under him, Thad felt the sensation of fresh air on his face & at this point, he was fully awake & absolutely confused. In his groggy state, he realized that he was outside with an unfamiliar boy who was not much older than he was. The boy introduced himself to a still disoriented Thad & asked Thad if he could help him with his car. The boy seemed friendly & still somewhat out of it from sleep, Thad agreed to go with him to what turned out to be a ramshackle house a half-mile away.
Once inside the home the boy continued to have a calm & friendly demeanor & introduced himself as Joe. 17-year-old Joseph Clark said he would be throwing a party & named four other boys that Thad was familiar with, saying they would also be coming over.
As they waited for the others to arrive, Joe invited Thad upstairs & told him he had model cars to show him. Thad followed, unaware of the pain & violence that awaited him. What Thad had no way of knowing at the time was that he was in the home of the Baraboo Bone Breaker & he would become his last victim. For years, the area of Baraboo had been plagued by a series of murders that started with 14-year-old Christian Steiner.
Christian went missing in 1994, one year earlier, after the 4th of July. Because it was a holiday, Christian’s parents initially wondered if he had snuck out of the house, but soon feared that he had been kidnapped when he failed to return home. They first noticed that Christian was missing when they went into his room to wake him at 6:15 am for his shift at a new job. He wasn’t in bed despite the fact that he had been in bed sleeping the night before when they checked on him at 10 pm.
Police speculated that he may have been a runaway but Christian’s parents dismissed this idea since everything was fine at home & he had no reason to run away. Clear signs of an abduction were present when his bedroom screen was found slashed on the ground, the patio door was found unlocked, footprints were found on the ground outside the window & muddy footprints were tracked around the house.
Sadly, less than a week later on July 10, Christian’s body was found in the Wisconsin River; he had been draped over a partially submerged tree along the edge of a sandbar. The medical examiner determined that his cause of death was drowning & the manner of death officially listed as undetermined. When a manner of death is being determined, there are four classifications known as the NASH classification: Natural, Accident, Suicide or Homicide. If it cannot be classified, it is listed as “undetermined.” It’s estimated that 15-20% of deaths around the country occur in an undetermined manner. Despite the fact that the autopsy showed no traumatic injuries to his body, police still believed that the boy was met with foul play. Beyond their grief, Christian’s parents were befuddled with what had happened to their teenage son since they’d seen him sleeping in bed & couldn’t understand why he would have gone outside & how he could have drowned.
There were no leads after Christian’s death & police were hitting a dead end which led to Christian’s parents starting their own investigation. As they spoke with neighbors, one name came up time & time again & this was the name of Joseph Clark who was known as the neighborhood bully. There was much speculation that Joe was likely involved, but because there was no direct evidence tying him to the case, no arrests were made.
Once in the house & upstairs, Thad began to feel a niggling of worry that he could be in danger & this was when Joe’s friendly persona instantly disappeared. Out of nowhere, Joe jumped up, grabbed Thad & pushed him back onto the filthy bed. Thad, stunned, tried to fight the much larger boy to no avail when suddenly, Joe grabbed Thad’s ankle & swiftly twisted it, snapping the bone.
This torture went on for hours at a time & it was said that Joe used the innocent boy’s body as a way to manage his anger & daily frustrations. Thad noticed that Joe was distracted during a moment & took his chance to try to escape. Despite the searing pain from his broken ankle, Thad jumped off the bed & limped as fast his broken leg would allow down the stairs.
When Thad reached the kitchen, Joe was able to catch up to him & put him in a chokehold & dragged him into the living room. At that point, Joe broke Thad’s femur & hip bone by pushing his leg up toward his head & leaning in until the bone snapped. Unable to bear the pain, Thad lost consciousness. When he woke sometime later, Joe was calmly sitting next to him. This calm, friendly demeanor came & went & would be replaced with anger & rage & the torturous sessions went on for 43 hours.
After the acts of torture would end, Joe would talk to Thad & during these calm periods, he explained to him that he had a fascination with bones & the sound of them breaking. He also told him that he had killed two other boys before, one with the name Chris. Thad wracked his head for ways to escape & tried to reason with Joe, assuring him that if he let him go, he wouldn’t tell anyone. He said he would come up with a story that involved him tripping over a table, causing his bones to break, but Joe said that no one would believe this story.
Joe continued the cycle of torture, tending to Thad’s wounds wrapping the areas of bone breaks with thick socks & cloth bandages. He also forced Thad into a pair of leg braces that allowed him to move about the house. These moments of kindness would last only so long before more cruelty & violence ensued, Joe stomping on Thad’s broken bones, jumping on his chest & trying to suffocate him. Joe had a fixation with trying to mend the bones before breaking them again. Thad also revealed that during his time in captivity Joe had masturbated in front of him. Thad felt that his only hope of survival was trying to befriend Joe.
During his time in captivity, Joe would move Thad to the couch so they could watch TV together. In a twisted take on a friendship, Joe would talk with Thad as if nothing was wrong with the situation. Joe spoke of his family, his car & how he lived with his brother inside the filthy home along with his brother’s girlfriend who were in & out of the house at the same time that Thad was being held prisoner.
On his second day of captivity, Joe told Thad that he would be going out & once he was down in the kitchen, Thad could hear him talking to someone. He assumed he must have been talking on the phone since he didn’t hear a response from another person. Before leaving, Joe made sure that his next torture session was especially brutally in order to be sure that Thad would be unable to escape.
After Joe left, despite the unbearable pain, Thad was determined to escape & slid off the bed, crawling to the stairs which he then threw himself down before dragging himself into the living room. As he reached the kitchen, Joe entered the house, accompanied by his girlfriend. Thad slid out of view, hiding in the kitchen as the couple watched TV. After the girl left, Joe soon discovered Thad lying on the kitchen floor & became enraged & locked him inside the closet & continued to do so each time he left the house moving forward.
As the torture continued, Thad’s parents first noticed he was missing at 4 am when he was no longer on the couch or anywhere else in the house. There was no sign of a break-in or that anything sinister had happened, but at the same time, they also knew that their son would not have left the house without telling them first. They searched the town for their missing son & when they still couldn’t find him by the following morning, they contacted police to file a missing persons report. Due to the lack of evidence at the Phillips home, there were no trails leading to Thad’s whereabouts.
As Thad remained confined to the closet in times that Joe would leave the house, he felt around in the darkness for something that could be used for a weapon, digging through piles of junk. In the meantime, Thad was dealing with pain that became more & more unbearable as the hours ticked by & he knew that if he didn’t find a solution soon, he would surely die. As Thad felt around in the dark, he found an old electric guitar that he used to smash out a panel of the closet where he was being held captive.
He managed to reach his hand out & unlock the door of the bedroom & despite his severe dehydration & mangled limbs, Thad dragged himself down the stairs & made it to the kitchen, passing out several times along the way from the unbearable pain. Here, he saw a phone attached to the wall, reached up, shook the cord until the receiver fell & dialed 911. He was able to tell the dispatcher his approximate location & what happened to him. The call was traced & within 30 minutes, police responded to the home & when Thad was found inside, the paramedics were quickly called. He was informed that he had severe internal bleeding as a result of the broken bones & had even two hours passed without assistance, he would have died. His legs had been broken in four locations & the skin on his feet were like rubber with his toes pointing the wrong way. The injuries seen were consistent with a victim of a bad car crash.
During his time in the hospital, Thad was able to provide a full description of his abductor & what he had lived through & only two hours later, police apprehended & arrested Joe at a bar.
Joe’s home was searched & investigators found evidence that indicated that Joe had intended to capture & torment more boys had he not been caught. Police located a notebook inside the home that listed about 29 names of local boys, including some that Thad knew. They were separated into lists as to when he could kidnap them & what he would do to them. There were three sheets of paper with three lists: ‘Get to Now’ (possibly misspelling “get to know”), ‘Can Wait’, & ‘The Leg Thing’. Under each title was a list of intended victims.
When Thad was initially saved from Joe’s house of horrors, he couldn’t remember the full name of either boy that Joe had bragged about previously killing. He only knew that the one boy’s first name was Chris & his last name started with an S. His dad began reading names from the phonebook & as soon as he said the name Chris Steiner, Thad knew that was the one. Thad went on to testify that Joe had spoken about murdering a boy named “Chris” the year before but couldn’t recall the name of the second boy that Joe spoke of & still doesn’t recall the name to this day.
With this information, the case into Christian Steiner’s death was reopened. This came as a surprise to investigators since at the time that his body was discovered, the pathologist who examined Christian found no sign of injury. However, when his body was recovered from the river, it was bloated from being in the water & no x-rays were taken so it was possible that the pathologist had overlooked something. Christian’s cause of death was drowning, but when he bragged to Thad about what he had done to the boy, he said that he murdered him & hung his body over a tree which was exactly how his body was found.
It took nearly a year for Joe to go to trial & during that time, Thad bravely took the stand to recount the horrors he was subjected to in the nearly two days he was being held prisoner. He also recounted Joe’s confession of the murder of Christian Steiner. After Thad’s testimony, Christian’s body was exhumed & an autopsy confirmed that both of his legs had been broken. X-rays from Thad’s legs showed that Christian had suffered from nearly identical fractures with four fractures discovered in Christian’s legs. Despite the fact that he also boasted about killing a second person, police were never able to link Joe to another case.
Joe’s defense opted to pursue the insanity plea & while under oath, Joe claimed that he had no recollection of what happened & argued that Thad had broken his own bones. It was argued that Joe’s biological mom was a heavy drug user during her pregnancy & that he suffered a head injury from a bike crash only the year before. The defense was not prepared for the evidence that the prosecution presented, including the notebook with the list of names of future victims.
In October 1997, Joe Clark was found guilty of the abduction of Thad Philips & the following crimes: Causing great bodily harm to a child, child enticement, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, mayhem & mental harm to a child. Joe pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury believed that he was sane. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison.
District Attorney Patricia Barrett wanted to hold a separate trial for the murder of Christian Steiner & Thad was asked to testify against Joe for a second time. Before the second trial had a chance to begin, Joe’s 15-year-old neighbor Michael Huebsch went to Thad’s house & shot Thad twice in the back with a hunting rifle. Michael & Joe were said to be friends & Michael was upset about the result of the first trial & wanted revenge. Thankfully Thad miraculously survived the attack & was able to testify as planned at Joe’s second trial where an additional 50 years was tacked onto his 100 year sentence.
Little information is available about Michael Huebsch, but according to reports he was charged with attempted murder. In 2018 when he was 35-years-old, he pleaded no contest to one count of second-degree sexual assault of a 15-year-old child & received a 12 year sentence with seven years of extended supervision.
To this day, Joe maintains that he has no memory of what he did to Thad since he “kind of blacked out”; he admits that he kidnapped him but only with the innocent intention of wanting to hang out & claims he is innocent of Christian’s death.
During his stay in the hospital after his rescue from Joe’s house, Thad’s severely broken legs required several surgeries that happened over the course of several years that left him with a permanent limp. Thad went on to sue Joe & won a $21 million settlement & as part of the settlement he was to receive $31,566 in medical damages, $6 million in compensation & $15 million in punitive damages. However, Joe has never had the money to pay Thad & as two decades passed, Thad never received a dime.
After a woman, Olga Johnson & her husband heard about Thad’s case, they decided to set up a GoFundMe with a goal of raising $100,000. Thus far, $10,291 has been raised. Olga felt inclined to help since she realizes that Thad’s bravery & resilience saved future victims from Joe & brought peace & closure to Christian’s family.
References:
- Murderpedia: Joe Clark
- Ranker: The horrifying story of the boy who survived the Bonebreaker Killer
- abc WKOW: Kidnapped & tortured by the ‘Bonebreaker’ survivor never receives $21M award
- Crime Waffles: Joe Clark – The Bone Breaker Killer
- Wisconsin Court of Appeals
- Medium: 13-year-old teen survives torture for over 43 hours
