The Baraboo Bone Breaker kept a journal in his bedroom. It contained the names of 25-30 boys and their telephone numbers, arranged under three lists: one called “Get to Know,” another “Can Wait,” and the third “Leg Thing.”
The terrible epithet belonged to a 17-year-old sexual sadist named Joseph Clark, who had the audacity to later stand up in court and say, “Yeah, I broke their legs, and if you don’t shut up, I’ll break yours too.”
But this story isn’t about him. It’s about Thad Phillips, the 13-year-old victim who survived him and led to his capture, all because of an old electric guitar.
The Fiery Spirit Of Young Phillips
Two weeks before the attack happened, Thad Phillips and his family had moved to Baraboo, Wisconsin. Thad had been an athletic young baseball player. Despite his small stature, he had incredible speed and resilience.
And that made him a formidable third base player for the Merrimack Flames Little League team. But at the time of moving, Thad was aging out of Little League eligibility.
He still spent time on the field. Soon after moving to Baraboo, he quickly became part of the local baseball scene. The Baraboo White team took him in as a pitcher, as per a podcast reconstruction of his early life from archived news articles.
In many ways, Thad was a quintessential teenager. He often fell asleep on the couch, and had to be carried to his own bed by his father, Donald Phillips. The early morning incident on 29th July 1995 began the same way.
He was asleep, and felt himself being carried. Naturally, he assumed it was his father and that he would reach his own bed. But some time later, he woke up to an unexpected sight.
The BoneBreaker Takes Thad Phillips
28th July 1995, the evening before the incident, the Phillips family had come back from dinner and everyone was sitting around for a bit. Some time later, the parents went to bed. Only Thad and his younger sister were on the couch watching TV.
The kids fell asleep. At some point in the night, Thad started to drift out of sleep and noticed he was being carried. At first, he assumed it was his father.
But when his vision cleared, he noticed a stranger carrying him out of the house. The stranger, now known as Joe Clark (17-years-old), introduced himself and asked for help with a car.
Joe Clark was a local boy notorious for being a teenage bully, and his name had even come up in the Chris Steiner murder case, but nothing materialised since there was no direct evidence.
Thad was oblivious to this. “It was dark, I didn’t really know what was going on. I’d just moved there. I wasn’t scared, I didn’t know I should be scared.” He recounted in a video interview series.
Clark reportedly took him to his house a mile away. Thad described the house as a dump, and said that there were old dishes & food everywhere.
The 17-year-old told the boy he was going to have a party, and that kids Thad knew from school were going to be there. Clark assured him they were just going to ‘hang out and have a good time’.
Later, he took Thad upstairs to his bedroom on the pretext of showing him his model cars & trucks. That was when Clark’s behaviour started to change. He freaked out, and threw Thad onto the bed.
Then Clark grabbed his right ankle and violently twisted it until it fractured. Somehow, after all of this, Thad managed to free himself and limp downstairs. But Clark got hold of him and threw him onto the couch.
Then the attacker forced one of Thad’s legs up to his head and applied enough pressure to cause a fracture in the thigh. Surprisingly, Clark’s demeanor flipped after this act of violence.
He started talking to Thad like a normal person again and made small talk. In the earlier-mentioned video series, Thad recounts asking Clark why he was doing it. The 17-year-old replied, “I like the sound of breaking bones.”
This was a pattern with Clark. He would injure Thad and then return to normal, even providing care for the injuries. This behaviour continued for the whole time Thad was captive.
Thad speaks about these assaults at length in the documentary below by Unseen. It contains interviews from the authorities and unreleased photographs from the case.
Close To Home, Far From Salvation
After inflicting the thigh injury, Clark dressed the boy’s legs in a crude cast. Thad wasn’t a fleeing risk anymore, so Clark left him alone on the bed.
Meanwhile, Thad’s father, Donald had woken up and found that he was nowhere to be seen. His sister was still asleep, and there weren’t any signs of a break-in or a violent struggle.
The family drove around and searched for hours, but didn’t find any signs of their boy. Kidnapping wasn’t an assumption in the beginning. Donald later admitted a crucial mistake during the search.
“I just never thought to check house to house because we didn’t know any of the neighbors right close. So if I would have, I would have probably found him before” he is heard confessing in a podcast.
Sunday morning, 24 hours after their son’s disappearance, the family finally filed a police report. Since there wasn’t much evidence in the house, the parents were told to wait for their phone to ring, in case Thad or a possible kidnapper called back.
While this happened, Thad had made an effort of his own. He tried to limp downstairs and get access to the phone. But before the boy could reach it, Clark returned home with his girlfriend.
While the couple talked, Thad did his best to stay silent. But after the girlfriend left, he was discovered. Clark injured him repeatedly, as retaliation for the escape attempt. Thad kept repeatedly talking to him during the act to distract him.
It would only stop the abuse momentarily, before it resumed. Some time later, when his girlfriend came back to the house, Clark locked the boy in a closet. Thad was trapped with no way out and the pain in his legs worsened with each moment.
A Last Ditch Effort Towards Freedom
Thad’s imprisonment in the closet lasted for days without any food, according to a later court judgement. Owing to the multiple attacks, the boy had sustained several injuries.
The same judgement mentions one of his ankles, one knee and bones in both legs were fractured, leaving Thad almost immobilised. Clark had also threatened to paralyse him if he tried to leave again.
On July 31st, 1995, Thad decided to search around in the closet. While feeling around in the dark, he stumbled upon an old electric guitar. He used it to smash through a panel of the closet door, and then he was able to unlock it.
After that, Thad did what he had tried to do multiple times before. He threw himself down the stairs, and started to crawl towards the kitchen. He’d move himself a foot, and then pass out. Then he’d wake up and crawl again.
This cycle repeated several times before he reached the phone. Luckily for him, the cord of the phone was really long and hung really low. He jiggled it a bit, and the receiver came down.
It was early morning when the 911 call connected to the Baraboo Police Department. “Help, someone kidnapped me,” Thad told the dispatcher. The police arrived at the house minutes later.
Clark wasn’t home. He would be later arrested that same night, found at a bar. When Thad was placed in an ambulance, he was informed that he only had two hours before he would have succumbed to his injuries.
The Baraboo Bonebreaker was finally arrested. And Thad Phillips was at the hospital, reunited with his parents. A podcast quoted him saying “I survived because I wanted to be with my family.”
But this wasn’t Thad’s last brush with death. A shocking incident happened after Clark was put on trial.
The Trial Of The Baraboo Bonebreaker
On September 7, 1995, the State of Wisconsin filed a criminal complaint charging Clark with eight crimes. For five of those, he filed a no-contest plea – which, by law the judge would have to treat as a guilty verdict for the purposes of sentencing.
But Clark also entered a plea of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. This flipped the direction of the case momentarily from ‘Did he do it?’ to ‘Could he be held responsible for it?’
According to an account of the proceedings, by September 1996, a jury rejected the insanity defence and found Clark mentally responsible at the time of the offences. He would be put on trial for his crimes, and Thad was scheduled to testify against him.
But he couldn’t make it. On 8th October 1995, he was shot by 15-year-old Michael Huebsch, reportedly due to an unrelated spat between the two. This delayed the trial to November 5, 1996
Nonetheless, Thad showed up to the trial and testified against his captor. Joe Clark AKA The Baraboo Bonebreaker was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Thad was awarded $21 million in damages, to make up for treatment costs.
Thad Phillips On The Road To Recovery
Thad’s testimony also helped convict Clark for the Chris Steiner case, but the money that was promised never actually reached him.
He went through countless surgeries and accumulated significant medical bills from the damage Clark did to his body. Community members Olga Johnson & her husband were moved by Thad’s efforts.
So they started a GoFundMe page to raise money for his medical bills. The page has a goal of raising $100K, and roughly $40K have been raised at the time of writing. New donations keep pouring in every week.
Fortunately, Thad survived being the victim of an underage crime and was found. But most victims don’t share the same fate. Read about Leigh Occhi, a 13-year-old, who disappeared from her home never to be found.
Another haunting case that is of Jo-Anne Pedersen, a 10-year-old who vanished from a payphone area in Chilliwack, British Columbia, in 1983. Her case still remains unsolved and active.
