Friday August 20, 1999 From the Channel 4 newsroom, here's today's top story...

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15-year-old gets life in prison, no chance of parole, in murder of playmate

By PAT LEISNER Associated Press Writer

BARTOW, Fla. (AP) - Joshua Phillips was sentenced Friday to life in prison with no chance of parole for beating and stabbing an 8-year-old neighbor whose body was found days later stuffed in the frame of his waterbed.

Joshua, 15, was tried as an adult last month and convicted of first-degree murder in the Nov. 3, 1998 death of Maddie Clifton. The pixie-faced girl lived 25 feet across the street from him in a Jacksonville neighborhood. Joshua had even pretended to help in the neighborhood search for Maddie when there was hope she was still alive.

Joshua, standing with his head bowed, showed no emotion when told that he would not be sentenced as a juvenile but as an adult, and would spend the rest of his life in prison. "I do not perceive you to be a child," said state Circuit Judge Charles Arnold. "Your monstrous act made you an adult." The sentencing came after emotional pleas from the Phillips family, and from the Clifton family, in a hearing that lasted about an hour.

The Phillips family asked for leniency, with Joshua's father Steve Phillips saying that it was "ludicrous and obscene" to prosecute the murder charge. Joshua's mother, Melissa Phillips, expressed the family's sorrow to the Cliftons. "Each time I look out of our kitchen window to the house across the street, my heart clutches at the thought of what the Cliftons are going through," she said through tears. "I'm sorry about their grief, but I cannot repair their heartbreak any more than I can repair our own," she said.

Maddie's family told the judge of their pain - the impact of a murder that "was cruel and senseless and took Maddie from us all," said Steve Clifton, the father. Maddie's mother, Sheila, talked about a little girl who was effervescent, giggly, loving. "No one or nothing can look up at me with those big brown eyes," she told the judge. "Pictures and memories, that's all I've got. ..."

Because he was 14 at the time of the slaying, Joshua faced a maximum sentence of life in prison. Florida law bars the death penalty for killers under 16. Joshua never denied killing Maddie. He told police he accidentally hit her in the eye with a baseball as they played in his back yard. He panicked at her screams, was scared his father would punish him.

So he dragged Maddie into his bedroom. He smashed her in the head with a bat to stop her from screaming and when she kept moaning, he grabbed a knife and stabbed her in the throat, he said. He shoved her under his water bed and went to wash up. Joshua still heard moaning. He pulled her from the bed and stabbed her until she stopped breathing, detectives said. An autopsy showed the girl was beaten over the head and stabbed at least nine times in the chest and twice in the neck.

The trial was moved 400 miles to Polk County in rural central Florida because of intense publicity in Jacksonville. Testimony took one day. The defense presented no witnesses. The waterbed where Maddie's body was hidden for seven days was reconstructed in the courtroom. The night Maddie disappeared, Joshua grabbed a flashlight and joined searchers. Volunteers scoured the neighborhood for days and all the while, Maddie's decomposing body was beneath a sheet of plywood supporting the frame of Joshua's waterbed, directly across the street from her home.

Joshua's mother made the grisly discovery and summoned police.

The teen's attorney, Richard Nichols, tried to sway jurors during the trial by saying that while it sounded like a "horror story like from Stephen King," it was not a case of premeditated murder.

Prosecutor Harry Shorstein argued it was. "This case was open and shut," he said. AP-NY-08-20-99 1236EDT

NewsChannel 4's Ray Lane was in Bartow for the sentencing. Eyewitness News will have the comments from both sets of parents and Judge Charles Arnold.