THE CORPSE UNDER THE WATERBED

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case i believe this is another one that you guys have seen on tick tock and requested me to cover which i'm not complaining i feel like true crime is blowing up on tik tok at the moment it's always been quite big on there but right now it's all over my for you page and i don't know if that's just because it's figured out who i am but you guys always see these tick tocks and then you run over to me and you're like please recover this in more detail and i really like it because these are cases that i've seen on my for you page as well and that i want to look into in further detail just to let you know that this video is part one of a new two-part series part two is going to be out in the next couple of days i don't know why my whole channel is two-part series these days it's just how it's been working out i don't know i've just come across a lot of long cases this one is a little bit of a smaller two-part series just because it's a bit too long to make it all one video because that would be really hard for me that would be like six seven hours of filming and i don't want to do that but it's not quite the length of the two-part videos that i've done before i don't actually know how long this video is gonna come out at but i feel like it's gonna be a little bit of a shorter two-parter hope you don't mind um let's get into it so today we're going to be talking about the case of maddie clifton however before we get into this i just want to give a huge shout out and credit to the morbid podcast they actually did a fun interview with the sister of the victim and i've used that interview in my research just to kind of get a more first-hand perspective of this case of course the family's own side is a side that's not often shown in the media the media speak with the police and that's how they formulate these articles and reports but hearing from jessie herself maddy's sister was so important for me to kind of get more of a personal grasp on this case if that makes sense there was a lot of things that jesse mentioned in that interview that are not mentioned in articles and i just want to say that the morbid podcast did an excellent job in carrying out that interview it was really really well done they were so respectful while keeping it natural and light-hearted which they're brilliant at i love the morbid podcast by the way but yeah i just wanted to credit them a little bit in the beginning because i did take some of my information from what jessie said in that podcast anyway with all of that out of the way i just want to say that this video is brought to you by nordvpn you guys already know i don't do anything online without a vpn activated and nordvpn have been my tried and true favorite vpn service for years using a vpn while you're browsing online essentially acts as a barrier for all of your information just in case you stumble across any websites or networks that might have people trying to access your information it works by giving you a different ip address from somewhere else in the world that you seem as though you're operating from and this is what is your barrier essentially you can use it at home i do all the time when i'm researching just in case i come across some shady websites or you can use it in public when you're accessing public wi-fi hotel wi-fi cafe wi-fi you never know how secure those networks are so it's always better to be protected but protection isn't the only benefit of a vpn service vpns can also grant you access to region locked content so that's other countries netflix selections disney plus selections youtube videos that are blocked in your country you guys know a lot of my youtube videos my early ones where i used to include like interview clips and stuff they've been copyrighted and blocked in a lot of countries so i mean it gives you a wider ellen o'neill library and it's actually not vpn's birthday this month they're nine years old this year a little cutie and to celebrate they've got a mega deal on at the moment for every purchase of a two-year plan you'll get a whole month free plus a surprise gift all you have to do is go to nordvpn.com forward slash eleanor and use the code eleanor at checkout thanks again to nordvpn for sponsoring this video now let's get into it before we do i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video just a quick warning before we get into this one i promise i'm nearly at the case however this one does involve the death of a child as well as some mention of potential sexual assault so if all of that is something that you don't want to listen to right now feel free to click out of this video i'll see you again at some point i'm sure so for today's kiss we are going to jacksonville florida in 1998. jacksonville is the largest and most populated city in florida and florida if you don't know it's super sunny super warm super nice and there lived maddie clifton born madeline ray clifton on june 17 1990 she was eight years old at the time of this case maddie lived with her mother sheila her father steve and her older sister jessie who was around two years older than her i think maybe three she was 11 at the time of this case so maybe like two and a half maddie and jessie were borderline inseparable growing up they were like best friends before they were sisters since they were so close in age they had so much in common they were kind of on each other's maturity levels they both wanted to play the same games they did everything together maddie was such a lively kid she loved dancing and this was actually something that she got her older sister into jessie said that she had no interest in dance really until maddie persuaded her to pick it up maddie was a super creative kid as well in general she loved music she could play the piano she practiced it for at least 20 minutes every day but the rest of her time when she wasn't playing the piano or you know at school the rest of it was consumed with just being a kid and just running around the streets playing sports she loved sports especially football and hockey she was quite like a tomboy girl her parents described her as they actually said that she was hard as nails and while she did like all the dance and things like that she also loved going out and getting dirty and that's exactly what maddie's plan was on november 3rd 1998. she'd been out during the day she came home she did her usual 20 minutes on the piano her everyday practice and then she begged her parents to let her go and play out on the street with her friends and they said yes so maddie went outside and her usual plan this is pretty much what all the kids on that street did because there were quite a few of them around the same age group that lived there they would just go out if they felt like playing and they would go and knock on the doors of each of their friends and just ask them if they were up for it if they were free if they wanted to come out and play so maddie didn't have any particular plans she just went out there she knocked on pretty much all her friends doors but most of them were busy and they couldn't come out and play with her so maddie started playing alone in the street eventually she was joined by a couple of neighbours and they all ended up playing golf in someone's garden however at some point while she was playing i think they ran out of golf balls or they wanted some more and so maddie knew that she actually had some at home so she said she was going to run home go and get these golf balls and she'd be back in a minute at some point i think they ran out of golf balls or they wanted some more and so maddie knew she had some at home so she said right i'm gonna run home i'll go get these balls and then i'll bring them back however maddy never returned to play golf with her friends after a while her friends thought that maybe she just decided to stay at home maybe it was her dinner time and so that's why she didn't come back her family on the other hand was still at home maddie's still not there and they think that she's still with her friends by the time 5pm rolled around it was dinner time maddy's family had gotten the dinner already and they were going to sit down as a family so they asked jessie her older sister to go out on her bike and go and get maddie from outside so jesse went out onto the street and she couldn't actually see maddie anywhere at first and so she rode down onto all the different cul-de-sacs up all the different streets she was shouting maddie's name but she couldn't see her anywhere and maddie wasn't coming out of anywhere to come and meet her jesse kept riding around the whole neighborhood a couple of times checking all these different streets still yelling maddie's name but there was no sign of her and there was no one else out playing either now so she returned home and told her parents that she couldn't find her little sister anywhere and they wasted no time getting on the phone to police and reporting their little girl as missing in the meantime until the police actually got to the house the family actually started their own searches they ran out into the street they were screaming maddie's name neighbors were coming out of their houses to see what the commercial was and as soon as they learned that little mandy clifton was missing they were also running around the streets screaming her name and no one could find her this continued into the night and all the way through until the next morning and still there was absolutely no sign of it and eventually within a couple of days this search had amassed over a thousand volunteers by this point most of maddie's neighbors had actually been interviewed by the police of course she was playing out on the street where all of their houses faced so someone must have seen something but no one was claiming that they had most of them said that they never even saw maddie at all that day i mean she was only out for maybe an hour and a half or two hours and the ones that said that they had seen maddie just said what we already know that she was out playing golf with her friends around 3 30 and that was the last time she was actually seen or that's the last confirmed sighting of maddie so once police had concluded all of these interviews with all of the neighbors they received no leads from any of these interviews which was quite surprising to them because they thought well maddie's definitely gone missing from the street and every one of these houses has windows facing the street so how did no one see anything they were hoping that in one of these interviews they would at least get something to go off like a suspicious car or someone saw a stranger in the neighborhood but no one had so now police had an initial theory that whoever had taken maddie and they did think that she was taken it wasn't like she got lost on her own street they thought that whoever had taken maddie could have been a local could have been someone that lived in that area because if anyone saw them walking along the street they wouldn't look suspicious you know saying maddie's playing on the street and this guy that lives on the next street over is walking in her direction no one would have thought twice about it because he lives there just to confirm that no one actually saw a man on the street walking towards maddie i'm just using that as an example but police expected something from these interviews and they got nothing so now they had this idea that maybe someone local had something to do with this and so they decided to run background checks on everyone that lived in this whole neighborhood not much really came up in these background searches everyone in this area where maddie lived seemed like really nice people the only thing that police actually found was the records of one guy that lived maybe three houses down from maddie a 45 year old man named larry grissom or larry grisham i don't know how you pronounce that had a previous record for sexual assault allegations around 15 20 years before this incident it was noted that both of these charges had been dropped so they weren't convictions that's why they're just like allegations they were never proven they weren't of children so i don't know if that means anything the charges were dropped and the charges weren't even against children in the first place but it was still pretty concerning that this was something that he was charged with in the past sexual assault and it turned out that larry was actually one of the last people to see maddie before she went missing he was one of those people that she was playing golf with it was maddie an older boy and larry and so for this reason larry was brought down to the police station for questioning although he told police that he knew absolutely nothing about maddie's disappearance she literally just left to go and get more golf balls and never returned so he thought that she'd just gone home for the evening so police went to go and speak with his immediate neighbors and they asked if they could confirm the alibi and they could so could the boy that he was playing golf with they all said that you know he never took maddie that day so his alibi does check out but just to make sure police wanted to give him a polygraph test a lie detector test which he actually failed so these are conflicting points to say the least his alibi does check out but he failed a lie detector test that said that he knew what happened to maddie so did he know what happened to maddie police did search his home after this i think they searched his home a total of nine times throughout this case because they were pretty set on him as a suspect in the beginning which it makes sense why it does he was an older man and he was one of the last people to see maddie that day however inside his house they didn't find anything and you know other than the polygraph test and the fact that he was one of the last people to see her there was no evidence against him really and polygraph tests you know i've talked about this before on my channel before they're not very accurate they're notoriously unreliable they're never used in court as evidence because they are so inaccurate sometimes they're used just to get a general idea of whether someone's telling the truth but they can never be like firm evidence in a case because they're just not it's not an exact science eventually the police ruled out larry as a suspect because the only thing that they had against him really was this test and everything else you know everything that they could do interview him check out his alibi he seemed innocent he really did now jessie maddy's older sister has actually said that larry is often portrayed quite inaccurately in this case because i mean let's be honest it does look a little bit off this is a 45 year old man playing outside with an eight-year-old girl and a boy that's just a little bit older than maddie he was playing outside with the two of them and then one of them goes missing it does look bad but jessie said that all of the kids that used to play out on the street all of their parents would kind of take turns keeping an eye on them as they were all playing outside and that included larry he didn't actually have any children there at that time he had two older children that had grown up and moved out however he did like to keep an eye on the neighborhood kids jesse said that it was never creepy it was always just kind of like him acting like a dad to these children you know maybe he missed his own kids and maybe he just wanted to play with kids again just to feel that same feeling that he felt with his own kids basically jesse said that it was never weird and it was just making sure that the kids in the area were safe and that larry was a good guy so now that larry has been cleared as a suspect i just want to go back to that golf ball story how they were playing golf in the garden they needed more golf balls so maddie said that she would go home and get some now this older boy that was playing golf with the two of them offered to walk maddie home and he was gonna wait for her while she got the golf balls and then they would go back to larry this boy's name was justin so maddie and justin set off walking to maddie's home they go inside where her sister jessie is practicing the piano maddie ran up to her room while justin stayed downstairs with jessie she's looking everywhere for these golf balls and she can't find them and according to jessie she was taking forever so justin said to maddie he was like look you find these golf balls i want to go back and play i'm going to go back outside and play golf with larry but when you found the golf balls you know come down and meet us and we'll carry on playing together so justin left maddie maddie was looking for balls for quite a while and she was being quite noisy and she could tell that she was disrupting her sister from her piano practice and so maddie eventually left the house i don't think she ever found any golf balls she was just going to go back down and carry on playing with the ones that they had and it was after she left the house this time that she went missing now like i said larry's house was literally like three doors down from maddie's so she went missing in a very very short span of time and on a very short span of the street as well think about how wide a three-house span is how did she go missing going from one house to the other but larry was cleared justin was cleared from having anything to do with maddie's disappearance so now you know the only suspect in the case is dropped and police are back to having no leads and they didn't really have anywhere else to look at this point in time and so they decided to bring in the fbi because this was a very very high importance case this was an eight-year-old girl that was missing anything could have happened to her at this point so they needed to solve this fast a few police officers were stationed at the clifton home to mainly look after jesse because they had no idea who had done this to maddie maybe they were targeting the clifton family in particular and maybe they planned on coming back for jesse so they had a couple of officers that stayed there 24 7 and watched jesse now these officers they were pretty cool about it they were really natural because jessie was just 11 years old and she didn't want to you know no 11 year old wants to be watched by policemen 24 7. so instead of doing that the officers would go in their normal clothes they would stay at the house and they would just play games with jesse board games they would watch kids tv with her they would be like friends as opposed to police watching her now at this point in the case a considerable amount of days had gone by and that's never a good sign when you're working on a missing child's case because the chances of finding that child alive a few days into the search are so slim i believe it's after the first six hours the chances of finding that child alive are halved and then after 12 hours that's halfed again then 24 hours half again 48 72 and it just keeps getting half and half and half so you can imagine how slim the chances are at this point that they're gonna find maddie alive while they were still hopeful that they might find her alive police actually started looking for a body they were sending divers into all the bodies of water they were searching wooded areas you know they had to be realistic with their searches they brought in sniffer dogs and they trained them both with maddie scent and also just the scent of dead bodies they sent them running along the street but nothing really came from that a reward was put up and i don't actually know who buy but a reward was put up for fifty thousand dollars for maddie's safe return and that was later doubled to a hundred thousand dollars police and the fbi and maddie's family and volunteers were all doing the best that they could these searches were still going strong no one had given up they were putting up posters they were doing tv appeals her family were literally going on the news and begging for anyone that knew anything to come forward with that information however despite how big this case was getting and it really was getting big like the media coverage on this case spanned pretty much the whole of florida and the whole country and worldwide but it was obviously the strongest in florida despite all of this strong strong media coverage they were still no closer to finding maddie clifton her father said it was literally just as if maddie had walked out of that door and vanished into thin air that was until exactly a week after maddie went missing on november 10 1988 police had a huge break in this case and they finally had a new suspect now this lead came from one of the clifton's neighbors actually just across the street lived the phillips family and this family consisted of husband steve wife melissa and their teenage son 14 year old josh the phillips family had supported the cliftons in their search for maddie this whole time they'd been going out searching on foot with them even their son had been printing out these missing persons posters for maddie and giving them out to everyone this family were quite connected to the clifton family obviously they lived opposite them and josh would play out with jesse and maddie sometimes he wasn't really part of the kids group that would go out because he was a little bit older but it was known that he did have a little bit of a crush on maddie's older sister jesse so yeah the two families knew each other and the thing that led to this lead was rather unexpected she'd been going through the whole house that day just cleaning up everywhere when she noticed a really strong order coming from her son's room now josh actually kept three birds like two parakeets and something else and he wouldn't clean them out very often it got quite smelly in his bedroom although now it was like stronger than it ever had been and so his mother was like right enough i'm going in there and i'm gonna clean up i'm getting rid of that smell josh was already in school at this point i believe it was like half past seven in the morning eight o'clockish when melissa went in that room and she began deep cleaning the whole thing as she did she looked over to his bed and she noticed like a wet patch on the floor next to his bed now josh actually had a water bed and she thought oh god it's leaking it's broken that did explain why the smell was worse than normal because not only was it the birds now she thought oh it's probably mildew or mold or something from this bed so she goes over to the bed and tries to find the source of this leak she lifts up the covers on his bed and she notices that josh has actually tried to fix this leak himself it looked as though he tried to tape up the corner of his bed and stuck inside the corner of this bed in all of this tape was actually a white sock and so melissa thought that maybe it just got stuck there when josh had taken it off so she grabbed it and tried to pull it but it wasn't coming loose it wasn't coming out so melissa peeled off all of this tape on the corner of the bed she tried to pull the sock again it was coming a little bit loose but it wasn't fully coming out and so she lifted his mattress on his bed a little bit and it was quite dark in there so she couldn't really see anything but still this sock wasn't coming loose for some reason so she went to go and get a torch to see what was going on and what this sock was caught on she brought the torch back lifted the mattress and shone the torch inside and that was when she saw the dead body of the missing little girl from across the street eight-year-old maddie clifton shoved under her 14 year old son's bed in that moment melissa didn't know what the hell to do i mean what do you do in that kind of situation the first thing she thought was to call her husband who was actually at work and so he didn't pick up she left him a very panicked voicemail saying please come home please it's an emergency she waited a couple of minutes for her husband to call back she was really really panicked at this stage and she thought i can't i can't stand here and wait i can't wait for him to call me back i need to do something about this police need to know about this so melissa ran downstairs in her house she ran straight out into the street and headed over to the clifton home because she knew that there would be police there police were stationed there all day every day and she ran up to the first officer that she saw and told them everything this officer then called for backup and once that team arrived they all went into the bedroom and recovered the body and confirmed that this was maddie clifton now once the body was identified maddie's family were then informed that their daughter had been found and her father said that he could just tell from the look on the officer's faces that he was about to have his whole life changed in that moment he knew what this news was gonna be he was about to learn that his baby was gone that his sweet little girl that he just spent the whole last week campaigning for searching for on foot day and night printing off posters doing interviews on the news to try and get her back he was about to learn that all of that was for nothing and not only was she dead but she'd been across the street under this boy's bed the whole time and they had no idea now like i said this was still very early in the morning it was around 8 a.m when they found maddie's body in josh's room and he was still at school so they thought this is the perfect time to search his room and see what else they can find inside they found a ton of air fresheners plug-in ones spray ones they found incense that he'd been burning all to try and mask the smell of maddie's decomposing body they found a baseball bat hidden under his drawers and a pen knife hidden behind his tv they also found a few rolls of tape hidden in separate parts of his bedroom he'd actually tried to tape his bed together at first using clear tape and then that wasn't enough so he'd gone and got like the industrial like duct tape and taped it over with that so there were a few different roles that they found in his closet they also found a pair of josh's shoes that had blood stains all over them and when they were tested this was found to be maddie clifton's blood there was also blood spatter on his ceiling fan which i'm actually quite surprised his parents didn't see before now maybe it was a small amount but again when it was tested it was found to be maddie's and this just shows how brutal the attack was well it tells you a lot of things about this murder number one that the attack took place in josh's bedroom and two that it was so brutal that blood is literally spraying up to the ceiling when he's attacking her police also found tipped on one of josh's bookshelves one of maddy's missing posters like i said he'd been joining in the searchers this whole week handing out posters knowing full well that her parents weren't gonna get their little girl back and i found it so creepy that he just kept her poster there so that he could see it every single day while he was sleeping on top of her dead body that's one of the most sinister things i think i've ever heard in a case like this that this is a 14 year old boy as well doing this but that wasn't all they found in josh's room police actually found one more thing tipped to his headboard and this item in particular would flip this case on its head entirely this item gave a whole new meaning to this case and a potential motive as to why this happened to eight-year-old maddie clifton and that is where i'm gonna end part one part two will probably be up tomorrow or the day after i'm gonna be super speedy with this one because i know i've left it in quite a cliffhanger place so if you wanna watch part two when it comes up make sure you subscribe to my channel make sure you've got the bell notifications on so that you don't miss it thanks again to nordvpn for sponsoring this video like i said it's their birthday right now so they're doing a super special deal where if you buy a two-month plan with them you can get a whole month for free on top of that plus a surprise gift which i don't know about you but i love gifts so go for it huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching this video if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below like i said make sure you've got my notifications on so that you don't miss when part two comes out if you want to subscribe to my channel you can click this link right here to do so if you want to subscribe to my second channel which i'm going to be posting on very very soon some rather unexpected videos are going to be going on there in the next two weeks so you can click on this link right here i don't know why i never said that or if you want to watch another true crime video in the meantime you can click this playlist right here okay bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 971,255

Rating: 4.9557738 out of 5

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, tiktok, viral, maddie clifton, clifton, maddie, maddy, maddy clifton, josh phillips, joshua phillips, waterbed, body, corpse, water, bed, true crime daily, florida, 2021, court, body under the waterbed

Id: MiRbkxdDBEw

Length: 29min 19sec (1759 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021