The Misery Machine - The Baraboo Bonebreaker [GRAPHIC]

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

This week, Yergy and Drewby take a trip up to Baraboo, Wisconsin, and cover a listener suggestion from none other than the amazing Eddy! Baraboo is a town that's all about the circus - but it's known for another darker scandal that rocked the community in the 90's when kids were going missing and turning up mangled in unimaginable ways. A very special thank you to Levi for supporting our show as our highest tier patron! Levi's Adoption Fundraising Page: https://gofund.me/d658a3a7 Support Our Patreon For More Unreleased Content: https://www.patreon.com/themiserymachine Join Our Street Team! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HfRUPQhB6LOqVupZm92OdV5rLDQcIMpHudmUZwt0C24/edit?usp=sharing Join Our Facebook Group to Request a Topic: https://t.co/DeSZIIMgXs?amp=1 PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/themiserymachine Instagram: miserymachinepodcast Twitter: misery_podcast Discord: https://discord.gg/kCCzjZM #themiserymachine #podcast #truecrime Source Material: https://murderpedia.org/male.C/c/clark-joe.htm https://www.ranker.com/list/joe-clark-the-bonebraker-facts/laura-allan https://rabrewster.com/2018/12/13/human-monsters-joe-clark-the-bonebreaker-killer/ https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/wi-unknown-victim-of-joe-clark-baraboo.90305/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueCrime/comments/f24jc1/bone_breaker/ https://apnews.com/article/5ded061aa228f6b8a597557fb8724258 https://www.ranker.com/list/joe-clark-the-bonebraker-facts/laura-allan https://www.wiscnews.com/baraboonewsrepublic/news/local/baraboo-child-sex-assault-defendant-asks-for-new-attorney/article_079b5953-7fc0-5e26-a5fa-e7343db6366d.html I Survived: Season 5 Episode 18 Madison Wisconsin State Journal Newspaper Archives 11/2/1996 pg 45

Hi, the Misery Machine. I'm Yerke. And I'm Drewby. And this week we're doing a lesser known case from Wisconsin that does involve child victims. And that's the Bear Boo Bonebreaker. Yeah, this was a suggestion from Eddie, our super fan. He suggested a really long time ago, and we just got to it. And I'm really glad we did because it is incredibly creepy. And I think that you'll enjoy it. I do too. And if you're listening on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. We just passed 6,400 subscribers. Over 1,000 a week. Yeah. Thank you so much to everybody to subscribe. That was completely. Completely unexpected. Yes, thank you very much, everyone that came over from the Delphi case. Really appreciate having you here. Without further ado.

The Baraboo Bonebreaker. Baraboo is a city in the Midwestern state of Wisconsin, situated on the Baraboo River. It is the largest city in Sock County, with a population of about 12,138 residents. Beribu is a town that is obsessed with the circus. It is home to the Circus World Museum, the 4th. former headquarters and winter home of the Ringling Brothers Circus in the International Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center. The Al Ringling Theater is an active landmark in the city,

along with the rumored to be haunted mansion sharing the same namesake. Our patron friend and superfan Eddie, who lives in Milwaukee, showed me some pictures of Baraboo, and it looks like just about any small town in Wisconsin, but the only difference is there's so much circus stuff here. And just recently, in 2017, they had an elephant escape and just run through the town. And I guess it was walking around eating flowers. Yeah, it didn't hurt nobody.

Didn't really destroy any property from what I understand. She just figured out how to unlock the mechanism in her holding cage. And yeah, I heard it was more than one, that it was two. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. And they just got out and started eating people's plants. Yep, just decided to chill outside. Which is fine. Yeah, that's totally fine with me. Yes.

So this is where our story begins. On July 29th, 1995, 12-year-old Thaddyest Fad Phillips was sleeping on the couch in his new home in Baraboo, Wisconsin. He'd only been living there for about two weeks, and he awoke that night and felt himself being picked up from the living room couch and carried through the house, thinking one of his parents, usually his dad, was taking him to bed after he'd fallen asleep watching TV. Instead, he was hoisted outside and sat down by a young man he could not quite recognize, but quickly assumed it was a a family friend or relative. Thad has stated that he wasn't scared at all by this. He figured it was a family friend who had car troubles that he could assist with and that his father just wasn't waking up to help. As Thad came to, he asked the person carrying him where his car was and the person

calmly responded that it was just over the hill from where they were. This person was a 17-year-old boy by the name of Joe Clark who told Thad to run with him, even though he had no idea who this teenage boy was, a groggy Thad agreed. Clark was friendly and talked about a party he was having and told young Thad the names of people he knew from school who were coming. The two arrived at an absolutely derelict home. Thad states that there was trash everywhere and the place was a complete dump. Clark introduced himself by his first name and said the rest of the guests should be there any minute. Despite never being in a situation like this, Thad said he never felt that he had any reason to be scared. Clark asked him if he liked to model cars and trucks and brought that upstairs to his room

to show him. Things seem to be going fine at first. The two did indeed talk about the model cars and trucks that Clark had, but then all of a sudden, Clark snaps. Joe Clark screamed and tossed that onto a soiled bed and proceeded to viciously twist and turn Thad's right ankle until it snapped and splintered backwards. Thad then attempted to reason with Clark asking why he would do this. Clark, who stopped to calmly sit next to Thad on the bed, explained he enjoyed the sound and feeling of bones breaking at his whim. He said he'd done something like this before and described how much he loved it. Thad took this opportunity to escape and tried to run away down the stairs. He said he didn't feel much pain, but he felt his footbone

moving up into his leg as he tried to run on it. Unfortunately, he could only limp away so quickly. Thad made it down the stairs through the living room and halfway through the kitchen before he was easily overtaken by his attacker. Clark wrapped his arm around Thad's neck and dragged him back to the living room and raged as attempted escape. Clark threw Thad onto his couch and took his right leg, the same leg he had already tortured, and pushed it upward past the young boy's head and leaned in until the femur bone in his thigh snapped. The femur bone is by some measures. The strong as bone in the human body. Even in children, it's often only seen broken after major accidents.

For Clark to snap Thad's femur, it took an extraordinary amount of force and an absolutely evil intense. Thad only heard the sound of the break and didn't feel any pain. Early, upon hearing the bone break, Joe Clark became a normal person again. He sat and discussed his life with Thad and watched TV as if they were friends. Despite Thad's young age, he knew he had to appeal to Joe. and seem humid in hopes that Clark would take pity on him and let him go. Thad asked why Clark does this to other people and not himself,

to which Clark replied that he wanted to, and he'd tried multiple times previously, but could never get the angle right to actually break his own bones. Thad tried to bargain with him to be let go, saying that he would tell people he broke it himself. One of the things he said is that he would say he tripped over a coffee table, but Clark said that nobody would believe him. if he tried.

They spent half the day watching TV and things were eerily calm. Clark dressed Thad's broken bones in makeshift casts consisting of socks and ace bandages, but occasionally would make him walk on them. Finally, Clark announced it was time to go upstairs and carried Thad back to his room. This time, he grabbed Thad's left ankle and twisted it until it broke. However, he did not stop upon hearing the break and kept twisting it until Thad's foot was completely backwards and his toes were pointing past the back of his knee. Oh my goodness. That said his ankle looks like a rubber band to him being twisted as far as it would go. Now Thad did try to fight back,

but was unable to do much to the much bigger boy in Clark. Clark would often have his back to Thad while twisting his limbs so Thad would kick him and hit him in the back of his head, but this only made Clark even more angry. In response, he would smother Thad with a pillow and then would let up only to tell him that he had to hold the pillow over his own face and not yell or scream or else Clark would break Thad's back or his neck if he didn't behave. Thad never cried in front of Joe Clark. He never wanted him to know how scared he was and did his best to keep his composure. Once Thad asked Clark if he could call his parents just to let him know he was okay,

to which Clark quickly agreed. He calmly brought over a cordless phone that he had handed to Thad. When Thad turned it on, he realized the phone wasn't connected and Clark simply just smirked witnessing this. Clark kept going out to try to start his car during the day, but he was having a lot of trouble with it. He would come inside and complain about it to Thad, but eventually his frustrations would overtake him

and he would continue to do more damage to him. Eventually during one of the sessions of making Thad walk around on his broken legs, Clark kicked him down a flight of stairs, and Thad tumbled down it and landed on his back. Thad's wounds were getting the better of his pain tolerance at this point, and his legs were swelling up, very badly. The pain was unbearable and Thad was in constant agony. He himself described his right

ankle, having swelled up to the size of a softball, and his thigh is the size of a basketball. I believe that. Clark left his victim alone on his bed while he went out, apparently convinced the boy was no longer a threat to escape due to the extent of his injuries. Thad Phillips had been in captivity for about 24 hours at this point. Knowing this was his only chance to escape, Thad dragged himself into this stairway and knowing that he had no other way to make it down, threw himself headfirst down the stairs into the living room. Upon falling to the bottom of the stairs, he passed out due to his injuries. He awoke to try to drag himself, but he kept passing out in the process of trying to escape.

He couldn't even make it to the kitchen when he awoke to find Joe Clark standing there in a surprise to see Thad laying on the floor. Enraged at Thad's attempt to escape, Thad was dragged upstairs yet again to continue the brutal punishment, twisting his ankles around past their physical limits and jumping up and down on Thad's broken body. Clark told him he would kill him if he tried to leave again. Clark had hundreds of pairs of brand new white socks that he would take great care to put on Thad so the seams would be aligned up exactly how he wanted him. That's a little weird. With this signal that the torture was over for now, Clark became normal again and brought

Thad downstairs to watch movies until Thad passed out on the couch. Young Thad awoke on Sunday morning, July 30th, to see his legs looking inhuman to him. They were yellow and bruised, swollen past the point of recognition. The pain was indescribably excruciating. It was his brother's birthday and he wanted nothing more to be with his family. However, Clark's outbursts were getting much worse, choosing to torture Thad every couple of hours now. And I read that it was getting to the point where Thad would yell to Clark, I hear your girlfriend outside, or I hear a car outside, knowing that Clark was going to go out there,

see nothing and come back upstairs and beat him even more. But at least it gave him a few seconds of a break. It was bothering him that badly. This torture was so painful that he just wanted a 10-second break, even if it meant it got worse. Laying Thad down on his bedroom floor, Clark would do running jumps onto Thad, bearing his full weight down onto him. Thad said that this was the event that ended up breaking his left knee. To say that both of Thad's legs were mangled at this point would be an understatement. He knew that he no longer had any chance of walking out of the house himself.

That evening, Clark again went to leave his house but was taking no chances with Thad this time. He locked the battered boy in his bedroom closet before leaving. Thad said that he heard the front door shut and the sound of a car drive away and knew this might be his last hope of trying to escape. And from what I understand, he was very dehydrated at this point, having been giving water for quite a bit. Feeling around with his hands in the dark, Thad found an old, heavy acoustic guitar and battered through the door enough so he could reach through and unlock it on the other side.

Dehydrated and his legs useless, Thad had no other option but once again throw himself head first down the stairs, passing out once he hit the floor. He awoke in the dark and dragged himself to the kitchen as best as he could. passing out again repeatedly from the pain and fatigue until he reached the kitchen phone. Thad could not stand to reach the phone himself, but fortunately the cord hung low enough for him to shake until the receiver fell off the hook. This was an old landline wall phone for those that remember those. Thankfully, the buttons for the phone were on the handset itself and not on the wall. Thad wonders what would have happened to him if the phone buttons weren't on the receiver he pulled down

or if Joe had disconnected the phone before he left. He then dialed 911 and explained his location and the predicament to a surprise dispatcher. There are sources that claim that the call was originally regarded as a prank, but that himself states that he was taken seriously and despite not knowing the address of the house, they knew exactly where he was at the mention of the name Joe Clark due to his prior criminal record. The police were stunned to find a 12-year-old boy laying on the floor, struggling in and out of consciousness with both feet facing sideways and his left knee pushed backwards through his leg.

He was quickly put on a stretcher and rushed to the hospital. One of the doctors who treated Thad said he was roughly two hours away from dying due to internal bleeding. After the police rescued Thad, he told him that Joe had admitted to killing a boy named Chris Steiner, as well as another boy whose name he could not recall. So that brings us to the next part of this story. So on July 4th, 1994, 14-year-old Chris Steiner disappeared from his home in Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Indications that he had been kidnapped included his shoe impression outside of his bedroom window and muddy tracks inside. He was not the type to run away. Five days after he disappeared, his body was found caught in a tree along the bank of the Wisconsin River. An autopsy was performed and the cause of death was attributed to drowning. But the manner of his death, accident or otherwise, remained undetermined. And then investigators learned that no x-rays had been taken, as it's not common during autopsies. You would think during the autopsy, they would notice that this boy's legs were mangled. They hadn't because he was bloated because he had drowned.

Oh, yeah. I know how long it took them to find them. Yeah, he was in the water a bit. So with this news from Thad, there was only one way to discover whether Christian Stein. had been subjected to the same bizarre treatment that Thad had endured, and that was to exhume his remains. The forensic pathologist identified four separate breaks in Christian's legs. It was apparent that the boy had been thrown into the water in this condition.

There was no way he could have used his legs to swim and could easily have drowned as he was. The grim discovery gave detectives probable cause to search Joe Clark's bedroom, where they found a notebook with three lists, all written in his hands, handwriting that included the names of 18 local boys. Their headings were, get to now, can wait, and leg thing. Clark claimed to be innocent in Steiner's murder, and his mother backed him up with an alibi. She said that if he had left home on the night that Steiner was abducted, she would have known because he'd have passed through her bedroom. However, it was shown that she's a heavy sleeper and that he had managed to slip by her before. Clark really had no alibi. Also,

damning was testimony by a former fellow juvenile detention inmate of Clark's who said that Clark had admitted to her that he had killed a boy and placed his body over a tree. So thinking about this now, like, how did this mother not know for 48 hours that this was going on in her home? This is the part I couldn't discover, because from what it sounds like and from Thad's own story, He's told his story in a couple of different interviews that Joe was the only one present there. At one point, his girlfriend came over for a brief amount of time

but didn't end up seeing Thad there, but he didn't see anyone else there. There's talk about Joe having a brother that he never saw and never saw a mother, father, anything like that. So I don't understand if this was a house that was in the family that Joe stayed at or what? Or just had absent parents that just kind of took off?

Had parents that were gone for a period of time. So according to the interview from Thad, he stated that Joe was arrested that night at the party he went to. And his words were when he was told he was being arrested for the attempted homicide of Thad Phillips, Joe Clark's response was, he's still alive. So I don't know, but those are the two situations I've heard upon Clark's arrest. Clark was first tried in the Phillips attack and entered a plea of no contest to attempted homicide and other charges. He was sentenced to a hundred-year prison term and was ordered to pay $31,566 in medical damages and $6 million in compensation damages and $15 million in punitive damage to Phillips. Judge Virginia Woolf, and yes, her name is Virginia Woolf, allowed Clark to be able to make money off of

his case due to the sensational nature of the crime in order for him to pay restitution to the victim. You may be wondering why is she allowing this? Well, he had no money really at the time. So all of this money that he was required to pay like he just didn't have. So she hoped that if he was allowed to make money off of his crime story, that Thad would be able to get money later down the road from it. So Clark claims to have no recollection of Thad Phillips' abduction and torture. Phillips had been held captive for about 43 hours in total and had sustained horrible fractures to both legs, which would require several surgeries over the years and resulted in a permanent limp. Additionally, Clark was found guilty of intentional homicide for the murder of Chris Steiner

and sentenced to life in prison plus 50 years. He was 17s of Trident and as an adult. Clark maintains his innocence in Chris Steiner's murder to this day. I don't know if we had this here, but he eventually pleaded no contest, but originally he was trying to plead not guilty due to mental incompetency, but that didn't end up going through. One other thing that should be mentioned, and I only found a couple sources on this. One was a very old newspaper article. Thad was the state's main witness. He was not able to make it to court, so they had the rescheduled the court date. The reason why they had to reschedule was because Thad was shot in the back by a 15-year-old boy. His name is Michael Hubish, I believe is how you pronounce it.

I tried to find if this was something that Clark had put this boy up to kill Thad so he couldn't be a witness any longer. But apparently this was an unrelated argument and poor Thad was shot by this boy. I tried to find what became of Michael Hubish. I couldn't find any arrest records for him shooting Thad, but I did find in more recent past that he is a convicted sex offender, having been arrested, I believe within the past five years. So when I finished researching this case, there was one case we had done previously that came to my mind immediately. And while you probably don't see the comparison at first, let me explain. So Junco Feruta was the case that reminded me of this. And it's not because of the way in which

either of them were tortured. It was the fact that Clark didn't want to kill Thad Phillips. He just wanted to keep torturing him and torturing him and torturing him. And yes, if it was true that he thought Thad was going to die in that closet, I guess that's one thing. But the point was never to kill anybody. The point is just to keep torturing for your own sick purposes. It seems that's all that motivated Clark. And, also when hearing about his notebook and just hearing how much he planned all this out, it really made me wonder if these were his only two instances of these types of tortures, this kidnapping and this torture. So Yergi and I looked to see if there was any other missing children in the Baraboo area around this time because I figured that this is not somebody who's new with this. This is somebody who might have been doing this for a while. Right. And there wasn't. So I had went through the missing persons database for Wisconsin. And as far as missing persons go, there wasn't anybody in the appropriate age group around the time he would have been operating. His target group was younger children. There were some missing people that were older than Joe Clark, but there wasn't anybody younger than that. Right. They would have been in their 40s, all the people that would have been in that time period. As far as cold cases go, there, again, it wasn't anybody that would have been in the appropriate age group. And they'd have been in the appropriate age group. And they'd have been. had some unidentified. The only person in Sok County that they had unidentified was an infant put in a duffel bag. And then there was a gentleman who was in the range of 18 to 20. That was in a town about 100 miles or so south. And it just didn't seem like it would have been the right. The person would have been too old. Yeah. So fortunately, we didn't uncover a string of murders that was written off on runaway. culture of the 90s where kids would run away and well I guess they just ran away. Ran away to join the circus. Yeah, exactly. So as it seems to me from our research that thankfully this was the only two times that Clark

had done something like this. And though he claims he had had a third victim and he told somebody in Juvie that he killed somebody and threw them on a tree, I'm hoping these were just lies. A lot of people think that the third victim was just a lie. because there's never been anything to substantiate. Thad himself doesn't remember the name, and there hasn't been any other bodies found. Yeah, I mean, there was a name given,

but could he have made the name up, sure? But Christian Steiner was real, and I'm glad they were able to bring closure of the family in that way. I tried to find where he's currently serving time. I couldn't. There is this video on YouTube that looks like a prison interview, but it's a different Joe Clark, one in Houston. It's not the same Joe Clark,

if anyone cares to look more into that. As far as Thad Phillips goes, he seems to have kids and still lives in Baraboo, completely normal life. And, uh, you know, I have to hand it to him because a lot of people when they suffer something like that in their hometown,

they tend to move away and who could blame them, but he's still there. So that's the episode. If you appreciated it, if you're listening on YouTube, if you could hit like and subscribe, this is the easiest way to help us grow this channel. We just got a thousand more subscribers.

In a week. In a week, just off of the Delphi update that we posted. And I am so grateful for all of you. We had a few people ask us what a podcast is or they weren't sure what a podcast is. We have a different format compared to other YouTube channels, but you're willing to stick around and check us out and hear what we're about and check out our other videos. And I really do appreciate that. all the new listeners. I'm so happy to have you here. And hopefully we can keep growing this.

As always, if you're on YouTube and you want to put in the comment section where you're from, we love that. If you have episode suggestions, we love to hear those two. Please keep them coming. We have quite a bit. We have a long spreadsheet of them, but I write them all down. And we're trying to go on location more for some of these cases, especially the ones that are close by, which will hopefully, be doing for a case in the very near future. Yes, I really, really want to go back to Boston as soon as possible. I do too because small little spoiler. I don't know if this is going to be the next episode, but there's a Cambridge case that was recommended to us that I'd like to do soon. I'll just leave it at that. I'm excited about that one. And if you're not listening on YouTube, if you could just subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to, if it allows you to give a five-star and

written review, do that as well if you want to say where you're from on there. we always love hearing from listeners. I was so excited last week's episode. A lot of folks actually chimed in in the comic section to say where they were from. And we have people in South Africa. We have more people in Australia. We have a listener from Cyprus and that was pretty wonderful. That was so cool.

Because that's on my bucket list of places to visit. And I absolutely know where Cyprus is. Yes. He's like, you guys probably don't know where Cyprus is. No, we know our Cyprus. I want to visit Cyprus. I really do. But we are obviously a main podcast first. Obviously it's our home state.

We don't just do main cases, but regardless, usually in your main podcast, most of your listeners from Maine, but most of our listeners are from other places in the world, and that's really cool. And I love connecting with all of you. So just a few things from last episode that I wanted to kind of address. I didn't know that a coroner was an elected position. I'm so sorry. I was just what's here in Maine. I feel so dumb about it because when this was brought up to me, I was like, really?

Really, that's an elected position. But I didn't think anything of it because in Maine, we don't have a coroner. We just have the medical examiner's office in the capital in Augusta. That's all we have. We can't be the only state that functions that way. I'm sure there isn't, but I had no idea. This is not an area of expertise for me. So I just basically look to you for things like that.

But the fact that it works like that here, I reason to believe it must work like that someplace. That's probably another small state, I'm sure. But we help our listeners learn things about cases. Our listeners help us learn things. It's kind of embarrassing because I'm just. supposed to be the death care expert here. And it's a pretty big mistake. It's okay. I mean, again, you were going to be a death care provider in Maine. So that's what you knew. It wasn't like you were going to, you know, go get licensed in some other states. So it's okay. Yes. I forgive you. I hope our

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