Chris and Alison interview Chief Frank Mackesy in our first ever 2-part interview. We spent a lot of time talking with Chief Mackesy and the conversation was too good to cut down to just one listen - so this episode is the first of two. In this episode you'll hear our discussion of two high-profile cases in which he was involved.
Chief Mackesy is the Director of Police and Public Safety at the University of North Florida. Before taking the position at UNF, he retired after 32 years with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office from the position of Undersheriff. He held many positions during his time with JSO, including Chief of Detectives.
Chris and Alison interview Chief Frank Mackesy in our first ever 2-part interview. We spent a lot of time talking with Chief Mackesy and the conversation was too good to cut down to just one listen - so this episode is the first of two. In this episode you'll hear our discussion of two high-profile cases in which he was involved.
Chief Mackesy is the Director of Police and Public Safety at the University of North Florida. Before taking the position at UNF, he retired after 32 years with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office from the position of Undersheriff. He held many positions during his time with JSO, including Chief of Detectives.
Mackesy_Part_1_Transcript.mp3
Alison DeBelder [00:00:04] This is trauma injustice. This is a podcast about the ways that people confront and manage trauma in the justice system. These conversations touched on seriously troubling topics. This podcast is not appropriate for children. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse and incarceration. I'm Chris Moser and I'm Alison DeBelder. We sat down and talked to Chief Frank Mackesy for a long time, first about his professional background. And then about two specific cases on which he worked because the talk ran long. We decided to bring it to you in two parts today. Let's hear about two major cases he worked next week will return for a discussion of his background and training in the time that he spent at the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. For now, here's the short intro Frank Mackesy started work with Jacksonville Sheriff's Office in 1979. He retired after 32 years from the position of undersheriff. Here are the stories of two major cases that he worked. Do you have specific cases, facts that stick with you, victims who weigh on your mind? Or do you just sort of have a catalog of all the cases that you've worked or the ones that stand out? Are there things that particularly trouble you?
Frank Mackesy [00:01:40] Oh, yeah. If any cop ever tell you, you know, they're not telling you the truth or they're not a very good cop. Julius Estes was in my mind for 20 years. I was able to gain closure by getting the bad guy.
Alison DeBelder [00:01:54] Did that help?
Frank Mackesy [00:01:55] It helped a lot.
Alison DeBelder [00:01:57] I want to hear about Julie's case, but do you keep in touch with victims families after the case is wrapped up as a rule?
Frank Mackesy [00:02:05] Not as a rule, but yes, it's happened, and it's not a very good thing, I don't think.
Alison DeBelder [00:02:10] Why do you say that?
Frank Mackesy [00:02:12] Because especially now, there's not anything I can do for him other than offer him support. For instance, there's a gentleman then went missing a few years back named John Rowan. We found John Rowan's vehicle in Orlando completely wiped clean. That doesn't happen, you know, unless something bad happened. His mother and his father have become very dear to me. Now they're Irish nationals, they were born and raised in Ireland and they moved over here. My grandmother was an Irish national, my grandfather too on my dad's side. The first time I went to their house, I opened the door and asked for Mrs. Rowan and Mr Al and slammed the door in my face. He was embittered at the agency because some things weren't done the way I would have liked to have been done. But we got past that to the point where when I retired in 2011, Mr. Rowan, the man that slammed the door in my face, sang Danny Boy at my retirement party a cappella.
Alison DeBelder [00:03:12] So why is this not a good thing?
Frank Mackesy [00:03:14] Because I can't give them the closure that they seek. If I had three wishes right now, if a genie popped out of a bottle and said there's three things that you can have, the very first thing it would be is tell me where John Rowland bodies buried. Just so Mr. and Mrs. Rowan can know before they die. That's all they want on this Earth right now.
Alison DeBelder [00:03:37] When a case is resolved, a suspect is arrested, is convicted, is sentenced and sometimes to the death penalty. Do you feel like that conviction does bring victims families a measure of peace or no?
Frank Mackesy [00:03:58] I think that's a better question to ask the families because I know. No, I don't. I think I know how I would feel if I was in their shoes, and I don't care how many times you kill somebody, it's not bringing back my loved one. Now that doesn't mean I'm I'm not for the death penalty because I'm telling you there are people on this Earth that do not belong on this Earth. They're here by the devil. And James Ullman's, one of them.
Alison DeBelder [00:04:25] So this was a cold case that was resolved on your watch when you were chief of detectives, is that right? Correct? Can you maybe run through the facts of the case and what happened with Julie Astor's and the other victims?
Frank Mackesy [00:04:42] I can only speak to Julie Estes. So it was October 22nd, I believe it was 1985. And back then we shot. We rotate shifts every month. We're in the midnight shift. We started our shift at 10:45 at night, but we all met downtown. The whole all police officer in the city met in the police station for a roll call. By the time we get done a roll call, you get to your car and you head to your be. Your shift starts at 10:45, but you don't get on your beat till like 11 10 after 11 something. And on my way out to the beat, I get a call about a it was a little Champ Store, a convenience store at Tetter and all Kings Road. Well, I knew the store because no one was on my beat. Number two, I went in there a lot that give a slight free soda and let us use their bathroom. And number three, my grandmother lived in the apartment complex right across the street from the store. My grandmother lived there. I wasn't going to let anything happen on my watch and I knew Julie, but I didn't know Julie. She was the clerk in the convenience store that let me use her bathroom or her phone, and we didn't have cell phones back then. And every now and then gave me a free soda. But she was just like all the rest of it in the worked in there. You know what I mean? So they get a call to check the store because it closed early. Well, it's 10 after 11:00 when I get the call store closes at 11:00. So I asked the dispatcher, I said, and I was training a rookie cop. He was in one of his phases of training and I'm training this officer. I said HQ, that store closes. 11. Do you have a callback number on the complainant to call the person back to ask them what their concern was? The complainant refused. OK, so I say, show me 10 fifty one, which means I'm on my way and the recruiting I get there in the stores closed, you know, it's buttoned down. So I use it as an opportunity to show them how to do a tactical approach. And you know, back then they didn't have their designs the way they do the stores now. So behind the cash register was not visible from outside in order to see what was going on behind the cash register, you had to be in the store, but you could see everything else in the store. So we shot our flashlights in the windows and I showed him how to do things, and we walked around the building and everything we're supposed to do. There's no sign of nothing. Nothing is disrupted. I mean, nothing. It just let the store closed. Now the one thing that I didn't notice, and I don't expect that the rookie would have noticed it is when you go into one of these stores, you know where your milk and all that stuff is. Well, they have cooler lights in them, you know, I guess at night, so you can see what what's in the display case? Well, the lights were off in that display case. We kind of noticed it because we talked about it, but we didn't think it unusual because how many times have you gone somewhere and left your curling iron ore? It's my wife's famous thing will be at the airport. Oh my gosh, I think I left the curling iron on. I said, There's too late now. The house is going to burn down. It'll be your fault. So next morning, around 6:30 6:40 something like that. We get off at 7:00. Get a call back to that store. Well, the money's gone. So I get there, the manager meets me. I said, what's up? He said the money's gone. And they had one of these round floor safe that was behind the counter under a rug, so the rug had been moved. The floor safe had simply been lifted out of the hole and sat down. That's the only thing that was disrupted in that store other than the money in the cash register was gone, too. You know, but that would have been put into the bag that was in that round hole in the floor. It just didn't sit right with me because of the call the night before. Now, remember I said when I was a robbery detective that we were lucky in that we had pictures of most of the bad guys. And I say that because most of them were guys, so you had to call robbery out to get the film out of the camera. We weren't allowed to touch it, but I had just had this hunch. So I call it a homicide.
Alison DeBelder [00:08:43] You called out homicide. Just on the store being closed early and the safe being removed. Oh yeah, that's while
Frank Mackesy [00:08:52] the homicide detectives thought the same thing. I'll never forget the robber detective's name. His name was Lavelle Golf. Geophys. You know, I'm a I'm training somebody, but I'm on the job like five years, so I'm a rookie to basically in those homicide guys were giving me the business. What the hell are you doing columns out in this nonsense? And this is a waste of our time and we don't start work till eight o'clock. There were being homicide detectives, basically prima donnas. They're going to kill me for saying that. So I'm thinking, Oh man, I screwed up now. Well, they do their thing and they leave. Lavelle Golf walks around the counter from empty in that roll of film. He didn't know me from Adam's house cat, OK? He'd never laid eyes on me before laid eyes on me before. And he said, Officer, I want you to know you did the right thing. Don't let those guys get under your skin. If the same thing happens again, someplace else tomorrow you do exactly what you did today.
Alison DeBelder [00:09:54] Good for him.
Frank Mackesy [00:09:56] Yeah. And I'm retired 10 years. I was a patrol officer and like I said, this is an 85. I think I remember to this day. So I call Julie Estes husband because it looked like a tilt up to look like she just took the money and ran. Well, they'd had an argument. I don't remember what day of the week it was, but that day when she went to work, she was in the three to 11 shift. Before she left for work. They had an argument. She didn't come home that night. I call him at 6:45 in the morning, and this is before I called out the detectives because it was just a teletype. I wasn't going to bother anybody other than the Robert Guy had to empty the film. And this dude says she didn't come off work last night. And I said, Really, that didn't concern you at all. And he says, No, not really, because we had a fight before she left. I figured she was mad and she's blowing off steam now that I've been married very long. If my wife's 15 minutes late coming back from the dadgum grocery store, I'm looking on, find my people and making sure everything's cool, you know? So my cop daughter's going off. I tell the rookie, Come on, let's go. So I loved him up and we dropped there. His house.
Alison DeBelder [00:11:08] I mean, everybody had to think that this was the guy, right? The husband who doesn't reporter not coming home.
Frank Mackesy [00:11:15] Well, I can only tell you what that robbery detective thought, but I can tell you what those homicide detectives thought of me, but they didn't tell me nothing about the case. So I go and I'm interviewing this guy, and I'm thinking the whole time robberies, I mean, homicide should be here talking to this guy. And his alibi is Hugh's in bed asleep alone all night,
Alison DeBelder [00:11:33] which is not a great alibi.
Frank Mackesy [00:11:36] No, no. It's a terrible alibi, but turned out he was telling the truth, right? I put all of this in my report. I think I put that in the general report. I may put that in a slap. I don't remember now I give the information to the people that are working the case and go home and go to bed because I just worked all night. It was my day off. That day started my days off. So I used to when I had a long weekend like that was coming up. I would try to stay awake that first day so I could spend time through the weekend with my family. Well, I'm asleep on my couch, taking a nap and the phone rings and it's Officer Mackesy and I'm like, Who wants to know? This is director Stelmach. So now I'm laying in my couch at attention. Yes, sir. They found her. They found her next to the railroad tracks on Old King's Road at the Den, and it's not there anymore, but back then it was a dead end. The next thing comes out of his mouth, he accuses me of not going to the call of blowing it off. Fortunately, I had that rookie with me because they got that rookie, unbeknownst to me, and they sweated him and the rookie told the truth.
Alison DeBelder [00:12:48] But you had also filed the report, right?
Frank Mackesy [00:12:50] They accused me of mishandling it at 11 o'clock the night before. Hmm. Will they find her, they find her car? Again, I haven't read this case in a long, long time. And if I get some of this wrong, I'm not trying to be untruthful. It's just a 60 year old memory. But Ellman came up.
Alison DeBelder [00:13:09] And you're talking about James Jimmy Aleman Jr.
Frank Mackesy [00:13:13] Yes, I am. We had a young girl killed in that same area who was Elliman's sister, and she was hung by her panties. They came to us and told us they thought it was good for that. So now he's on all our radar screens. Well, I'm thinking, well, heck, if he's good for that, he's good for Julia Stiles because you only live like five or eight houses away an old king drug.
Alison DeBelder [00:13:40] Let me stop you just right there. So when Julia Stiles was found, you'll believe that she had been kidnaped and that she had been raped and she had been murdered, right?
Frank Mackesy [00:13:51] All that happened.
Alison DeBelder [00:13:53] How was she killed? Do you recall?
Frank Mackesy [00:13:56] I believe it was strangulation. But don't hold me to that. Oh, so the sisters found that again, it's an area that sort of might be, but it was on it. They found her. I was on a different shift. And so now we're all when I say we are the officers that road that area, including the ones that were on different shifts, we're all communicating back and forth because we don't want this stuff happen in a heartbeat. So one day there's an off duty officer. Some weeks or months later, he's on South Side Boulevard. There's a Cadillac dealership right there. I think the other side of the road might be Gate Parkway now, but I'm not 100 percent sure. But that Cadillac dealership is still there. The hired officer to stop traffic on Sunset Boulevard to let cars in and out. The officer's name was Billard Dearborn. Bill is out there directing traffic. He's got car stopped there on South Side Boulevard. They're going south on Sunset Boulevard. They're heading the way from town. All of a sudden, this young lady yells out help, and she burst out of this car that stopped in traffic and she goes running up the bill. Help me, help me. He kidnaped me. She's going to kill me. He's going to kill me. Well, Bill drops down on element. What I mean by that is he pulls his gun and he takes Ellman into custody. While the young lady that Elleman kidnaped was a version of Julie Estes. Same size, same hair color, same body build. I even want to say that she worked in a convenience store somewhere they never put two and two together, but neither did I because I didn't know about this at the time. Now, fast forward, you know, I was a patrolman, I was a detective, I got promoted to sergeant, I made lieutenant, then I'm a captain working a zone. Glover makes me chief of the jail. And the reason I'm telling you that is because it's 20 years later. So that's what's happening in this 20 years time span. I get moved to the detective division about the time of Brenton Butler, and I call him a cold case squad. It was Rick Parker and Robbie Hints or the two names that I remember the most. There were others, and I apologize for not remembering who they were. Might have been texting Steve. Anyway, all men that I had the utmost respect for both as men and as police officers. So I called him office. I tell Parker, I want you to open the Julius Steve case and rework it for me. And I said, I want you to look at James Ellman. So they asked me a bunch of questions and answered it. They go down, they pull the case and they say, I wrote the original report. So now they understand they find that there's semen on one of her socks. Now, back then, there was no such thing as DNA. There was DNA. We just didn't know how to read it. We have a very small sample. For about that time. We were having a lot of problems with the state crime lab, and what we did is we did send it to the state crime lab. The sample that we had and they used like half of it. And it came back inconclusive. Well, to Hinton's benefit, he always throws the credit my way. Parker and Hansen and the rest of the people on a cold case squad, the once deserved credit because other ones did the work. All I was doing was steering the ship, so to speak. Robbie Hinson told me, he said, I don't believe this. Something's not right. I said, Send it back through what? You got left. He said, not much. And if they screw this up, we're done. I said, then what would you rather do? He says, Well, I'd really rather send it to a private lab, but we don't have any money for that. I said, How much is it? I think he said, twenty five hundred bucks. So, Robbie, that's no money. I got an investigative fund. We'll just use that money and we'll do it. He says, you'll do that. I said, Yeah, I'll do that. Well, then they come up with sending it to the army's DNA lab that their specialty is identifying remains from soldiers. Now, I've got to back up a minute because I left a very important piece out of this, Ellman is in CODIS now. Good luck with that acronym Alison.
Alison DeBelder [00:18:04] It's a database of people's DNA.
Frank Mackesy [00:18:08] Yeah, there you go. So now he's in CODIS because of the kidnaping. After that, they passed this law when DNA became effective that the people that were in prison had to be checked as well. So he's in the database now, but he's never been checked that samples never been checked against the database. Well, they put it in CODIS and it pops out its it's. Well, that's no silver bullet. It's a good bullet, but it's not the one we need. I'll never forget it. Me and those detective set my office when I was chief of detectives, and we strategized and we argued we went back and forth. And James Ellman is a sociopath. I'm not saying that to be mean. I'm telling you that's what I believe. He was getting out of prison. He got a 20 year sentence for kidnaping that young lady back then when you went in to prison, you got a third or more of your sentence off the day you walked in the door. And then they gave you good time on top of that. So if he was lucky, he probably would have done 10 years in a 20 year sentence. James Ellman did a day for day on a 20 year sentence because he kept getting in trouble in prison. You guys are defense lawyers. I don't have to tell you, but sometimes the denials just as good as an admission. What we had decided was if we could get him to come off of it and confess, Hallelujah. But if we can get him to deny it, that's just as good as a confession because we've got his semen in her sock. Well, James Ellman was institutionalized. And what I mean by that is he was an inmate raised in an inmate system, and he was hard. But when he went into it, there was something not right with Jim Tilmon. Mean, we still believe he killed his sister, even though we have no proof he's alleged to have done that. We know he kidnaped the clerk and we got a semen on Julius his sock. And I think there was one other victim out there for something that we thought Alison was good for, but we could never prove that one. So they sit down there, good talking to him and they start talking to him. He's copping an attitude with them, but he never said, Hey, I just want my lawyer. He was showing him. He was the boss. Hey, James, we understand you're fixing to get out and I'm making some of those up, but we need to ask you about a case. Pieces may. I ain't got no other cases. I've been in here 20 years. They said, What about Julie Estes, who, you know, she was the clerk that worked at the little Champ Store right down the street from her house? I got no idea who you're talking about. Think hard, James. Come on. You had to know her. You live right down the street. You went to that store all the time. I may have seen her in the store, but I got no idea what you're talking about. So they show her a picture. Show him a picture. Here she is. Doesn't ring a bell. You're sure. Yeah, I'm sure. Well, how did you seem to get in her sock? I want my lawyer. Too late now. So I was kind of digging in on this one because I wanted him to get the death penalty, so I'm over there, arguing State Attorney. Well, he files a motion to suppress on the lab because we used an army lab under Posse Comitatus. Well, heck, I hadn't really ever heard of Posse Comitatus, so I didn't know if I was supposed to be worried or not. But it was a stretch as what the lawyers told me it was a stretch. And as a result, he got life in prison once he lost his motion to suppress. He caught up to life in prison without any chance of parole, ever. And I was good at that because earlier I said, there's some people that don't need to be on the street. I firmly believe that James Ellman is one of them to the point where I had a special unit that worked for me when I was a chief of detectives the day James Ellman got out of prison. We're going 24 seven eyes on surveillance on him because I knew it was only a matter of time before he offended and killed somebody else.
Alison DeBelder [00:22:13] I feel like the victim of the kidnaping who survived is such a hero in this entire story. You couldn't because she had a knife to her and she had the presence of mind when it would be sorely tempting. I imagine to do what you're told. You know, from the guy holding the knife at you that you're trapped in a car with, it would be really tempting to do what you're told. And she saw a cop. She acted immediately and he saved her life. She saved her own life. But in addition to that, that officer and that woman are the reason that he ended up in CODIS and that he ended up being connected to Julie Estes. So her bravery is just astounding to me. And the consequences of her conduct.
Frank Mackesy [00:23:11] You get no argument out of me there. I've never met her and I'm eternally grateful.
Alison DeBelder [00:23:17] So were you thinking about that case for those 20 years?
Frank Mackesy [00:23:23] She was with me not on a daily basis. That wouldn't be truthful. I promise you, though, I thought of Julia Estes once or twice a month for 20 years. I never forgot her.
Alison DeBelder [00:23:36] Did your feelings around what happened to her and that case, do you feel like they changed after Ellman was sentenced?
Frank Mackesy [00:23:46] No, she changed my feelings long before James Holman came into the picture.
Alison DeBelder [00:23:52] How so?
Frank Mackesy [00:23:54] The agency forgot about her. But I didn't.
Alison DeBelder [00:24:01] Well, it took that time, though, didn't it? I mean, the science had to change. Or do you think something else could have happened
Frank Mackesy [00:24:07] for the science change a few years before I was there as the chief of detectives? What happens is and this is one of my pet peeves when I was at the sheriff's office is, look, these people are not numbers their names. If you treat them like a number, you're moving to the next number. Let's make sure we do right by the name. And I'll tell you how I know that's true. Now, fast forward, this is now July of 2003. Now he got arrested for the Julies murder, and I think the deal is even already been worked out. And you know, he's where he needs to be for the rest of his days on this Earth. And John Rutherford's elected sheriff, and he's having a staff meeting at the Old Adams Mark Hotel on the riverfront with all his new staff, and he's fixing to take over Sheriff. I mean, he was the sheriff, actually. But you know how it is. You get a staff retreat, you get everybody on the same page. Here's my vision. I'm the sheriff. This is how I want to change this city. This is what I need you to do. And while we're there, the door is open now. It's like a Friday afternoon and we're all in civilian clothes and in walks. Jennifer Wall with the cameraman. Jennifer was a reporter from Channel four in Jacksonville. So I think she's still there. She's got these people tagging along with her. I'm just sitting there fat, dumb and happy. They walk up to the and we think they're there because they're covering this new administration coming on, you know, it goes those fluff pieces that they do. And Sheriff Rutherford calls me up there. Yeah, I don't know what the heck's going on, so I said, we won't go up there. I know Jennifer. I known Jennifer for years because I did. All the news conferences on law enforcement involved shootings for a very long time. It was Julie Estes, mother and father and her husband at the time. It floored me. And all she said to me was. Thanks for not forget my daughter for 20 years. Then we went to a room and we all sat around, shot the breeze, and the husband looks at me and goes, You thought I killed her? Didn't answer as absolutely. You thought you killed her? I told him, and I apologize for that once we got on Dahlmann. But up until Jim Ellman came on the picture, I had you good for you, had no alibi and you didn't seem to care that she was gone. He never really got over her loss, either.
Alison DeBelder [00:26:42] Sure, it's amazing. I was just wondering about your relationships with assistant state attorneys, that's what in Florida, we call district attorneys, state attorneys for people who aren't in Florida. When you're working with an assistant state attorney, especially on a difficult case like one that's old or you don't have as much evidence as you'd like. Can that be contentious or does that usually go pretty smoothly? Do you see eye to eye? Do you have any insights on that that you're interested in sharing?
Frank Mackesy [00:27:11] It was all of the above. Now, from a defense attorney's perspective, you know, you might not be too enamored with this concept of prosecuting people. But there was a time in Jacksonville if you didn't have a van full of nuns, the witnesses to your murder, they wouldn't file it. And it used to drive me nuts. And you know what, if it was white neighborhoods, what was happening in there would have been a different perspective. But because it's in a high crime neighborhood and everybody's drug dealer, it's one drug dealer killing another drug dealer. Nobody seemed to care. When I was chief detectives, I said, Well, that mom and dad or that grandmother cares. This is not right. And I used to fight like a dog on a piece of meat over that. But they held all the power. They're like, Whoa, we can't win this. My how the hell do you know you ain't even trying? I'm really more about the victim. I don't really care about the color of the victim or the sex of the victim or the sexual orientation of the victim, the victims, the victim. Our job is about the victim. And sometimes that victim can't speak for themselves like a Julia Estes or there's no one else to speak for them. That's what they got us for.
Alison DeBelder [00:28:29] That brings me to another case I wanted to ask you about, because I am actually interested in your feelings around the victim and the killer in particular in this case, and that is the case of a girl, Mattie Clifton. I'm going to ask you to summarize what happened in Mattie Clifton's case.
Frank Mackesy [00:28:51] It was 1998. It was November 3rd. I was home sick. Running fever, all that kind of stuff. I get a call. I was chief of patrol and they tell me we got him as an eight year old. The lieutenant they called me at the time was a guy named Steve Weintraub, who I think is responsible for us, eventually finding Maddie's body because the very first thing that he did when he got there is that lieutenant as he shut down that entire neighborhood and nothing went in and nothing came out. If it came out, it was completely searched. So Matty doesn't show up, want to say this was like a Monday or Tuesday was Tuesday. It was a Tuesday. It takes on a life of its own. It's a missing eight year old. She's as cute as a button. Pictures plastered all over the media, the neighborhoods they're putting out, signs people are getting together to search for, and it takes wall to wall coverage with the news media, their run and news media coverage with no commercial interruption. Back then, when I was a chief patrol, my responsibilities were the perimeter security. That was it. Everything that goes on inside that tape was the responsibility of the tech division that we turn set the tempo from the very get go. So when I get there, I could to the patrol guys. We're just standing outside the other tape making sure nobody goes in, nobody comes out and I go to the command center and I'm sitting in the command center and it's a bunch of detectives and there's a person from FDLE and there that's a profiler kind of like you see on these TV shows, the lieutenant that was in charge at that time is a really, really good guy. He's a conscientious guy. They're in there. And I said, Hey, guys, I know I'm a little late to the dance, but would you mind briefing me and what you got so far? So they start telling me, and then this one little old block ran right off Rainbow Road. I used to live on Rainbow Road as a kid, so I know this area like the back of my hand. I used to run from the police in those woods, so I knew those woods. The fact is, they're telling me this stuff. And on that, one little old block was three or four registered sexual offenders or predators. So they're naturally zero in on them, right? And the profiler weighs in and he he gives me this line of, well, we're looking for a 22 year old, blond haired, blue eyed white male that lives with his mother. That's got and I'm thinking the whole time that cat stopped to me, man, this guy is an idiot. The last thing I said, they briefing, I said, look, I understand why you're looking at these predators and offenders, but you need to be concentrating the last person she was in a lab with. Now the chief of Patrol's telling the detectives how to do their job that don't go over too well. But that's just how smart
Alison DeBelder [00:31:33] you appear to have had a career of making good friends with homicide detectives from what I can tell
Frank Mackesy [00:31:38] you. Yeah, actually. Eventually I would save guys in the morning for me as chief of detectives, and we were all fine. But good point, I have to give the house right. So this is a big deal. Now we're going into the weekend in the Friday comes and there was an Eckerd drugstore in the shopping center right there at St. Augustine and University. There's a dry cleaners right next to it, had a drive thru and it was me, the chief of detectives and Sheriff Glover. And we're having a strategy meeting with the sheriff and they're wanting to pull out our patrol perimeter and they want to go covert and watch the neighborhood to see if somebody because we felt like she was in that perimeter somewhere. See, Batman. It doesn't happen often in Jacksonville, it does happen, but it doesn't happen often. There are not a lot of stranger abductions ones too many, but we'll have them once every few years. So we're playing the odds that that's not what happened. They want to pull down the perimeter and I'm just sitting there. If you can believe this one. Keep your mouth shut. Listen to the sheriff and the chief of detectives. Talk to the sheriff, looks at me and goes, What do you think, chief? I said, I think that's a terrible idea. He says, What do you mean? I said I don't think we should take a perimeter down until Monday. Well, why not a single share? She's been missing the good part of this whole week. We probably had a couple of hundred people show up to search for her. If we're not here, when the throngs show up to search for her this weekend, that's not going to look good for us. And we're going to lose somebody else. And in that confusion, we could lose Maddie. There's a little bit of dialog back and forth between me and the chief and finally sheriff steps in and says, OK, we're going to leave the perimeter up until Monday. OK, so that weekend, we're all working that weekend because we want to find this little girl and they search that house like twice at least and didn't find her. Now the suspect's bedroom was a pig pen at the time. He had a bird's parents
Alison DeBelder [00:33:43] tell us who was the suspect. Who are you? Describe who you're talking about?
Frank Mackesy [00:33:46] Josh Phillips at the time, I think he was 12. He was the last person she was seen alive with. Go figure. He was out searching for. They asked for permission to search the house a couple of times. They got it. Those birds stunk to high heaven. And when you went in his room, he was burning incense. There was a bedroom window. And if you were standing outside of this window and you raised the window and you leaned inside that window, you would touch the waterbed. So it was against that wall. It was a cinderblock house. I was there on Saturday morning when the cadaver dog walked under that window where the bed was located on the other side and never alerted. We searched through the weekend. I mean, this is a big deal on Monday morning, like at seven o'clock in the morning, I get a phone call chief. We found her. She's under Josh's bed. Well, the first thing I think of is how in the hell do you miss her under a bed, which is a legitimate question. They say, What do you want me to do? I said, You lock that perimeter down and you don't do anything till I get there. Well, chief, you got a problem with that. And I forget what show it was. Just like Today Show or Good Morning America one of them? Well, they've got their local affiliate. This is a big ole semi-truck with a giant antenna on it to broadcast. Sheila Clifton, Maddie's mom and her husband are talking to like the gumballs and the perks of the world, and they're inside our perimeter. They're literally parked in front of Josh Phillips's house. So Josh Phillips' house is on a corner. There's a two lane road and Mandy Clifton's house is across the street. This truck is parked between the cliffs and in the Phillips house. Fortunately, I didn't live far when I get there and I said, What do you want us to do? I said, We're not doing anything until that interview's over. When that interview's over, we're getting that truck out of here and then we're going to start doing police work. I did not want Sheila Clifton finding out that we found her daughter in front of the entire country watching her on TV. I didn't think that was right. Now it's the detective scene, but I beat him there, so for right now, I'm OK because I'm Irish rank a person on the scene. So we get there. We shut the thing down. Now Glover shows up, Chief Detective shows up the detective start showing up. We had a special operations guy in an unmarked car in front of the Clifton house, and the mother came out knocked on the window of his car. This is something along the lines of I got some money to show you.
Alison DeBelder [00:36:27] You're talking about Josh Phillips mom, his mom.
Frank Mackesy [00:36:30] Yes, Josh Holt's mom comes out, knocks in the witnesses. I got something to show you. The guy walks in in the corner of the waterbed. It's not like a regular bed. In that corner of the bed had been duct taped shut. So what happened is rigor mortis has set in and her leg kind of straighten out. And she. Pushed it when her leg straightened out a little bit in her little foot was sticking out the corner of underneath that bed. But what it also did is, or at least a very strenuous odor. It's been since Tuesday, OK, but what was unique about this was the temperature of that water bed was so cool it kind of slowed the normal process way, way, way down. So much for the 22 year old white male blue eyes, blond hair, all that nonsense. He was a 12 year old that committed the murder. So I'll never forget that news conference, who was Glover did all the talking, obviously, we had reporters here from all across the state. I think there were some people here from other countries. It was the biggest thing I had seen up until that point of time as far as media publicity was concerned. And you know, the number one question people want to know is how do you miss her under a bed? Well, it's not like playing hide and seek with your kid where you get to lift up the cover and look under the bed. The bed was a wooden frame that had metal hinges on three of the four corners. The hinge was broken on the fourth corner. The family had taped over it. I even think they question the family about that, and they said it had been broken for quite some time. I don't remember exactly he told Sheila Clifton about that day, about finding Maddie. I remember her response, you know, because the mother and her baby's gone. We provided an escort. We pulled the funeral, gave her a police escort. There are people hundreds and hundreds of people lined up on the road, taking her to her final resting place. We went to the church, we we looked out for the family, but we also I look I looked out for Josh Phillips's family, too, because going back in the very beginning of this conversation, there's two families who lost kids that day. It's just that Mandy Clifton's was permanent, and I really had empathy for them. People were showing up. People were dropping off animals like birds with their head cut off on their doorstep and, you know, doing god awful things like that. But my breaking point came was when not so much the mother, she was there. But Josh's father and mother did a TV show with Dan Rather 48 hours. Much of that and that father went on that TV show and blamed Mandy Clifton for her death. And then from that point on, I was done with them.
Alison DeBelder [00:39:28] I read somewhere that you remembered the clothes that you were wearing the day that Maddie was found and that you were not able to ever wear those clothes again, is that true?
Frank Mackesy [00:39:43] And there were warming in. Sheriff Glover, because I'd been so involved in the decision making process of that investigation, asked me if I wanted to go in and see her, and I respectfully declined. I told him I'd seen enough that kids in my life I didn't see need to see another one. I wanted to remember Mattie for the shoulder length brown hair with that little old but not buck tooth, but she had a gap between her front teeth. You know she's wearing a little necklace around her neck. That's what I wanted to remember her for. Not the last week what was seen her under that bed. And I will tell you this to this day, the sheriff Glover and I are in contact with each other. He remembers this case. Like no others.
Alison DeBelder [00:40:33] I'll put up in social media for folks to go and see if they want. There's a photo gallery that exists on Jacksonville RT.com Still, and it is just. Heartbreaking. That doesn't even do it justice.
Frank Mackesy [00:40:47] It doesn't have
Alison DeBelder [00:40:48] to look at some of the images and how the community responded and to look at pictures of Matty in the clothes that she was wearing when she went missing and then also the photograph of Josh Phillips because he was a child. And I'm wondering if you can speak to what that's like because I mean, I say I represented children when I had a 17 year old or a 16 year old that I represented. But I mean, he was 12 years old. Can you speak to that because it's hard to wrap my brain around?
Frank Mackesy [00:41:21] You know, I've been doing this now almost 40 years. Nothing really surprises me anymore. But that one surprised me a little bit. Now I suspect the name of it from the very beginning for the no other reason. He was the last person she was seen alive with. There was no history of any of those other mobs from that neighborhood re-offending or there being any issues none of them had ever interacted with Mandy. But I think the reason Josh Clift committed that murder is because he was afraid of his father.
Alison DeBelder [00:41:54] And just for the listeners, my understanding is that when he was questioned, Josh said that he had accidentally struck Mandy with a baseball, I believe bat a bat, and he was frightened specifically of his father. And so. He did the other things that he did, but everything about it strikes me as just so supremely childish. Right? The panic, the reaction and then where he put her. It's just such a childish.
Frank Mackesy [00:42:27] Yeah, I'm not even going to give him that pass because I've seen other murders by people much older than him committed the same way.
Alison DeBelder [00:42:35] But you do believe that he was afraid of his dad.
Frank Mackesy [00:42:37] I do. And I think the reason he did what he did is because that's where he got trapped with Mandy when his father came home unexpectedly. Mandy wasn't supposed to be in the house.
Alison DeBelder [00:42:48] And Josh Phillips, just for the listeners, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. And then there was a change in the law recently where children, under certain circumstances, they can't be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. And he was given a new sentencing hearing in front of a different judge and again was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Is there anything else that like in the lead up to our getting together today that you had really wanted to mention or discuss that we haven't gotten to? Chief.
Frank Mackesy [00:43:24] No, I have to admit that the name of your podcast kind of throws me off a little bit, I'm not exactly sure what it meant. You know, and after talking to the two of you, I could understand a little better what it meant. And it made me think about trauma in law enforcement specifically because unfortunately, we see it before anybody else. And the thing I can tell you is the stuff that you see on TV. It's a bunch of hooey. I can tell you that those men and women out there, for the most part, the good ones, which is most of them, there are some knuckleheads. Don't get me wrong care. And they care about the people they're out there serving. But it also has an impact on them, or you wouldn't see high divorce rates, high alcoholism rates, higher suicide rates. Right. All that's because of what they experience on the job, for the most part. There's probably other stuff going on, but it's mostly that. And I have friends who were cops that died from alcoholism. I have friends who committed suicide as a result of the job. And I also have friends who have been divorced because of the job. There's trauma here.
Chris Moser [00:44:35] I just want to thank you so much for taking the risk because we are going abroad and talking to divergent people and players in the system and listening to their perspectives and seeing all the intersections, and hopefully this will help officers like us help some of the lawyers that have come to us and told us I thought I was alone or various things personally. You remind me a lot of one of my childhood friends who lived across the street from me named Robbie Reddick, and he is, I guess you call it, the spokesperson or a detective in Broward County in Plantation. And he used to call the fire truck and watch him come. So when you said you ran from the police, I got a chuckle. But I just appreciate hearing you speak and talk about education and mentorship. Paying attention, empathy and all the goodwill that the community has. When you were in those roles because of all the engagement and the hard work that you put in. I just applaud you for taking the risk, because I know you didn't know either of us very well at all. And I think that this is going to be a fantastic season, and I think it's a very important topic that no one's really talking about in this sort of intimate way. Just thank you so much for taking the time to do this and taking the chance on us.
Frank Mackesy [00:46:03] Well, you're certainly welcome. Thanks, Joe. Take care.
Alison DeBelder [00:46:07] Tune in next week for the rest of our discussion. Trauma injustice is created by Chris Moser and Alison DeBelder and engineered by Chris Higgins. Thanks for listening. To help us out, please subscribe to the podcast. Leave a star rating and review for us on Apple Podcasts and share with others who might be interested. Follow us and share your feedback on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at Trauma Injustice.