School of Humans.
Sometime between the evening of September second and the early morning hours of September third, nineteen ninety four, thirty five year old Billy Jean Phillips was brutally beaten to death at her home in Alabama, Arkansas. This case very quickly became the biggest story in Madison County. Billy Jean had had several lovers, including, as we said last week, the deputy prosecutor named Rusty Kane and his son.
And Rusty's son was just twelve.
Years old when Billy Jean first made sexual advances toward him. There was also Billy Jean's younger brother, Robert McKnight, who had had some issues with drugs. Needless to say, there was a long list of potential suspects. Billy Jean was found wearing her white T shirt and underwear. She had been attacked and beaten with a weapon that split her scalp.
Police believed it was her.
Son's tea ball bat, since the bat was found splintered into pieces in the master bedroom. Then Billy Jean's killer strangled her. Billy Jean had fought hard, so hard that two of her fingernails ripped out police were looking hard at Rusty Kane, the deputy prosecutor, and several other suspects, but over the years, police took DNA from several of them, and Rusty Kane and his son and Billy Jean's brother
were eliminated. None of the people that they took DNA samples for were a match to the DNA that had been found under Billy Jean's fingernails. Over the years, it was reported that police had tested at least fourteen people, none of them were a match. But in two thousand and two, there was an arrest in the Billy Jean Phillips murder case, one that would shock the community. I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past five years of making my true crime podcast, Telling Gone, I've learned there's no such
thing as a small town where murder never happens. I've received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five that's six seven eight seven four four six one four five. This is Helen Gone murder line. The
guy who was arrested was named Clint Eugene Phillips. By the way, Clint was no relation to Billy Jean. That same last name was just a coincidence. Clint Phillips was never a suspect in the original police investigation. He was never even a person of interest. Initially, Clint was not arrested for Billy Jean's murder. He was arrested and charged
with sexual assault against his girlfriend at the time. He was eventually convicted of that sexual assault, and after his arrest, law enforcement asked Clint to provide them with a blood sample, and when he did, the DNA was a match to the DNA that was found under Billy Jean phillips fingernails. Here's Terry Jones, the prosecutor on this case.
Well, we didn't suspect him at all. We didn't even know about until we've got the DNA evidence back.
This was kind of a shock because, again Clint Phillips was someone whose name never came up in the original investigation at all. But when Billy Jean's parents, Edna and Earle saw Clint on the news and saw the news reports about him being arrested for sexual assault. They remembered Clint. They remembered that he used to come into the Ozark shop where Billy Jean worked, and that he would talk to her while.
She worked there.
But Clint Phillips was just seventeen years old back in nineteen ninety four, just a couple of days from his eighteenth birthday when Billy Jane was killed, so he was never really on the radar, And honestly, from the newspaper reports, it's not clear whether police decided to compare Clint's DNA to the DNA under Billy Jean's fingernails on their own, or whether it was Billy Jean's father who called them
and kind of prompted them to do that. After law enforcement said they had a match, detectives started looking deeper into Clint Phillips and his background. They started talking to Clint's former girlfriends, and in total, three girlfriends testified that Clint had been abusive.
His lawyers said that all.
The abuse had happened after nineteen ninety seven, when Clint apparently became addicted to methamphetamine.
We questioned ex girlfriends found out that he was kind of a rough lover. He liked to do violent things to the girls and that sort of thing, and then we found out he was in town that night.
Clint's lawyer painted a picture of Clint in nineteen ninety four as a normal teenager who wanted to go into computer science, but the women who eventually testified against Clint told police a very different story. Clint's ex wife, who he married a few years after Billy Jean was murdered, testified that he kicked her, threw her on the ground,
and punched her in the face. Another ex girlfriend testified that in two thousand and one, Clint had locked her in a room and stabbed her with her own keys, as well as beating her. One ex girlfriend testified that Clint Phillips drugged and raped her in two thousand and two. This was the sexual assault that Clint was eventually convicted of. This ex girlfriend told police this was a violent attack.
She said Clint had punched her in the face and tried to choke her with a TV chord, and this attempted strangulation reminded a lot of people of what happened to Billy Jean. Phillips because she had also been strangled. But Clint did something after his arrest that could either be seen as really kind of naive or really shrewd and smart. What he did was he reached out to local reporters and right after he was arrested, he did an interview with a local TV station. From jail, Pete.
Got to TV State. He told that story to the TV stations before we even had the.
Trial, and in that interview, Clinton admitted he had known Billy Jean. He said he had hooked up with her on the night she was murdered, but he said it was totally consensual, and he said that it did not happen at her house the crime scene. His story, which was later told through his attorney in court, was that
Clint had flirted with Billy Jean. He would go see her in the Ozark shop and they would be flirtatious, and then he said, right before she was killed, he had mentioned that he was going to turn eighteen in two days. Clint's attorney said Billy Jean asked him what he wanted for his birthday, and that she offered to give him a sexual encounter as a birthday present. Clint claimed that the DNA under Billy Jean's fingernails must have
happened when they had a sexual encounter. He claimed that she was giving him oral sex and he scratched her, but he claimed that when he left her she was very much alive. Let's go back to the night of September second. Clint claimed that on that night he was arrested in charge with d w I. He was released
from jail at around seven pm. At first, he told police that at some point that night, he couldn't quite remember when because he was drunk, he and Billy Jean had met on the side of the road somewhere and had oral sex in his truck. Now, remember, Billy Jean Phillips was working at the Ozark shop that night, so it's not clear whether this supposed encounter happened while she.
Was at work or afterwards.
But the witness who saw Billy Jean and saw her car drive toward her house said that they saw her car turn off toward her road at around ten forty five or eleven PM. The timeline becomes very important here because remember, police said that Billy jan was killed approximately sometime between ten thirty that night and the next morning at around six am. They couldn't narrow it down any more than that, and Clint did seem to have an alibi for that night, at least for part of it.
His sister, Angela Head, and another friend named Heather Harp said Clint was with them at the Washington County Fair from around eleven PM on September second until two thirty am the next morning, But at the trial, an Arkansas State Police investigator named Steve Coffinger said both Heather and Angela had originally told him a different story and said that Clint was not with them at the fair that night. In September of two thousand and three, Clint Eugene Phillips went to trial.
Clint Phillips was on trial.
The charge that he was facing was capital murder, and a lot of attention was focused on the crime scene because this was a tough case to prove.
There was just so many rumors going around Madison County that was very difficult impossible to get a conviction. We didn't have anyth that put him in that house the night that she was killed. That's a pretty big hole.
As Terry pointed out, other than the DNA evidence under Billy Jean's fingernails that was apparently a match to Clint Phillips. There was no physical evidence tying Clint to that crime scene at all, and prosecutors also struggled with providing the jury with a motive for this crime, which isn't a requirement necessarily, but would help tremendously in a case where it seemed like there were so many people who were pissed off the victim, The prosecution leaned hard into the
DNA under Billy Jean's fingernails. An ex girlfriend of Clint's testified that Clint did have scratches on him the day after the murder, but again Clint had a story for that. He said that those had been sex scratches, that they had happened during oral sex. Clint told police he had oral sex with Billy Jean in the church parking lot near her home. Clint did not take the stand in his own defense, but the jury was able to see video footage of that interview that Clint did with the reporter.
In that interview, Clint.
Said, quote, there's nothing in my background that makes me a murderer.
Everyone knows that end quote.
Clint also told local journalists that he had doubts about the authenticity of that DNA. Clint told the Madison County Record that the police asked him to give a blood sample. He said that he had given everything that the police asked for voluntarily, and he believed that someone could be trying to frame him. This sounds a little bit wild, but as we've seen in other cases, we have to consider this possibility. We have seen a lot of other
mistakes made in the Arkansas State Crime Lab. Remember in Christina Pipkins's case, the wrong hairs were sent in for testing, and if the defendant had not had a really good lawyer, that mistake might never have been uncovered.
So we know that mistakes can happen.
By the time of Billy Jan Phillips trial, doctor Fami Mallek, the controversial medical examiner who had been so discredited after making so many mistake was gone and there was a new medical examiner, Charles Cocus.
Doctor Cocus testified.
That in his opinion, it was unlikely that the scratches on Clint Phillips could have happened from oral sex, but he had to admit he didn't know for sure. It was a possibility, but there's another possibility maybe Clint didn't kill Billy Jean Phillips, but maybe he was not telling
the full truth about what happened that night. Remember, there were a lot of questions at the crime scene that were never answered, including the fact we still have no explanation for the unmade bed upstairs or who may have.
Been sleeping in it.
And then there was another very last minute witness, and this person was a friend of Clint's. According to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, this person had talked to Clint after the murder, and the person told police that Clint had told them that he had been there for Billy Jean's murder, but that he had just watched it happen and he wasn't a part of it. So the real story, did Clint really have oral sex on the side of the road with Billy Jean or did he go over to her house that night to.
Have sex with her and then attack her?
Or could it have been someone else, Maybe someone else who walked in on them or waited for Clint to leave and came in to confront Billy Jean, Maybe another jealous lover. Because remember there were signs of a cleanup and a stage crime scene a lot of people wondered whether Clint, as a senior in high school, would have been sophisticated enough to do that. Now, a lot of the questions in the Billy Jean Phillips case could have
been answered with better crime scene evidence. Unfortunately, the police screwed up a lot of it. There were other mistakes. There was the missing black suitcase that had been seen in the video and the missing vacuum bag from Billy Jean's vacum cleaner. There were the bed sheets from that unmade bed that were apparently sent in for forensic testing and then were inexplicably lost. And there were other hairs hairs that police said might have been from a perpetrator
but ended up being Billy Jean's hairs. And the biggest mistake was, as we said in last week's episode, police believed the murder weapon may have been a tee ball bat that was found splintered by Billy Jean's body, But it came out in court that investigators thought that bat had been cleaned off, But there could have absolutely been microscopic evidence on it. If it had been properly tested, it could have been the one thing that could tie
a killer to the crime scene at Billy Jean's house. Unfortunately, the tee ball bat was mistakenly destroyed by the crime lab, and the defense cast doubt on the idea that Clint Phillips, who weighed one hundred and thirty five pounds and was described in newspapers as scrawny. They wondered whether he would have been strong enough to beat Billy.
Jean to death.
Now, in my opinion, one hundred and thirty five pounds man would absolutely have been strong enough to beat a very small woman to death, no matter how feisty she was. But the defense also pointed out the screens had been taken off the windows, and there were signs of staging at the crime scene, and they wondered whether a drunk high school student would have had the sophistication to clean up that crime scene. And I agree with that assessment. I think that there are elements of this crime scene
that make no sense. Parts of it seemed very disorganized, like the killing itself. It seems like someone flew into a rage, picked up the nearest weapon of opportunity, and killed Billy Jean. But then there are signs that the scene was cleaned up afterwards. So I wonder was this the same person who did these things, or could someone have come by later, maybe another one of Billy Jean's lovers, and decided they need to clean things up before police
arrived and started their official investigation. These are things that I still wonder about today. And again we come back to that murder weapon, the.
T ball bat.
I asked Terry Jones about that. I wondered if anything that was that light and small could have been the only murder weapon. I know she was strangled, but I just wondered if, in his opinion, there could have been something else, something police didn't find. And this is what he said.
I don't think it was the bad eventually, I think it was something else. You do, yeah, because you can't describe the bat completely clean. You just can't do it right.
So there could be a second murder weapon out there, something police have never found. At the trial, defense used the other suspects in Billy Jean's murder to their advantage. In closing arguments, the defense attorney said police had suspected Rusty Kane, the deputy prosecutor and Billy Jean's lover, for a long time. And again I need to point out Rusty Kane was never arrested or charge with anything, but the suspicions and rumors over the years definitely worked to
the defendant's advantage. Prosecutor Terry Jones had a theory for what happened that night. He said that he believed that Clint Phillips was drinking very heavily that night. We know that because he got a DWI. He said, Billy Jean was sexually ford she offered him this birthday gift. So Terry Jones believes that Clint did come to Billy Jean's house and that they started a sexual encounter, but his
theory is that perhaps Clint could not perform sexually. The Democrat Gazette quoted Terry Jones as saying in court, quote, maybe Clint Phillips and Billy Jean had a date that night. He went to her house after the fair. Perhaps the alcohol had an effect. She teased him about it and
that set him off. End quote. We'll probably never know for sure exactly what went down in Billy Jean's bedroom, but that would explain why Clint had scratches on his back that to the medical examiner appeared to come from some kind of sexual encounter that was not oral sex, but would perhaps also explain why the forensic evidence did not indicate that Billy Jean had had intercourse with anyone before her death. Terry Jones told me he was convinced that Clint Phillips was the right guy.
He said he did his best. Again.
He wrote a book called Mister Prosecutor about this case, and he said it's one of the few cases he lost.
I think we had the right guy. I think we had plenty of evidence to convictim if there had been some will among the jury.
But in the end, it seems like the jury just had too many doubts. The trial took three days. After six hours of deliberation, the jury came back with a verdict. They found Clint Phillips not guilty. Clint was crying in court. He visibly broke down and got emotional when that verdict was read.
He walked out of the courtroom a free man.
His family, who came to support him, said they always believed in his innocence. Billy Jean's parents, of course, were devastated. Earl McKnight, Billy Jean's father was in a wheelchair. Her mother, Edna was also very frail, and after the verdict was read, they kind of collapsed into each other's arms. Billy Jean's baby brother, Robert, the one she was super close to, carried his mother out to the car.
Apparently it was just too much for her.
Don Martinez, Billy Jean phillips uncle, told the Arkansas Democraticzette quote, the mcknights have been in this community for fifty years. They are good people. They are not vindictive, but a wound has been reopened here. Please pray for them.
I think in the end, the father came back and thanked me for the efforts that we had done, and he said, we got the right guy. You know. He was not dissatisfied with what finally got done, except of course, for the verdict.
Obviously, Billy Jean's family was devastated and the rest of the community was pretty divided. Was this an innocent man who had been railroaded or had local rumors about the prosecutor and the sheriff and Billy Jean's sex life stop justice from being served. Prosecutor Terry Jones said the verdict on Clint Phillips would, in his opinion, make it very difficult to prosecute anyone else in future. He said, everyone in town knew about the case. Everyone knew about Clint's
DNA being under Billy Jean's fingernails. Another big question that I have is what happened to that physical evidence. Terry Jones says that along with the bat being destroyed and the bedsheets disappearing, and so many other pieces of evidence being mislaid, he was told all of the files had
been destroyed in a flood. I told him that I was going to ask around and do my best to figure out what actually happened to those files and if any of them are out there somewhere, because it seems very strange to me that every single piece of evidence from such a crucial case is just gone. Billy Jean's father, Earl, passed away in two thousand and five. Edna died in twenty fourteen. These people died never knowing who killed their daughter.
Remember Sheriff Ralph Baker, the one who was Billy Jean's friend and who ran Madison County and who, by the way, a lot of people believe ran the drug trade in Madison County. He became yet another person who died in a freak accident that happened in January of nineteen ninety eight. Apparently, Sheriff Ralph was in his patrol car trying to cross the White River. The cruiser started to flood, it flipped over, and he drowned. But some people believe this was not
just an accident. Even though the sheriff's body was found, he became kind of like the Elvis Presley of Arkansas. There were rumors he had faked his own death and escaped somewhere, that he had taken a lot of cash with him, And even though this seems extremely far fetched, I can tell you there are rumors on Facebook and other places to that effect. One of the reasons why a lot of people seem to believe that Ralph Baker couldn't have died this way was because he had so.
Much experience crossing the river.
They believe he would have known that a bridge like that was not safe to cross, and they just don't believe he would have taken that chance in those conditions. They believe he would have known that that would be super dangerous. There were lots of Facebook comments on the post about the twentieth anniversary of Ralph's death. It's clear again he was a very polarizing figure. Some people absolutely loved him and others really hated him.
One red quote.
I remember when Ralph Baker took my dad down the riverbed and left him handcuffed, beat the hell out of him with a gun and a pistol and a flashlight and told him to run so he could shoot him in the back because he was from California.
End quote.
So the controversy over Sheriff Ralph Baker continues to this day. Then, in two thousand and nine, and this is just kind of a weird side note, but David Mack, the author of the expose on Sheriff Ralph Baker, the one that talked about Sheriff Baker's alleged involvement in the drug trade. David Mack was at a Walmart in Fayetteville. Police said they caught him shoplifting, so they put him in a holding area in the back of the store. Then they put the penknife he was carrying on the counter. Then,
and this was the way it was reported. To everyone's horror, David Mack picked up his pen knife and slit his own throat. According to local news reports, he was still trying to stab himself while people were trying to subdue him. In the end, he was rushed to the hospital and died. There just one more strange death connected to Madison County. The mystery of Billy Jean Phillips continued. I'm hoping maybe one of you will hear something that I miss in all this. It reminds me of a game of clue.
And I'm not saying that because I take it lightly at all. I'm saying that because I believe there are a lot of suspects out there. There's a lot of information floating around that's not necessarily relevant. But I feel like there are a lot of clues out there, and if we can put them together in the right order, I feel like this case maybe could be solved someday. A lot of people over the years have implied Billy Jean phillips murder was about drugs. I don't believe this
was a straight drug murder. A drug dealer would have taken the money out of Billy Jean's wallet, and they probably would have stolen her jewelry and not bothered to stage the crime scene.
They just would have bailed. What about an arranged hit.
I've considered that, but I think at least right now, the evidence does not seem to back this theory up. Remember, there was no sign of forced entry. She was also wearing all of her jewelry, which she only wore when she was expecting company. And finally, we have to go back to what we do know from the physical evidence. For me, the biggest clue is the murder weapon, her son's tea ball bat. Even if it wasn't the only murder weapon, was definitely used. It was a weapon of opportunity.
Someone flew into a rage and grabbed the first thing they saw, because a tee ball bat is not a logical murder weapon.
Someone killed Billy.
Jean in a rage, and then they or someone else, either someone close to them or perhaps someone totally unconnected to them, but with a lot to lose stage that crime scene. We've talked a lot about the Cane family, Rusty, his wife Sharon, and their son Trey. We know that Rusty and Billy Jean were supposed to have a date that night. They had met up and exchange gifts. But
I wonder if he came back later. Maybe he got angry with Billy Jean and they got into an argument, or maybe Rusty Kane came in and discovered Billy Jean's body. Maybe him or another family member or someone else close to him helped clean it up. I still wonder about Billy Jean's closet. Remember that Euna, billy Jean's sister, said Rusty Kane had a whole rack of clothes. Basically he
had his own, like half of Billy Jean's closet. But when Billy Jean's body was found, Yuna said that the side of the closet where Billy Jean had kept Rusty Kane's clothes was just bare hangers. So who if anyone took these clothes? Did someone come in and grab them out of that closet? And if so, was it the killer or was it someone else. Sharon and Rusty Kane divorced in two thousand and four, so her spousal privilege would presumably have ended then. I still wonder if she's
ever talked to anyone about this murder. Rusty Kane survived the scandal. He eventually became the Huntsville City Attorney. Back in twenty fourteen, he was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated. Then he got another du in twenty seventeen. At that time, his blood.
Alcohol level was reportedly over twice the legal.
Limit, and even after that he remained the Huntsville City attorney. I guess some things never changed in the good old boys system in Arkansas. There was one final clue, and this, by the way, is why I love investigative reporting. The Arkansas Democrat Cazette that did so much great reporting on this case tracked down a neighbor who lived near Billy
Jean's house. Since this is a rural area, this person saw all the cars that would drive by to go to Billy Jeans, and also this being a rural area, they would notice who was driving what they knew everybody's car. So this neighbor went out to feed her chickens every day between five and six am. She stated that just before dawn on September third, she was out and heard
a car passing by. She said she looked up, but she couldn't see any headlights, which means that this person knew the road well enough to be able to drive it in the dark. Was this the killer or killers or was this someone doing a cleanup? Terry Jones said that they had talked to that neighbor he said, they talked to a lot of people, and they spent years trying to solve this case. So could Terry Jones be right? Did they get the right guy but just not have
enough evidence to win the case. I still wonder if Billy Jean's killer is out there. I've said before, murder investigations are like time travel. We get frozen in time at a moment when a horrific crime happens. Some part of our minds are always reliving that traumatic moment over and over. People focus on the larger issues of the case,
or the drug trade or the wacky characters. All I can think about is Billy Jean phillips little son, who was just seven years old when he found his mother lying in a pool of blood on her bedroom floor.
Clint Phillips is now fifty two years old.
After the trial, his family said they were planning to move him out of Madison County because of all the bad publicity, but it seems like he didn't get very far. After Clint's trial, he became involved in drug dealing. He was arrested for methamphetamine charges, and over the years he
did accumulate more of a criminal record. In October of twenty twenty three, he was arrested in Madison County after the Madison County Sheriff's Office seized approximately three hundred grams of methamphetamine, along with some other paraphernalia from Clint's residence. He was charged with trafficking and controlled substance distribution, theft
of property, and possession of drug paraphernalia. Clint's criminal record includes arrests and convictions for drugs, domestic battery, and aggravated assaults. After the arrest for sexual assault in two thousand and two, he became a registered sex offender. He's been arrested a couple of times since then for failure to register as a sex offender.
And very recently Clint.
This name came up again in a very strange way in another case. In January of twenty twenty two, a forty one year old man named Jason Lerell disappeared. Now the exact date when Jason vanished depends on who you ask. It's been reported that there was a sighting of him on January twenty seventh, but there are conflicting reports about whether that sighting was valid or not. We're going to go a lot more in depth into Jason's case in next week's episode, but the last known contact that Jason
had with anyone was on January twenty first. Then on February thirteenth, twenty twenty two, a few weeks after Jason disappeared, a deputy transported an inmate to the Barry County jail.
Now.
According to the arrest report, this man had blood on his hands and all over his clothing. He had been arrested on a totally unrelated charge, but he shot police when he said he had information about Jason Lerell's disappearance and that Madison County would want to talk to him about a capital murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production
of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts. Music is contributed by Ben Sale. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon.
Barr, and L. C. Crowley.
If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six ' one four or five.
School of Humans,