Julia Phillips, SC’s oldest female convicted killer, faded before death

Prison was not easy on former glamor girl Julia Phillips. No more upscale makeup boutiques and nail salons paid for by her affluent lawyer boyfriend. No designer clothes and shoes. No trips on ocean liners. South Carolina’s oldest female convicted killer withered away with heart disease, her hair turned the color of a gray sky, and died Wednesday at age 72.

At least she said she was 72. Even Phillips’ own lawyer, who tried to save her life before she was convicted in 2013 of accessory to murder in the death of boyfriend and former York Mayor Melvin Roberts in 2010, said Phillips was three, maybe four years older.

This is a woman, who just minutes after claiming to police in 2010 that she too was attacked when Roberts was killed, and the cops wanted to take pictures, blurted out with a laugh: “Will I be in Playboy?”

Apparently, Julia Phillips couldn’t even shoot straight about her age to her own lawyer. She sure never shot straight about being in the rain for half an hour, and being attacked by a black or Hispanic man, as she was not wet and no black man was ever found.

Most important, she died without ever giving up who helped her kill Roberts, as authorities convinced a jury she did not act alone.

She sure tried to stay young, but prison, snatched the youth and the life straight out of her.

Maybe she used no needles, but Julia Phillips, who thought she was a beauty and at one time had been a stunner and a knockout, was a junkie.

“All the facade is now stripped away,” said David Roberts, one of Melvin Roberts’ two sons. “She died what she was. Gray. Old. Evil. A killer.”

As recently as 2009, Phillips slept at night in York but could be seen flitting downtown 20 miles west in her hometown of Gaffney during the day when she managed the makeup store and clothes shop that Roberts owned and paid for. She was known to everybody. She was in her 60s and looked 10 or more years younger. She had been married twice before - she was married to one of them twice - before spending a decade with Roberts.

On Roberts’ arm, she sported pearls and diamonds and loved the limelight. She flashed cleavage and jewelry equally. It faded into jailhouse bulbs.

But before that it faded into pills. Narcotics, Dope. Drugs. Phillips would buy heroin-type narcotic pills at $80 a pop in the years leading up to her arrest from the lowest of street dealers in Gaffney, trial testimony showed. The money Roberts gave her for the store, the inventory, bills, went toward drugs. Even her own lawyer said during the trial the drugs were the problem.

Roberts knew about some of the drugs and the lies and threatened to cut off all money to Phillips after 10 years as a couple. Phillips response was to steal $2,000 in rent money owed Roberts by Gaffney tenants, then blow it on narcotics.

Phillips’ hair was described as “blonde or strawberry” when she walked into prison three years ago. Even as she collected Social Security before she was arrested and convicted, she had a maid who cleaned her house and fed her cat in Gaffney. The day Phillips was arrested in 2010 she cantered down police department stairs in a plunging blouse, her makeup done and her hair dyed a brilliant blonde.

Yet that same day she was arrested, Julia Phillips had exactly $1.62 to her name in the bank, and owed creditors tens of thousands of dollars.

Phillips had blown through at least $60,000 of Melvin Roberts’ money. But she wanted more.

Roberts, who was 79 in 2010 but still in good health aside from a pacemaker, was going to re-write his will and take back a $150,000 Gaffney building and more from Phillips. He was going to send her packing with her drug problem and her empty purse.

“This woman was invited to our homes, was part of our family, we treated her with respect,” said Ronnie Roberts, Melvin Roberts’ other son. “What does she do? She steals from our father, and then kills him. Over money. Because she was into drugs.”

David and Ronnie Roberts have refused to soften their stance on Phillips now that she is dead. She did not earn it. She never came clean and confessed. She lied right into the grave.

Julia Phillips turned from the glamor girl of Gaffney, the White Rose of York, in her designer clothes and high-heels and flashing more jewelry than a mobster’s moll, into a doper buying pills in an alley from derelicts.

Then she became, say the Roberts’ sons and the cops and prosecutors and most important, a jury, a killer.

This story was originally published July 11, 2016 at 3:41 PM with the headline "Julia Phillips, SC’s oldest female convicted killer, faded before death."