JOLIET, Ill. – For eight months, Kevin Fox sat in a jail cell as a suspect in his 3-year-old daughter's death, knowing prosecutors wanted him executed and that the real killer was free.
On Wednesday, Fox sat just a few feet away from Scott Eby as the convicted sex offender pleaded guilty to the suburban Chicago girl's sexual assault and murder. In a clear voice, Eby said the word "guilty" six times — ensuring he will spend the rest of his life behind bars for the death of Riley Fox.
In exchange for the 39-year-old's plea, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty.
The courtroom was packed with dozens of friends and family of Riley, many wearing pins with a photograph of the girl nicknamed "Rileybugs" on them. The gallery was silent as Eby entered his plea, ending a six-year ordeal in the highly-publicized case.
Kevin Fox, who was exonerated by DNA evidence, was the first to take the witness stand and read a statement in which he talked about his time in jail.
"I would always wonder what you were doing with your freedom," he said. "If you were lying, watching TV or if you were picking your next victim."
He said that once he left court, he would drive Eby from his mind.
"After today you will no longer be a part of my memories of my daughter," he said looking up from his notes, staring directly at Eby.
In horrific details, Assistant Will County State's Attorney Michael Fitzgerald told the judge how Eby, in a five-page letter, admitted that on June 6, 2004, he had been drinking and using cocaine — a combination that gave him the urge to break into Riley's Wilmington house and molest her.
Eby said he put a bandanna over his face before entering the house, put his hand over Riley's mouth and put her in the trunk of his car. He described then driving to a nearby forest preserve, duct-taping her wrists and mouth and sexually assaulting her on the floor of a men's room.
"Eby wrote that it was stifling hot that day, that he must have pulled down his bandanna because he looked down and stated that Riley Fox was staring at his face," Fitzgerald said.
Eby told authorities he knew the girl could identify him and panicked, taking her to a nearby creek and holding her "under the water by the shoulders until he couldn't feel her struggle anymore."
Many in the courtroom openly wept.
Melissa Fox spoke of the joys of watching her daughter and how she liked to sing, dance, tell jokes and catch butterflies. But, as her voice cracked, she also told Eby what he took when he held her daughter's head under water. Tears welled in Eby's eyes as the girl's mother spoke.
"She would never have the opportunity to play with her friends, have sleepovers, get her driver's license, go to homecoming or prom, go to college, get married or have a family of her own," Fox said. "I didn't get a chance to say goodbye or give her a last kiss or hug. Instead, I visit a headstone that I decorate for holidays and her birthday."
Eby spoke briefly, saying he didn't know why he killed the little girl.
"I wish I could explain," he said reading from a piece of lined notebook paper his attorney said he wrote himself.
After the hearing, Eby's attorney, Michael Renzi, said his client planned on pleading guilty from the time he was charged in May. He said Eby didn't want to put the family through a trial.
Prosecutors said Riley's parents agreed to the plea deal.
"I'm opposed to you getting the death penalty and dying a quick, painless death," Melissa Fox told him.
Kevin Fox had harsher words after the trial.
"I hope he rots in hell," he told reporters.
The plea comes nearly five months after Will County State's Attorney James Glasgow announced he'd charged Eby with first-degree murder and predatory criminal sexual assault of a child.
Authorities were led to Eby from DNA evidence collected from the crime scene along with other clues, including a pair of Eby's shoes pulled from the water that had his name written in them.
Glasgow, who was not the prosecutor when Kevin Fox was arrested, cleared him after taking office. Fox and his wife were awarded $12.2 million in damages after they accused Will County investigators of fabricating evidence. A federal appeals court in April reduced the award to $8.6 million.
Eby was an inmate at the medium security Lawrence Correctional Center in Sumner, serving time for a Dec. 2005 sexual assault conviction filed in an attack on a relative. According to the Illinois Department of Corrections, he will be eligible for parole on that conviction in mid-2017.
I would have taken a sharpened wooden stake hidden in my sleeves and stabbed him in his neck as many times as I could right there in the court room if this was my child.
it didn't help any that the father actually confessed.
supposedly coerced by police.
but clearly something not right in his head.
ABC
Fox's murder was a gruesome crime that rocked the Rust Belt community. Search volunteers found Riley's body face-down in a creek in the Forsythe Woods, about a two-and-a-half miles from the Fox residence.
Authorities initially charged the young girl's father, Kevin Fox, with the murder, based largely on a videotape confession that he'd killed Riley.
According to the investigators, Kevin Fox said he woke up in the middle of the night went to the bathroom, where he accidentally hit Riley with the door, causing her to stumble and hit her head on the bathtub. Thinking he'd accidentally killed her, he panicked and supposedly did something to make it look like she was sexually assaulted.
Investigators said he put duct tape over Riley's mouth, drove her in his car to the river, walked down the side of a small bridge and dumped her into the river.
Fox spent eight months in prison before he was released and ultimately cleared through DNA evidence
Within an hour of finding the body of 3-year-old Riley Fox in a Wilmington creek, authorities pulled a pair of shoes from those waters. Written inside each was the last name of the man charged six years later with her murder.
Police placed the shoes in evidence, but never pieced that lead together with other clues -- a call to police from the man's home and signs of a burglary preceding Riley's abduction -- that could have led them to Scott Wayne Eby in the hours and days after her sexual assault and slaying.
Instead, Will County sheriff's detectives focused almost exclusively on Riley's father, Kevin. DNA evidence excluded Kevin Fox after he spent eight months in jail, but authorities didn't declare him innocent until last month, when Eby allegedly confessed to the slaying and the partial DNA sample from the crime scene matched his.
"Looking at all of the information that we now have about Eby, he could have been apprehended the day after the murder, and he probably would have confessed," said attorney Kathleen Zellner, who won an $8 million federal civil court judgment on behalf of Kevin Fox and Riley's mother, Melissa.
Investigators' photos and notes obtained by the Tribune, as well as interviews with people involved in the case, shed light on evidence made public for the first time Tuesday on chicagotribune.com.
During the civil trial, an FBI agent testified that then-Sgt. Edward Hayes, who led the investigation, ordered that DNA testing be stopped after the arrest of Fox, who incriminated himself in a statement made after 14 hours of interrogation. The civil jury found Fox's statement was coerced and held Hayes and Deputy Scott Swearengen mainly responsible.
Zellner, who compared the shoe evidence to "dropping your driver's license at the (crime) scene," also said police failed to search a forest preserve bathroom near the creek. Eby confessed to sexually assaulting Riley in that bathroom and disposing of her underpants in a nearby garbage can, she said.
"There were probably five possibilities where Eby's name could have surfaced very early on during the investigation," she added. "I think it's an example of really shoddy police work."
She also said that Eby, who lived about a mile from Riley at the time of her slaying, in December 2005 was convicted of sexually assaulting a relative. If police investigating Riley's killing had then obtained his DNA and compared it with the partial sample, that would have been key evidence against him, Zellner said.
Pat Barry, spokesman for the Will County sheriff's department, declined comment on specific evidence, but reiterated the apology Sheriff Paul Kaupas gave last month.
Kaupas said he's interviewing companies, whose employees include retired FBI agents and chiefs of police, to do an extensive review of the Riley Fox investigation.
"There were some mistakes made in the case," Kaupas conceded. "That's what we're trying to avoid, any of these things (happening) in the future."
He said investigators did swab "anybody and anything" for DNA after Riley's death, but did not specify when; a crime sample was identified in June 2005. But Kaupas also acknowledged that they did not search for people who lived in the Wilmington area at the time of the crime and later became sex offenders, which could have led to Eby. He said the sheriff's department didn't have enough personnel.
Charles Pelkie, spokesman for State's Attorney James Glasgow, also declined comment. Glasgow freed Kevin Fox, who was charged under Glasgow's predecessor, and oversaw the investigation that eventually led to Eby.
Henry Weidling, former volunteer director of the Wilmington Emergency Services and Disaster Agency, said he found a pair of white athletic shoes in the creek fewer than 100 yards from the crime scene and less than an hour after Riley's body was found on June 6, 2004. Weidling said the shoes looked like they hadn't been in the water long.
Photographs of the shoes show "EBY" on the inside of their tongues, according to case documents. Although the name is hard to make out in the photos, handwritten police notes clearly note "EBY" and list the brand.
Eby, who was on parole for burglary when Riley was killed, said during his confession that he discarded the shoes in the water when they became muddy after drowning Riley in a section of Forked Creek, Zellner said.
The morning Riley went missing, Wilmington police were called by Eby's mother to their home for a "wellness check," Eby said during his confession, according to Zellner and Melissa Fox, who were both briefed by the FBI.
Police were visiting Eby's home to see if he had "thoughts of suicide," said Chief Darin Plotts, one of two officers who responded.
When police arrived, Eby, now 38, was agitated and vomiting. He asked police if they had found "that little girl yet," Melissa Fox said.
Barry, of the sheriff's office, said many agencies had pieces of information about Eby, but "nobody put it together."
"We don't have an answer for a lot of this stuff," Barry said. "There were definitely, definitely communication lapses. There were definitely things not done."
Kaupas said his office never had contact with Eby. Wilmington police handled that aspect, he said.
But James Metta, the chief at the time, said once her body was found and her death became a homicide investigation, he turned the case over to the sheriff's office.
"Our part in it ended," said Metta, now living in Florida. "Our case was solved, unfortunately, by finding (Riley)."
During his recorded confession last month, Eby said that before entering the Fox home, he burglarized a home across the street, where he cut a screen to gain entry to a patio door, Zellner said. That screen also was in evidence, but an evidence technician dismissed the cut as storm damage, records show.
Melissa Fox said the shoe evidence, combined with the other details, should have led police straight to Eby, not her husband.
"It's amazing to me," she said, referring to the shoes. "They had the evidence to solve the crime within the first 24 hours. It's all right there."
She said that Swearengen, who testified at trial that he immediately suspected Kevin Fox, often told her the evidence would do justice for Riley.
"The evidence has spoken," Melissa Fox said. "It's too bad that six years ago, he wasn't willing to listen."
shoe, the house, assaulted in public restroom, the creek where she was found.
The cops in this situation were wrong, wrong, wrong...
"Around 1:30 a.m., Kevin took a polygraph examination, and the examiner immediately told him that the results showed he was not being truthful. (At trial, an expert witness testified that the polygraph results were fabricated.) Kevin could not believe it. Officers brought Melissa into the polygraph room, and the polygraph examiner told her Kevin had failed. Melissa turned to Kevin, told him she loved him, that she believed him, and that she was behind him all the way.
According to the Foxes, Hayes was outside the door when Melissa made those comments, and as soon as she did, he went ballistic. He screamed to the officers to “get her the fuck out of that room right now,” and a detective started pulling Melissa out of the room by the arm while Hayes screamed “you’re a fucking murderer” at Kevin. Hayes then met Melissa in the doorway and screamed in her face, “Your husband’s a fucking liar, and he’s a fucking murderer. He never loved you or your fucking daughter, and he killed her, and you need to learn to fucking get over it.” Melissa said that she was terrified and felt like Hayes had “crushed the spirit out of her.” Page 14
Interesting interpretation here from the officers. You get up to leave an interrogation and you are prevented from doing so. This does not mean you are not free to leave all you need to do is ask. If you fail to ask then we can prevent you from leaving without any repercussions. Ridiculous. Remember that the parents were walking into an area in the station that they passed through three locked doors. During much of this time Melissa is also locked in to a room and isolated from calling a lawyer or talking to Kevin. This is a textbook example of a coercive interrogation.
What kind of ANIMAL finds a 3 year old baby sexually attactive? What kind of monster could do that? You don't prosecute them, you stomp them out like the cockroaches they are. You stomp on their heads until their brains are meshed with the asphalt permenantly.
this is why all confessions must be backed up with evidence. a confession alone is never enough to convict.
i can't explain the police methods here, and can't explain why he confessed.
(11-11-2010, 12:18 PM)Lady Cop Wrote: this is why all confessions must be backed up with evidence. a confession alone is never enough to convict.
i can't explain the police methods here, and can't explain why he confessed.
I can't understand confessing to something I did, let alone something I didn't do. I would have been arressted for assualt on a police officer if they ever tried to accuse me of hurting my child. At least this is how I see it being played out, but it is kind of hard to judge him, not walking in his shoes.
(11-11-2010, 12:30 PM)HyenaKiller Wrote: I would have been arressted for assualt on a police officer if they ever tried to accuse me of hurting my child.
I understand this.
I also understand that some people will say anything to stop the pain . . . physical or psychological.
(11-11-2010, 12:18 PM)Lady Cop Wrote: this is why all confessions must be backed up with evidence. a confession alone is never enough to convict.
i can't explain the police methods here, and can't explain why he confessed.
I got pulled over once when I was in my 20's by a BEAUTIFUL cop, I was driving on suspended license and was sure I was going to jail. Well, this cop is just jabbering away to me (after giving me a ticket) asking me all kinds of personal questions and all I wanted to do was get out there. It occurred to me after I was driving away, that she was hitting on me. I often wondered what would have happened if I would have picked up on it BEFORE leaving the scene.... Ahh well, that was a lost oppurtunity...
that was rather unprofessional of her.
i have had many males try to hit on me before and after i cuffed them up. unless it was vulgar and crude, i would laugh it off and turn it into a joke. and when they asked me to pat them down i would call on a big ugly male deputy to do it.
(11-11-2010, 02:01 PM)Lady Cop Wrote: that was rather unprofessional of her.
i have had many males try to hit on me before and after i cuffed them up. unless it was vulgar and crude, i would laugh it off and turn it into a joke. and when they asked me to pat them down i would call on a big ugly male deputy to do it.
Ya perhaps it was, but still, what was I THINKING?????
sigh... It would have made a great Penthouse story...
![[Image: riley_10.jpg]](http://i68.servimg.com/u/f68/13/98/02/72/riley_10.jpg)
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