Illinois 2004 Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community

This is a story of what happens when police and a community turn on an innocent man and it comes with a surprise ending. Word of a figure emerging from the past confessing and giving astonishing details of Riley’s last night at home.  A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story.

 The following program contains content that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is strongly advised.  Tyler was just 5 years old. He woke up that Sunday morning and his sister was gone. Not [clears throat] in the bathroom. Not in the kitchen. Not anywhere in the house that a 5-year-old could check on his own before going to wake his father.

 Kevin Fox had put the kids to bed on the living room furniture the night before. Riley was put on the couch. Tyler was  in the chair just beside her. He’d gone to his own room, watched some TV, and fallen asleep hours later. By 7:00 that morning,    Tyler was standing at his door saying Riley was gone. Kevin searched everywhere in the house.

There was no trace of Riley. He thought to check with the neighbors. Maybe she had gone there to play or just hiding. But he couldn’t just find her. Then he called the police.  uh, my daughter’s nowhere nowhere to be found. How old is she?  Three. You’re kidding me.  He did not know yet that the back door lock had been broken before that night.

He did not know yet that a burglar had broken into the house across the street a few hours earlier and then crossed the street to his house. He did not know that the man had found nothing worth stealing inside, had been about to leave, and had  looked back. He did not know any of it yet. He only knew that his 3-year-old  daughter had been sleeping on the living room couch in her flamingo pajamas under a Dora  the Explorer blanket.

 And now she wasn’t. Welcome to Cold Case Unlocked. This case broke open not because of a database match,    not because of a genealogy tree, but because a father’s daughter said three words before she died. Where are you watching from tonight? We’d love to know. New here? Hit like and subscribe. It keeps the files open.

Now, back to Wilmington. Her name was Riley Ann Fox, born March 31st,  2001. 3 years old. Her family called her Riley bugs. She had an older brother named Tyler, 5 years old, a father named Kevin and a mother Melissa, who had traveled roughly 60 miles away from Chicago that weekend to participate in an overnight cancer awareness charity walk.

Kevin had the kids at their grandmother’s house, and he’d pick them up at around 1:00 in the morning on June 6th, 2004, because the evening had run late. He settled the children where they could sleep. Then he went to his bedroom. Asleep on a couch in the living room of a house on a quiet street in Wilmington, Illinois, a small city about 60 miles south of Chicago.

 The kind of place where people left their back doors unlocked without thinking about it because nothing had ever given them a reason to think about it. The back door lock on the Fox house had actually been broken for some time. Kevin didn’t know. It hadn’t mattered yet. On the night of June 5th into the early hours of June 6th, 2004, a man was driving around Wilmington, drinking and using hard substances and looking for houses to break into.

He had done this before. He had three prior burglary convictions already on his record. He broke into the house across the street from the Foxes first, cut through a window screen, found a wallet, and took $40. Then he crossed the street. He found the back door of the Fox house. The lock was broken. He walked in.

He moved through the house looking for something worth taking. He found nothing. He was about to leave. Then he looked back. He abducted Riley and drove her to a nearby forest preserve 4 miles away. Biological evidence recovered from the crime scene was proof of something more severe. He thought he couldn’t let her go after the bandanna he’d been wearing over his face slipped off and she had seen him.

He walked back to his car without his shoes. He had taken them off near the creek at some point. He left them there. Sitting in the water near where Riley was. Both shoes had a name written inside the tongue. One piece of evidence the investigators would have for years and should have looked into.

 Search teams found Riley later that same day, June 6th, face down in the creek, still in her flamingo pajamas, her hands bound and gagged. The shoes were pulled from the water nearby within hours of the discovery. They were logged in as evidence. Nobody connected the name to anyone. Every case on this channel takes hours of real research.

If you like how we bring these cases to life, hit like and subscribe. Now, back to Wilmington and the 14 hours that changed everything for the wrong reasons. Will County Sheriff’s detectives arrived at the scene and at the Fox home and began working the case from the outside in. There was no sign of forced entry at the house.

No broken window, no splintered door frame. Nothing visible to suggest anyone had come in from outside. What they did not factor in, what nobody flagged, was that the back door lock had already been broken before that night. It wasn’t a point of entry that showed damage because it hadn’t needed to be forced. It was already open.

 The detectives also did not connect the burglary from across the street. Same night. Same neighborhood. A window screen cut clean. Not torn by a storm. Cut deliberately. Logged into evidence as storm damage. Not connected to Riley’s disappearance. Not connected to each other. Not connected to the shoes sitting in the evidence locker with a name written on both tongues.

Instead, they looked at Kevin Fox. A father whose daughter had vanished from inside a house with no signs of forced entry. A father who had been the last adult to see her. A father who, in the logic the detectives were constructing, had no explanation for how she could have been taken without  his knowledge.

 They brought him in 5 months later, October 28th, 2004. They kept him in that room for 14 hours. What happened inside is disputed and will remain  disputed. Detectives said Kevin confessed voluntarily. Kevin said something different.  Did you have anything to do with the death of your daughter?  Not at all. Not at all.  How do How do you possibly confess to it?  It was my only way  out.

 He said that after 14 hours, he was broken. That he had been told his wife had already implicated him. That he was told the only way he would ever see his children again was if he cooperated. That he said what they needed to hear, not because it was true, but because he  had nothing left. He told them he had accidentally hit Riley’s head with a door and panicked and staged the whole thing to look like an abduction.

He recanted  the moment the interrogation ended. He said he had made all of it up under pressure. He said it immediately and he never stopped saying it. It didn’t matter. The videotaped  statement existed. The detectives had what they needed. Kevin Fox was charged with the first-degree murder  of his own 3-year-old daughter.

 He was held on a $25 million bond. He faced the death penalty. He was taken to Will County Jail on the same calendar that was still turning toward Riley’s fourth birthday. A birthday she would never reach.    And he sat there while the investigation stopped looking for anyone else. Tyler was 5 years old when he woke his father that  Sunday morning.

He was 5 years old when his father was taken to jail. He was 6 years old for most of the 8 months Kevin spent inside.    Kevin’s brother Chad did not accept what was happening. He stepped in and took the lead in fighting for Kevin’s release while Kevin couldn’t fight for himself. They hired attorney Kathleen Zellner, a lawyer who had already proven wrongful convictions in other cases, and who looked at the evidence in this one and believed from the beginning that Kevin was innocent. She pushed for DNA testing

on biological material from the crime scene that had been labeled inconclusive by the original investigators. The Will County authorities had reportedly told the FBI not to test certain evidence. Zellner pushed anyway. She sent the samples to a private lab. The private lab ran the test. The DNA did not match Kevin Fox.

 It matched an unknown male, someone who was not Kevin, not anyone in his family, not anyone whose profile existed in any database. The charges were dropped. In February 2005, 8 months after his daughter died, Kevin Fox walked out of the Will County jail into a crowd of cheering, sobbing relatives. Prosecutors said they were flabbergasted.

 The state’s attorney who dropped the charges had not been the one who filed them. Kevin and Melissa sued Will County for what had been done to them. A federal jury awarded 15 and a half million dollars in 2007, the largest civil rights verdict in Illinois history at the time. An appeals court reduced it to 8 million.

 Kevin Fox received 8 million dollars for 8 months of his life and the permanent shape that year left on everything that came after it. The shoes which would have helped get the suspect were still in evidence storage. The window screen still logged as storm damage. The $40 still missing from the neighbor’s wallet across the street.

 The unknown male DNA profile still sitting in a file pointing at no one. 5 years have passed. In 2009, at the request of local authorities who had run out of road, FBI special agent Laurie Warren took over the case. She called it the most important case of her career. She and her partner, agent Jeremy Resslar, went back to the beginning. They re-interviewed witnesses.

 They canvassed Wilmington street by street. They found the neighbor across the street and the cut window screen. They found the pieces that had been sitting in separate files and started laying them next to each other. During the canvas, they spoke to a woman who had previously been in a relationship with a man of questionable character.

She told the agents she’d had a bad feeling about him for years and hadn’t known who to tell. She said she’d been glad when the FBI showed up because she finally had someone. She described a day months after Riley’s death when she and the man had been at Riley’s memorial garden in Wilmington. A small garden the community had built in the girl’s memory.

She had been standing there saying she couldn’t believe someone had done something like that to a sweet little girl. He had looked at her and said, “Oh, that was such a shame, wasn’t it?” She said the way he said it was cold, like an actor reading from a script who didn’t know how to perform the emotion.  [clears throat]  It had stuck with her ever since.

She’d never forgotten the sound of it. The FBI learned he was already in prison. He had been convicted in 2005 of criminally assault on a relative and was serving time at Lawrence Correctional Center. They went to see him. Warren said later she initially didn’t feel like he was involved. She wanted a DNA sample just in case.

 He denied everything. Answered every question. The agents left. Immediately after they walked out, he called his mother from prison on a recorded line. He was crying. He was begging. “I’m fixing to spend the rest of my life in the penitentiary, Mom. Only thing that I can tell you is that the FBI came and visited me today, okay? And that’s the only thing I can say.

You got to come down here, Mom, so I can give you a hug and a kiss one last time, please. Days later, Warren’s phone rang. It was the prison. He had attempted suicide. He had written a letter before the attempt. It had been addressed to the FBI agents who had visited him.  All of a sudden, my phone started ringing off the hook.

 I said, this has got to be important. It was from the prison where Scotty B is in.  The prison faxed it immediately. The title of the letter? A confession to murder. Two exclamation points. Warren said later, “My head is spinning at this point. We just left this guy several days prior. He didn’t give us any indication that he was involved.

 And my head was literally spinning. Like, oh my goodness, this is really happening.” Warren and Reese returned back to the prison with a video camera. This time he talked. He talked in full. He had been drinking and using hard substances that Saturday night. He drove around Wilmington. He broke into the house across the street.

 He cut the window screen. He took $40 from a wallet. He crossed the street to the Fox house. The back door lock was broken. He walked in. He found nothing worth stealing. He was about to leave. He looked back. He saw Riley on the couch. He fixated on her. He described everything that followed. He described driving to the forest preserve.

He described the public restroom.    He described the bandana slipping off his face. He described Forked Creek, the drowning, and what she said before the end. “I want my daddy.” DNA recovered from the duct tape  used to gag her was compared against his sample. It matched. The shoes pulled from the creek the morning of June 6th, 2004, within hours of Riley being found, both tongues with his name written inside, had been sitting in the evidence storage for 6 years.

His name had been in the shoes the whole time. Born in Illinois in 1971, 6 ft  2, 230 lbs, he had been living 1 mile from the Fox family home on the night Riley died. Three prior burglary convictions before 2004.  He had spent the years after Riley’s death moving through Wilmington, attending her memorial garden, watching the community grieve, watching Kevin Fox get charged and jailed and released.

He had been convicted of an assault on a relative  in 2005, a separate crime, a separate victim, a separate file, and sent to prison. He had been in that prison  when the FBI knocked on his cell door. He had been the kind of man his neighbors didn’t  think much about one way or the other.

 His name was Scott Eby. In May 2010, he was charged with first-degree murder and predatory criminal offense on a child. In November 2010, he stood before a judge and pleaded guilty. He did so to avoid the death penalty. The courtroom was packed. Family and friends of Riley filled the gallery wearing pins with her photograph on them.

   The pins had been made by Riley’s family in the weeks after her death. They had been wearing them for 6 years.  Kevin Fox was the first to speak. He stood up and looked directly at the man sitting at the defense table, the man who had taken his daughter from a couch in his own living room while he slept in the next room.

And he read from his notes. “I would always wonder what you were doing with your freedom, if you were lying, watching TV, or if you were picking your next victim.” Then he looked up from the paper. He looked at Eby directly. “After today, you will no longer be a part of my memories of my daughter.” The judge sentenced Scott Eby to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Melissa Fox stood and spoke. Kathleen Zellner, who had pushed for  the DNA test nobody else would push for, was in that room. Scott Eby said nothing, but life itself didn’t get much easier for the Fox family. Kevin and Melissa had separated afterwards and both had relocated  and married to different partners.

In March 2023, Kevin Fox was involved in a car crash, which took his life in Arkansas. He was 46  years old. Riley would have been 22. He had survived everything the Will County investigation did  to him. He had survived jail, the charges, the trial that never happened, the wrongful conviction that never became a conviction only because the DNA was too clear to ignore.

He had won the lawsuit. He had gotten the answer. He had looked Eby in the face in that courtroom and told him he was done. Then he died in a car crash on a highway in Arkansas  13 years later. Kathleen Zellner said he was a kind, gentle man who loved his children above  all else.

 Scott Eby died in December the same year at Menard Correctional Center. He was 52 years old. He had been in prison for 13 years. Zellner said, “It is ironic that Kevin Fox and Scott Eby died in the same year. Kevin’s death was heartbreaking and tragic. Eby’s death is the opposite. He forfeited his right to life when he ended the life of Riley.

” Riley Fox, born March  31st, 2001, 3 years old, Riley Bugs. She was asleep on the living room couch in her flamingo pajamas under a Dora the Explorer blanket because the sheets weren’t clean yet and her father hadn’t wanted to wake her. Tyler in the chair beside her, Kevin in the next room asleep by 2:33.

A man crossed the street, found the back door lock already broken, walked in, found nothing worth stealing, and looked back. Two shoes pulled from the creek the same morning she was found. A name written on the tongue inside both of them. Logged into evidence sitting in a storage room for 6 years while Kevin Fox sat in jail while Tyler grew up without his father while the community wore their pins and waited for an answer that was already written in both shoes at the bottom of a creek.

I want my daddy. She was just 3 years old and she knew exactly who she needed and she said his name. This case reminds you of the need to often check the entry points at your house before you assume everything is secure. A broken lock you haven’t noticed yet could be an open door you don’t know yet. It costs nothing to check.

 It takes 30 seconds. Kevin Fox didn’t know his back door lock was broken. He had no reason to check. Now you do. If this case stayed with you, drop a comment. Tell us which moment hit hardest. Hit like, subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next one.