Cops Needed Therapy After Solving This Crime | True Crime Documentary

On Saturday, June 5, 2004, in the quiet town of Wilmington, Illinois, Melissa Fox was away in Chicago participating in a two-day charity walk to raise money for breast cancer research. Back home, her husband Kevin was looking after their two young children, six-year-old Tyler and three-year-old Riley. Earlier that morning, Kevin took the children to a local art supply store to buy poster boards and colored markers so they could make welcome signs for Melissa when she finished her walk the next morning.

Later that evening, Kevin dropped Tyler and Riley off at their grandmother’s house, Melissa’s mother’s place, before heading into Chicago with Melissa’s brother, Tony. The two men attended a concert together and enjoyed a late dinner with a friend before driving back toward Wilmington. They did not return to the area until shortly after midnight.

Even though it was late, Kevin insisted on picking up his children so they could sleep at home. He arrived at his mother-in-law’s home at 12:50 a.m., where Riley and Tyler were already fast asleep in their beds. Tony helped carry the sleeping children out to Kevin’s Ford Escape, and Kevin drove them back through the quiet, empty streets.

Upon arriving home, Kevin encountered a minor inconvenience inside the house. Melissa had stripped the bedsheets off the mattresses before leaving for her trip, and Kevin had not remade the beds. Exhausted from the long day and short on time, he decided not to bother making the beds at nearly 1:00 a.m.

Instead, Kevin gently laid Tyler down on the living room ottoman and tucked Riley into the sofa with her favorite yellow blanket. This was not an unusual arrangement for the family, as both children had fallen asleep in the living room on many occasions. Kevin checked on both of them once more, left the television on with the room fan running, and went to bed around 2:30 a.m.

At 7:50 a.m. the following morning, Kevin woke up to find six-year-old Tyler standing in his bedroom doorway. Tyler looked at his father and said that Riley was gone. At first, Kevin was not overly concerned because the children frequently played hide-and-seek, and Riley’s room had plenty of hiding spots.

However, when Kevin walked into the living room, he saw Riley’s yellow blanket lying undisturbed on the sofa. He noticed that the front door was standing wide open, though he assumed Tyler had opened it while searching for his sister. Kevin quickly searched every room in the house, checked the back garden, and considered asking the neighbors, but there was no sign of the little girl.

The back door was also unlocked, though its lock had been broken for some time, so that detail did not immediately trigger alarm bells. At 8:30 a.m., roughly forty minutes after Tyler first alerted him, Kevin decided to call for help. Rather than dialing emergency services, he dialed directory assistance, still convinced that Riley had simply wandered nearby.

When connected to the dispatcher, Kevin attempted to explain the situation calmly.

“Yeah, I was wondering if you could send an officer over here.”

“My name’s Kevin Fox. I woke up this morning and my daughter is nowhere to be found.”

“How old is she?”

“Three.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No.”

“You can’t find your three-year-old daughter?”

“No.”

The dispatcher assured him that in many cases, young children simply wander off and are quickly located nearby. Police officers arrived at the Fox residence shortly after the call to gather details. Kevin described Riley as wearing a white T-shirt featuring a flamingo design and pink capri trousers.

As additional officers arrived on the scene, they requested that Kevin wait outside in the yard while they conducted a preliminary search of the property. A full search operation was quickly initiated throughout the surrounding neighborhood. Meanwhile, Melissa remained an hour away in Chicago, entirely unaware that her daughter was missing.

One of the investigating officers explicitly advised Kevin not to call his wife immediately so as not to cause unnecessary panic. Kevin followed this advice until his phone rang while he was walking down the street desperately shouting Riley’s name. It was Melissa calling to check in, and Kevin broke down, revealing that their daughter had vanished.

Upon hearing the news, Melissa collapsed on the ground in shock. A friend who was accompanying her took the phone, spoke with Kevin, and immediately arranged transportation to get Melissa back to Wilmington. When she arrived home, the street was flooded with police cruisers, emergency personnel, and concerned neighbors.

Melissa spotted Kevin standing in a neighbor’s garden across the road and walked directly toward him. Looking into his eyes, she demanded answers.

“Did you do something stupid?”

“You better not be lying to me.”

By 2:30 p.m., more than six hours after Riley had been reported missing, authorities finally issued an official Amber Alert. Kevin’s brother, Chad, learned about the alert while a friend watching a Chicago Cubs game noticed his niece’s photo flashing on the stadium scoreboard. The friend called Chad immediately to ask if that was indeed his niece on television.

Riley’s photograph spread rapidly across local news channels, prompting hundreds of community volunteers to join the search efforts. At approximately 3:30 p.m., two volunteers, Christine Lopez and her daughter Lisa Romano, were searching Forsyth Woods, roughly two and a half miles from the Fox residence. As they walked along the edge of a local creek, Christine noticed an object floating in the water.

At first, Christine assumed it was simply dumped rubbish or a discarded plastic bag caught in the brush. However, an overwhelming sense of dread compelled her to take a closer look.

“I can’t even explain it.”

“I just had this really bad feeling about this place, and that’s why I came here.”

“We went in a little ways, and the brush started getting thicker, and that’s when I saw her.”

“She was face down in the creek.”

A crime scene investigator arrived at the location within minutes to secure the area. Riley was found submerged face down in the water, with her trousers and underwear entirely missing. A subsequent postmortem examination revealed duct tape residue on her arms and nine distinct blunt-force injuries to her head.

The medical examiner confirmed that the three-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted prior to her death. Forensic technicians managed to recover trace saliva evidence from the duct tape that had been secured over her mouth. The official cause of death was determined to be drowning.

What had begun as a terrifying missing child search instantly transformed into a high-stakes homicide investigation. Detectives from the Will County Sheriff’s Office officially took control of the crime scene and the overall investigation. The entire local community rallied around the grieving family, offering prayers and support during the terrifying ordeal.

The day after the discovery, Kevin and Melissa were brought in by investigators for questioning. Without hesitation, both parents voluntarily agreed to provide their fingerprints and DNA samples to help eliminate them from suspicion. Lead Detective Scott Swearingen informed the couple that investigators were pursuing a theory that Riley’s murder was an act of revenge by an acquaintance.

However, behind closed doors, investigators were quietly building a vastly different narrative. They had begun focusing on the theory that Riley’s death was an internal family accident that had been staged to look like a murder. At this early point in the investigation, neither Kevin nor Melissa had even been informed that their daughter was sexually assaulted.

On June 11, 2004, a wake for Riley was held at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Wilmington. Over 6,000 mourners attended the service, including family, friends, and thousands of sympathetic strangers. Among the crowd were two undercover detectives deployed specifically to monitor Kevin’s behavior, secretly recording video footage and taking photos throughout the service.

In the weeks following the funeral, Kevin and Melissa temporarily moved in with Kevin’s parents, Curt and Dawn. Detective Swearingen maintained regular contact with the family, frequently visiting for casual coffee and offering updates on the progress of the case. On June 22, the detective asked Kevin and Melissa to bring six-year-old Tyler to the Child Advocacy Center for counseling.

Upon arrival, a woman named Mary Jane Pluth introduced herself as a professional counselor. She requested to speak with Tyler privately to determine if he had remembered waking up on the night his sister vanished. Kevin signed a consent form believing he was securing free grief therapy for his traumatized young son.

In reality, fine print within the document revealed that the session was actually a Videotaped Victim Sensitive Interview (VSI). The session was secretly monitored by Detective Swearingen and his colleague, Detective Brad Wachtel, behind a two-way mirror. The primary objective was not therapy, but extracting potentially incriminating statements regarding the boy’s father.

Throughout the interrogation, the interviewer repeatedly asked Tyler if his father had taken Riley or carried her out of the room that night. Despite the increasingly suggestive phrasing, the six-year-old firmly maintained that his father had done no such thing. Tyler answered no to the coercive questions a total of 168 times.

Eventually, the prolonged pressure caused the young boy to break down in tears on the floor, repeatedly crying out for his mother and father. Despite watching the young child curl into a ball in distress, none of the adults in the facility intervened to stop the session. Afterward, Detective Michael Gilfoyle drove Tyler home without a parent present.

During that unrecorded car ride, Gilfoyle conducted another informal interview without consent or a child specialist present. Gilfoyle later authored an official police report claiming that Tyler had suddenly changed his story during the drive. The report alleged Tyler stated that his father had carried Riley away that night and was later seen washing his clothes in the morning.

By September 2004, significant cracks began to show in the official police investigation. A friend of Melissa’s alerted her to a strikingly similar child abduction case in nearby LaPorte, Indiana. When Melissa passed the tip to Detective Swearingen, he exhibited complete indifference and admitted he was entirely unfamiliar with the Indiana case.

This reaction marked the first moment Melissa began to suspect that investigators were failing to properly search for the real perpetrator. On October 26, 2004, at 7:00 p.m., Detective Swearingen called the Fox home to report a major break in the case. Believing they were about to identify their daughter’s killer, Kevin and Melissa immediately drove to the station.

Upon arrival, the couple was escorted through three locked security doors and introduced to Supervisor Ed Hayes. Melissa was directed to wait in a conference room while Kevin was escorted into a separate interrogation room. Over thirty police officers gathered in adjacent rooms to monitor the live video feed of Kevin’s questioning.

Inside the room, Detectives Swearingen and Wachtel read Kevin his Miranda rights and asked directly if he killed Riley. Kevin firmly denied any involvement and repeatedly detailed his precise timeline of events from that night. At 8:10 p.m., the detectives dropped all pretenses and directly accused Kevin of murdering his daughter.

Distraught and panicked, Kevin denied the accusations and stood up to leave the room. The detectives physically blocked his path and ordered him to sit back down. They falsely claimed that physical fiber evidence directly linked him to Riley’s body, utilizing legal deception tactics permitted during interrogations.

When Kevin requested a legal representative, both detectives stood up, walked out of the room, and locked the door behind them. A short time later, Swearingen returned accompanied by Supervisor Ed Hayes. They falsely asserted that security camera footage from a nearby petrol station showed his Ford Escape driving by at 4:50 a.m.

Hayes informed Kevin that if he confessed to a tragic accident, he would face only minor involuntary manslaughter charges. He warned that if Kevin refused to cooperate, prosecutors would seek a life sentence or the death penalty. Meanwhile, Melissa remained locked inside a conference room for three hours waiting for a promised interview that never occurred.

When Melissa began pounding on the door and shouting, Swearingen finally came in to address her directly at 11:00 p.m. He told her plainly that police believed Kevin had accidentally killed Riley and staged the crime scene to look like a sexual assault. Melissa fiercely rejected the claim, refusing to doubt her husband’s innocence.

Back in the interrogation room, Hayes claimed Kevin would fail a polygraph exam, prompting Kevin to agree to the test to prove his innocence. By the time the test was administered at 1:30 a.m., Kevin had been awake for nearly twenty-one consecutive hours. Following the examination, the technician claimed the results indicated clear deception.

Hayes subsequently delivered severe psychological threats, warning Kevin that he would ensure he was sexually assaulted daily in state prison. Detective Gilfoyle entered the room shortly after, hurling personal insults and slamming heavy metal handcuffs onto the table. Detectives David Debrowski and Rutledge then took over, leaning in extremely close to intimidate Kevin physically.

Rutledge told Kevin that his family had already abandoned him and that Melissa would eventually move on, remarry, and raise Tyler with another man. Hayes and Swearingen returned shortly after, laying horrifying crime scene photos in front of Kevin, including images showing Riley in full rigor mortis. This was the very first time Kevin learned that his daughter had been bound with duct tape.

Swearingen presented a fabricated scenario, suggesting that perhaps Riley had fallen off the sofa and struck her head by accident. Kevin initially resisted, but after fourteen hours of relentless psychological coercion and sleep deprivation, his resolve completely collapsed. Believing he would be released on bond the following day to fight the charges, Kevin decided to tell investigators whatever they wanted to hear.

Kevin intentionally fabricated a confession filled with glaring factual errors, assuming any competent investigation would quickly disprove it. He claimed he accidentally struck Riley with a bathroom door, causing her to fall and hit her head on the bathtub. In reality, the bathtub was situated several feet away from the arc of the door frame.

When investigators noted that head trauma did not match the cause of death, Swearingen instructed Kevin to state that he believed she was dead before placing her in the creek. When asked about her missing underwear, Kevin claimed he threw it into the creek, but detectives corrected him, stating the creek had already been thoroughly searched. Kevin then described a driving route to the creek and claimed he threw the duct tape into a trash bin nowhere near that path.

Despite the massive inconsistencies, authorities held a press conference announcing that Kevin Fox had provided a full confession. He was officially charged with first-degree murder and remanded to custody on a $25 million bond. Shortly after his arrest, Kevin’s brother Chad secured the services of prominent defense attorney Kathleen Zellner.

Zellner immediately recognized the classic markers of a coerced confession and launched an independent investigation. Concurrently, Supervisor Ed Hayes instructed the FBI not to process the biological DNA evidence recovered from Riley’s body. Unfazed, Zellner’s legal team set out to systematically dismantle the prosecution’s physical claims.

Defense investigators tested the bathroom door mechanics and proved it was physically impossible for the door to cause Riley’s specific head injuries. They measured the creek’s water current and confirmed it was far too weak to move a body downstream to where Riley was located. Furthermore, video experts analyzed the petrol station footage and confirmed the vehicle displayed possessed a completely different wheelbase than Kevin’s SUV.

Eight months after Kevin’s arrest, Zellner successfully petitioned for access to the preserved DNA evidence and sent it to an accredited private laboratory. Within days, the definitive results arrived, conclusively excluding Kevin as the source of the foreign DNA. On June 17, 2005, prosecutors were forced to drop all criminal charges against Kevin Fox, releasing him after 243 days of wrongful imprisonment.

Following his release, Kevin and Melissa filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Will County and the individual detectives involved. In December 2007, a federal jury ruled decisively in favor of the Fox family, finding that investigators had coerced a false confession and violated Kevin’s constitutional rights. The jury awarded the family $15.5 million in damages, which was later reduced on appeal to approximately $8.5 million.

Despite the civil jury verdict, no investigating officer or department official involved in the botched case was ever formally disciplined. For nearly six years following Riley’s murder, the true killer remained at large while critical evidence sat ignored in police files. It was only after the Federal Bureau of Investigation formally intervened that the physical evidence was subjected to proper review.

FBI agents discovered several critical leads that local investigators had completely overlooked during the initial 2004 investigation. On the exact night of Riley’s disappearance, a residential burglary had been reported at a home directly across the street from the Fox residence. Additionally, a pair of muddy white gym shoes marked with the initials “EB” had been recovered near Riley’s body.

Furthermore, a public restroom adjacent to the creek where Riley was found had never been processed for latent fingerprints or forensic evidence. Instead, investigating officers had routinely used the public facility as a bathroom throughout the day of the search. Crucially, hours after Riley disappeared, a 911 call was placed requesting a welfare check on a local man named Scott Eby.

When officers responded to that 2004 call, they found Eby barefoot, covered in mud, and visibly vomiting on his lawn. Eby looked at the responding officers and immediately asked if they had found the missing little girl yet. At the time, responding officers inexplicably dismissed the interaction and left without conducting a search or filing a detailed report.

Years later, an anonymous woman contacted the FBI after learning they had reopened the cold case. She revealed that her ex-boyfriend, Scott Eby, had behaved suspiciously during a visit to Riley’s memorial garden months after the murder. When she expressed sympathy for the victim, Eby offered a strangely rehearsed, emotionless response that deeply unsettled her.

FBI agents investigated Eby’s background, revealing a extensive criminal record involving burglary and violent offenses. At the time of the murder, Eby lived with his mother just one mile away from the Fox family home. When agents tracked him down, Eby was already serving a 14-year sentence at Lawrence Correctional Center for assaulting a relative.

When initially questioned by federal agents, Eby denied any involvement in Riley’s death but agreed to submit a DNA sample. Days after providing the sample, Eby attempted suicide in his cell, leaving behind a written confession titled “A Confession to Murder.” His DNA profile returned as an exact match to the biological evidence found on Riley’s body and the duct tape.

After surviving his suicide attempt, Eby provided a comprehensive, five-page videotaped confession detailing his actions on the night of the crime. He explained that he had consumed heavy amounts of alcohol and illicit drugs before deciding to commit burglaries in the area. After breaking into the house across from the Foxes, he noticed the unlocked back door of the Fox residence and walked inside.

Finding both children sleeping in the living room, Eby fixated on three-year-old Riley. He temporarily left the house to retrieve his car, returned wearing a bandana over his face, and carried Riley out to his vehicle. He bound her with duct tape, placed her in the trunk, and drove directly to the public bathroom at Forsyth Woods.

After assaulting her inside the facility, Eby realized his bandana had slipped off during the struggle. Fearing the child could identify him, he carried her into the nearby creek and held her underwater until she drowned. The shoes recovered near the creek were confirmed to be state-issued footwear Eby had received while previously incarcerated at Danville Correctional Center.

In November 2010, Scott Eby entered a guilty plea to five counts of first-degree murder to avoid the death penalty. During the emotional sentencing hearing, Melissa Fox delivered a devastating victim impact statement detailing the loss of her daughter. She spoke directly to Eby about the milestones stolen from Riley, including her school dances, college graduation, and wedding.

“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.”

Kevin Fox also addressed the killer directly inside the courtroom before the judge handed down the official sentence.

“After today, you will no longer be part of the memories of my daughter.”

Scott Eby was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, ensuring he would spend the rest of his natural life behind bars.