After False Confession an Arrest in Riley Fox Muder

Police have made an arrest in the murder of Riley Fox. In 2004, the three-year-old Fox was abducted, raped and murdered in Joilet, Illinois a suburb of Chicago. The case made national news when here father was arrested for her murder and later released by police.

Police arrested Scott Wayne Eby when his DNA matched DNA found at the scene of Riley's murder. He was in prison serving a 14-year sentence for criminal sexual assault.

Eby lived about a mile from the Foxes when Riley was killed. At the time, the divorced, unemployed Eby was on parole for a DuPage County burglary conviction. He has additional burglary convictions out of Cook County and a forgery conviction from Kane County.

After Riley's body was discovered her father, Kevin Fox, said he and his wife, Melissa, drove hand-in-hand to the detectives' Joliet offices to learn who killed Riley.

Instead, Fox said he felt as if detectives "ripped my heart out of my chest" when they began accusing him, according to the Beacon-News.

He remained resolute, the father said, for several hours. But his anger turned to despair. He failed a lie-detector test. Fox said he was falsely told that his family, including Melissa, believed in his guilt.

Kevin Fox said a sheriff's detective taunted him with threats that he'd be repeatedly raped while in prison for murder. He said they ignored his requests for an attorney, showed him crime-scene photos of his slain daughter, beat on the interrogation table with handcuffs while shouting in his face -- hour after hour after hour.

According to the Beacon-News, police offered Fox a deal -- confess that it was an accident and be freed on lesser involuntary manslaughter charges. So, Fox told jurors, he took the deal.

Fox confessed in the Oct. 27, 2004, videotaped statement that he accidentally bumped Riley's head on the bathroom door but panicked and tried to make it look like an abduction.

"I felt alone, beaten down," he said. "I knew it would be checked out and that I'd be cleared."

He remained jailed for eight months until a DNA analysis of saliva evidence excluded his genetic profile< according to the Beacon-News.

Fox and his wife sued Will County, the State's Attorney and five sheriffs deputies. He won a mutli-million dollar verdict.