Scott Eby: Riley Fox Murder, Confession, and Prison Death

Scott Eby was the man who kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and murdered three-year-old Riley Fox in Wilmington, Illinois, on June 6, 2004. A paroled burglar and registered sex offender who lived in the same neighborhood as the Fox family, Eby escaped detection for six years while Riley’s father, Kevin Fox, was wrongly arrested, coerced into a false confession, and jailed for eight months before DNA testing cleared him. The Scott Eby Riley Fox murder case only closed in 2010, after the FBI took over the investigation and Eby confessed in a letter he titled “A Confession to Murder.” He pleaded guilty later that year and died in prison in December 2023 at age 52.

What Eby Did the Night of the Murder

Eby later told FBI agents he had been drinking and using cocaine on the night of June 5, 2004, and set out to burglarize homes in the Fox family’s Wilmington neighborhood. He first broke into a house across the street from the Foxes, cutting through a screen door and taking $40. He then walked through a back door with a broken lock into the Fox home. Finding nothing worth stealing, he saw Riley asleep, abducted her, and drove her to nearby Forsythe Woods.¹

He sexually assaulted her in a park bathroom. He told investigators he decided to kill her after the bandana he was using as a mask slipped and she saw his face. He drowned her in Forked Creek and threw his sneakers into the water before leaving. Riley’s body was found in the creek about four miles from her home; she had been bound, gagged, sexually assaulted, and drowned.²³

How Eby Was Missed for Six Years

The sneakers Eby threw into the creek had his name written on the tongues and were believed to have been issued by the Illinois Department of Corrections. Investigators recovered them less than an hour after they found Riley’s body. They sat in a Will County evidence locker for more than five years without ever being traced back to him.⁴⁵

Wilmington police also spoke with Eby directly in the hours after Riley disappeared. Officers conducted a welfare check at his home, during which Eby asked them whether they had found the girl. No one connected that remark, or the burglary a neighbor reported that same morning, to the case.¹

Instead, Will County Sheriff’s investigators focused on Riley’s father. On October 26, 2004, they brought Kevin Fox in for a roughly 14-hour interrogation and pressed him into an implausible accidental-death story. He was charged with first-degree murder, held on a $25 million bond, and spent 243 days in jail. His attorney, Kathleen Zellner, persuaded newly elected State’s Attorney James Glasgow to allow a private laboratory to retest biological evidence the state crime lab had called inconclusive. The results excluded Kevin Fox “with 100 percent certainty,” and Glasgow dropped the charges on June 17, 2005.⁶⁷

The FBI Reopens the Case

The case went cold after Kevin Fox was cleared. In 2009, Glasgow asked the FBI to take over, saying he felt something “drastic” was needed.⁸ Special Agent Lori Warren led a new neighborhood canvass in Wilmington. A woman who had once been in a relationship with Eby gave agents his name, saying she had a “bad feeling” about him and describing a remark he had made at Riley’s memorial site that struck her as cold.¹

By that point Eby was already in prison, serving 14 years at the Lawrence Correctional Center for the 2005 criminal sexual assault of a relative.⁹ Warren and Agent Jeremy Resar went to interview him. Eby was cooperative and denied knowing the Fox family. Warren nearly crossed him off the list, but she asked for a DNA sample as a precaution. Soon after the agents left, Eby called his mother and told her he was “fixin’ to spend the rest of my life in the penitentiary.” Days later he attempted suicide, then wrote a letter titled “A Confession to Murder,” which prison officials faxed to the FBI.¹

Agents returned and recorded a video confession. Eby described the burglary across the street, the abduction, the assault at Forsythe Woods, the drowning, and throwing his sneakers into the creek. The details matched the physical evidence, including the shoes with his name on them.¹

Charges, Guilty Plea, and Life Sentence

On May 27, 2010, Glasgow announced that Eby had been charged with five counts of first-degree murder and one count of predatory criminal sexual assault of a child. Bond was denied.¹⁰ In November 2010, Eby pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and predatory sexual assault in exchange for prosecutors agreeing not to seek the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.¹¹ Speaking to reporters at the sentencing, Kevin Fox said of Eby: “I hope he rots in hell.”¹²

Who Eby Was in June 2004

Eby had a long criminal record, mostly for burglary.¹³ At the time of Riley’s murder he was on parole for a burglary conviction in DuPage County, was a registered sex offender, and was living in the same Wilmington neighborhood as the Fox family. In July 2005, about a year after killing Riley, he was sent to prison for sexually assaulting a relative. That conviction is what kept him locked up and available for the FBI to find in 2009.⁹

The Independent Report on the Original Investigation

After Eby’s arrest, Will County Sheriff Paul Kaupas acknowledged that his department had “obviously dropped the ball” and commissioned a review by Andrews International at a cost of roughly $100,000.⁵ The 45-page report, released in January 2011, called the investigation an “unguided missile” with “almost nonexistent” management and meetings that were “scattershot, disorganized and unproductive.”¹⁴

Its central findings pointed at the same missed clues:

The signed sneakers were collected on day one and never followed up on.⁵
A neighbor’s burglary report from that morning, and the welfare check on Eby hours after the murder, were never connected to the case.¹
Investigators were “too quick to dismiss the idea that the Riley Fox murder may have been a stranger crime” and “too focused on Kevin Fox to correct their error.”¹⁵
Kevin Fox’s videotaped statement was “highly questionable evidence,” because a detective had led him through the details rather than eliciting them.¹⁴

The review concluded the mistakes were not intentional and recommended expanded training on DNA evidence and false-confession recognition. Kaupas expanded training and put a new commanding officer with investigative experience over major cases.¹⁴

The Civil Verdict and Kevin Fox’s Later Death

Kathleen Zellner filed a federal civil rights lawsuit for Kevin Fox six weeks after his arrest, before the DNA results even came back.¹⁶ After a six-week trial that ended on December 20, 2007, a jury awarded Kevin Fox $5.6 million in compensatory damages and $3.7 million in punitive damages, and his then-wife Melissa Fox $3.7 million in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages — a total of $15.5 million.¹⁷ On appeal, the Seventh Circuit affirmed that investigators lacked probable cause, with Judge Terence T. Evans calling the detectives’ reasoning “absolutely absurd” and writing that “probable cause may be a loose concept, but it leaves no room for the absurd.” The court reduced the award to roughly $8.16 million.¹⁸

Kevin Fox later moved to Arkansas, remarried, started a business, and had three more children.¹⁹ On March 20, 2023, he was killed at age 46 in a head-on collision on State Highway 7 near Dardanelle, Arkansas, after another driver crossed the center line into his path. Both drivers died at the scene.²⁰

Eby’s Death in Prison

Less than nine months after Kevin Fox’s death, on December 7, 2023, Scott Eby died at the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois, while serving his life sentence. He was 52. The Illinois Department of Corrections did not release a cause of death.²¹ Zellner responded with a short statement: “Finally justice for Riley!”¹²

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Prison Legal News. Illinois Federal Jury Awards Record $15.5 Million in False Arrest Case
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Courthouse News Service. Damages Cut to $8M in Case of Exonerated Man
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CBS News Chicago. Kevin Fox Killed in Crash in Arkansas
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CBS News Chicago. Scott Eby, Admitted Rape and Murder of Riley Fox, Dies in Prison