Inmate Charged in Girl's Murder; Her Father Had Been Imprisoned, Freed Based on DNA
Authorities in suburban Chicago have charged a man currently serving 14 years in prison with the 2004 rape and drowning of 3-year-old Riley Fox.
Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow and Robert Grant, the FBI’s special-agent-in-charge, formally announced first-degree murder and predatory criminal sexual assault charges against Scott Wayne Eby on Thursday afternoon. Eby was sent to prison in July 2005 for criminal sexual assault, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Eby’s arrest on those charges came only a month after Riley Fox’s father, Kevin Fox, who was initially charged with her murder, was released from after nearly eight months there after DNA tests failed to link him to the crime. Fox had made a videotaped confession but said that it was coerced; he was “fed lies and threats the entire time,” he told the Chicago Tribune at the time. Trial evidence showed that a detective supervisor called the FBI and told them to stop testing DNA evidence shortly after Fox’s arrest, but a private lab’s tests later ruled out Fox as a suspect, the Chicago Tribune reports. Kevin Fox and his wife were eventually awarded $8 million in damages over his wrongful arrest.
Kathleen Zellner, an attorney for the Fox family, said that the FBI linked Eby to the killing through DNA. She also told the Tribune that investigators believe Eby had broken into the house next door to the Fox family home in Wilmington, Ill.
