Fox federal trial in jury's hands

Did Will County sheriff's detectives conspire to frame Kevin Fox through fabricated evidence and a coerced confession to his 3-year-old daughter's murder, knowingly allowing the real killer to remain free?

That's the question a federal jury will consider this morning when its members begin deliberating after listening to six weeks of often-emotional testimony in the civil rights trial surrounding the child's tragic death.

Kevin Fox, 30, and his wife, Melissa, asked the panel to award them $44 million in damages against five detectives, one of whom is deceased, and Will County itself. Their attorney beseeched the panel Monday to send a loud message to law enforcement against abusing its power to ensure no other family faces what the Foxes endured.

"These defendants were willing to fabricate evidence to convict and execute an innocent man," attorney Kathleen Zellner said in her closing argument. "Your verdict has to teach these people they can't get away with it. If this can happen to Kevin and Melissa Fox, with their beautiful child, it can happen to any of us -- that's what's at stake here."

Hikers found the partially nude body of 3-year-old Riley Fox in Forked Creek June 6, 2004, hours after she disappeared from her nearby home in Wilmington. Her killer remains free. Instead, the Will County officials who investigated her sex slaying are on trial.

The Foxes allege detectives subjected the father to threats, lies and false promises of a deal during a 14.5-hour interrogation that began late Oct. 26, 2004, and ended in his arrest early the next morning. The father spent eight months in prison for his child's murder before being freed through DNA testing when saliva recovered from the rape kit excluded him. A later DNA test on duct tape found on Riley's mouth also excluded Kevin Fox, and was the same genetic profile of that from the rape kit.

The federal jury of five men and five women must decide if detectives acted reasonably or if they conspired to frame Kevin Fox. The detectives' attorney, Robert Smith, urged jurors to reach a verdict based on the law, not vengeance or sympathy for a couple who have suffered an undeniable loss -- the violent slaying of their little girl.

Melissa Fox was in Chicago for an anti-cancer walk the weekend Riley disappeared. Kevin Fox reported Riley missing early June 6, 2004, when he called a non-emergency police line some 40 minutes after his son alerted him that she was gone. Fox later explained he thought Riley was playing a game.

Smith argued the detectives had probable cause to arrest Kevin Fox even before he confessed and acted reasonably in their exhaustive homicide investigation. The defense maintains the Foxes' then-6-year-old son told police he saw Fox leave the house with Riley; that Kevin Fox's story changed during the interrogation; he failed a lie-detector test; and surveillance footage from a service station showed a car that resembled his despite his claims he never left that morning.

Smith reminded jurors that detectives did not have the benefit of the DNA results until after the arrest. And what motive would police have to frame Fox, the attorney asked.

"They have spent their entire lives in law enforcement -- a job that pays close to nothing and takes them away from their families and puts them in danger," Smith said in his closing argument. "They are police officers, but they take their uniforms off at night and are fathers, brothers, husbands, coaches, neighbors. They are you and me."

And then there's the confession. Kevin Fox confessed on videotape that he accidentally bumped Riley's head on the bathroom door but panicked and tried to make it look like an abduction. Fox earlier testified that he agreed to the story only out of desperation because detectives told him he'd be freed within 24 hours on lesser involuntary manslaughter charges.

But the sheriff's detectives said they never coached Fox on his detailed accident story. They contend Fox was properly read his rights and deny he was coerced through threats, such as that they'd make sure he was raped daily in prison. Fox said detectives took turns questioning him for 10 of the 14.5-hour interview, but the defense said it was more like seven hours.

Zellner, the Foxes' attorney, alleges police targeted Kevin Fox from the onset despite leads that suggested an unknown sexual predator abducted, raped and killed Riley. She said they failed to properly question neighbors, rule out about 18 registered sex offenders who lived in the neighborhood and, later, tossed their handwritten notes despite a recent law requiring all such paperwork to be saved.

Zellner called experts to bolster her theories, including those to debunk the lie-detector test's reliability and explain false confessions.

She voluntarily dropped several original defendants, including former Will County State's Attorney Jeff Tomczak, in the lawsuit to narrow its focus on the lead investigators. The jury returns this morning to deliberate in the trial before U.S. Northern District Judge John Darrah.