Who Killed Riley Fox?

DNA Testing

Despite all of that, Zellner was still concerned about swaying jurors from Kevin's confession.

"The only way you can trump a confession is with DNA. You've got to have DNA," Zellner said.

Because Riley's body was in the water for hours, it was much harder to retrieve a DNA profile. Zellner feared that she'd been robbed of the silver bullet which had worked for her so often in the past.

The Fox family's life was thrown into turmoil when three-year-old Riley went missing.

(Courtesy of the Fox family)

"I thought it would take miracle for us to find DNA," she said. And she was right. The tests came back negative for blood and semen.

Click here to read the Illinois State Crime Lab Report.

For saliva, the test read "inconclusive." Dr. Karl Reich, who runs a private Chicago-area lab called Independent Forensics, told Zellner the word "inconclusive" was actually a cause for hope.

"Inconclusive" simply means it hasn't been read, and Reich said one reason for that could be that the state lab's equipment might not have been sophisticated enough to pick up on what little DNA was there.

"Another testing, called Y-STR testing, could certainly be possible and might in fact be the right kind of testing for this case," Reich said.

Y-STR testing analyzes the Y-chromosome, which is nearly identical in males of the same lineage and can be tested in small amounts. Though that partial profile may not be enough to fully identify a criminal, it is enough there to eliminate a suspect with 100 percent certainty.

"It's a well-established technique," said Reich. But though it was valid in court, neither the state of Illinois nor the FBI was using it at the time. So Zellner convinced the Will County prosecutor to send the samples to a respected lab in Virginia.

But she told Kevin the chances of gleaning anything from such a small sample were slim.

It would take months to get her answer. Bureaucracy held up the DNA samples and as the family waited, Melissa struggled to keep it together.

"It was a nightmare, but I knew the only thing I could do was support Kevin, stay strong for Tyler," she said.

Charges Dropped

Finally, on June 16, 2005, after eight months in jail, Kevin learned the results of the DNA test.

Zellner remembers that phone call from Virginia: "I pick up the phone and she said, I've got the profile done. There was enough DNA, I've excluded your client. I said, 'well, you just saved somebody's life.'"

She raced to the Will County jail to tell Kevin. The accused father was stunned.

"It hit me that, that I was going home and, and my name would finally be cleared," he said.

With the case against Kevin collapsing, the new Will County State's Attorney Jim Glasgow held an immediate court hearing. Kevin Fox, who could have faced the death penalty, was released with all charges dropped.

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But the case that had shattered the Wilmington community was far from over. Zellner switched from defense to offense, pursuing a massive lawsuit on behalf of the Foxes against Will County. The Fox family claimed that the investigators didn't simply make innocent mistakes which led to Kevin's arrest. They were out to convict him from the beginning.

That DNA had been sent to the FBI, which is often the case when DNA samples need further testing that state crime labs aren't equipped for. But in this case, FBI records showed that "all additional DNA analyses were discontinued" once Kevin offered that confession. The FBI stated that a Will County investigator told them to stop, despite the "inconclusive" finding.

"It's the one piece of evidence that could disprove the confession?..that could have set him free," Zellner said.

Click here to read the FBI DNA Lab Report.

The police, Zellner argued, deliberately ignored evidence suggesting that an intruder was in the house. She said that there are numerous parts of the house they never bothered to check, including the back door, which was standing open.

"We know what's how the intruder came in because the lock was broken," she says. Zellner also claimed one of the windows was open from the inside, potential evidence of an intruder looking for an exit route. None of this was ever fingerprinted, nor was the blanket used to cover Riley that night.

Jury Awards Millions to Fox Family

Professor Ann Burgess of Boston College, who was worked with the FBI profiling killers, testified on behalf of the Foxes that cases involving intruders are not as rare as many think. "There're many cases where an intruder comes in and and takes a child, Elizabeth Smart, absolutely, perfect case."

In fact, just this summer, DNA analysis from the same lab that cleared Kevin Fox definitively cleared Patsy and John Ramsey in the notorious murder of their daughter, Jon Benet. In the Ramsey case, the detectives once discounted the intruder theory as well. A lead investigator even wrote a book arguing that Jon Benet's death was an accident quickly staged to look like a murder. Zellner thinks that's what inspired investigators in the Fox case to adopt their own accident theory.

To convince the jury, Zellner turned back to the interrogation of 6-year-old Tyler Fox. She said the tape of the interrogation reveals how badly the police wanted Tyler to point the finger at his own father. Tyler can be seen covering his head with his hoodie and becoming more and more upset in the video as the interviewer questions him about Kevin's possible involvement in the crime. According the Zellner, she counted 168 times that he's asked and he shook his head, no.

"He's trying to tell her he doesn't know anything and she just won't stop," Zellner said of the interviewer. "I think what you see in that is just purely evil. They take this child who's in this horrible situation and they are trying to manipulate him to help them frame his father. It is despicable."

The interviewer on the tape settled with the Foxes out-of-court and denied any wrongdoing. But the Will County detectives went to trial.

After five weeks of testimony, a jury awarded Kevin Fox and his wife Melissa $15.5 million in their civil rights case against Will County.

"We want people to know the truth. We are not bad people; we never were," Melissa said.

Though the jury rejected the most serious charge of conspiracy, for Kathleen Zellner, the huge judgment is an extraordinary victory for the wrongfully accused. "I've won a lot of big trials," she said. "I have not done a trial where I have felt that I so exposed people as lying."