The videotaped statement in which Kevin Fox implicated himself in the June 2004 murder of his 3-year-old daughter, Riley, runs 20 minutes.
The interrogation that preceded it played out over 14 hours.
Fox was released Friday after DNA tests cleared him and charges against him were dropped. On Monday, Will County sheriff’s officials said they would review how the investigation was handled, including how detectives obtained Fox’s confession.
The Fox case is another example of how videotaping confessions–without also taping the interrogations that led up to them–can produce results that are misleading, if not altogether false.
But beginning next month, state law will require police across Illinois to videotape interrogations in all murder investigations.
It is a change borne of a long national record of false confessions, including false videotaped confessions. Among the cases: that of Corethian Bell of Chicago, who was exonerated by DNA in early 2002 of killing his mother; and the New York Central Park jogger case, in which five men admitted the crime on videotape only to be exonerated later.
How successful the law will be in eliminating false confessions will depend on how strictly judges enforce it and how they interpret numerous exceptions.
Under the new law, a confession is presumed inadmissible as evidence if the police interrogation is not videotaped. But if police and prosecutors can show a suspect chose not to be videotaped, a judge could allow the confession into evidence.
“There are concerns that law enforcement will try to coerce or persuade suspects that it’s not in their best interests to speak on tape,” said Steven Drizin, the legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University.
Another exception allows for police and prosecutors to show that it was not feasible to videotape a confession, such as a claim that a videocamera was not available.
Drizin, who has assembled a database of more than 150 false confessions, is nevertheless optimistic.
“I tend to think,” said Drizin, “that given the amount of money and resources throughout the state to get ready for this statute, law enforcement officers are going to put their best foot forward and utilize this equipment and record a majority of interrogations in homicide cases.”
What may not change with the law is the view that, in the world of evidence, the confession is king. Bell’s confession is a case in point.
Bell confessed on videotape to the stabbing death in 2000 of his mother, Netta, saying he had killed her because she was using cocaine.
It was not until DNA tests cleared Bell that he was set free. DNA eventually pointed to another suspect, who pleaded guilty to the murder.
The case was the first videotaped confession in Illinois to unravel. It was so compelling that the Cook County state’s attorney’s office used it to help teach prosecutors how to recognize the signs of a false confession.
But in sworn depositions last year as part of a lawsuit Bell has filed against Chicago police, the officers involved said they still believed in Bell’s guilt, saying the confession was not entirely undermined by the DNA.
“Why would anyone tell us that they would kill their mother if they didn’t do it?” one of the detectives said in his deposition.
Even a prosecutor who worked on the case said he still believed Bell had some role in his mother’s death in light of the video confession.
As Fox said happened to him, Bell gave in after a long interrogation.
Bell, who his lawyers say is of low intelligence and suffers from mental illness, called Chicago police after he found his mother dead.
Police placed him in a small windowless room and interrogated him intermittently for hours, leaving him alone when he was not being questioned.
Detectives, according to Bell’s lawyers, told him that his alibi did not check out and that he had failed a lie-detector test. At one point, the lawyers alleged in his lawsuit, he was struck in the face. After 50 hours, Bell gave the 20-minute videotaped confession.
“What they are designed to do is to place a person in the position where he believes his best alternative is to confess, and that if he doesn’t confess he will be abused and in even greater trouble with the authorities,” said his attorney, Locke Bowman, of the MacArthur Justice Center.
Like Fox, Bell thought he could prove his innocence to a judge.
“He thought,” said Bowman, “this is a terrible situation but people will understand because I didn’t do it. If it wasn’t for the DNA, there’d be no explaining it at all.”
Bowman said the video does not show what happened to Bell.
“It doesn’t begin to tell what happened to him,” he said. “That video is 20 minutes at the end of a 2-day and 2-hour process that takes him from numerous denials of this accusation to finally knuckling under.”
The Fox case is particularly significant because, unlike Bell, Fox does not suffer from mental illness or have a low IQ, two factors that experts say frequently contribute to suspects making false confessions.
Drizin said the tactics police used in the Fox case are often used in interrogations. The Fox case “should put to rest the myth that is promoted by law enforcement officers that false confessions are not the result of interrogation techniques,” he said. “Law enforcement officials would like the public to believe only the mentally retarded or juveniles or other vulnerable suspects are likely to falsely confess when pressured by police.”
Fox’s attorney, Kathleen Zellner, said his interrogation began after he had worked all day. He had not eaten dinner. While he was being questioned, day had turned to night and back to day again.
The detectives, according to Zellner, said that Fox would be raped in the County Jail, showed him photos of the dead girl bound with duct tape, and told him if he did not confess he risked losing his only chance at a deal with the prosecutors.
Officers told him that his wife and family were abandoning him, Zellner said.
“He was so hopeless. He felt like there was no way out,” said Zellner, who has represented other men who have made false confessions and been exonerated. “But he figured he’d bond out and then prove he was innocent.
“They said, you’re going down for this, one way or the other,” she added. “They told him there was a train leaving and he could either get on or get off. … And they turned the cameras on for just the last 20 minutes.”
In the videotape, said Zellner, Fox appears with his head down and his hand over his mouth, mostly mumbling. He does not explain how the murder happened in a narrative; instead he mostly gives brief assents.
What is missing from Fox’s confession, according to Zellner, is mention of a key element of the crime that might have indicated that Fox was involved: the location of the underwear and capri pants his daughter was wearing the day she died.
The clothes, said Zellner, were not recovered. The real killer, she said, could have told police where they are. But the police do not ask Fox about them.
“It didn’t have the crucial detail: Where were her underpants and her capri pants,” Zellner said. “That would have been the thing that would have nailed it. That was the one thing the killer could have told them that they didn’t already have.
“Everything else, they already knew about and fed to him.”
———-
smmills@tribune.com
mpossley@tribune.com
