They told him to come to the police station at 7:30 PM, telling him that they had information about the case. He'd been awake since 4:30 that morning. At 1 AM, they brought in a polygraph, gave him an exam (with an inexperienced technicican) that lasted an hour. They told him that he'd failed.
At one point, according to the lawsuit, Hayes leaned close and told Kevin that he "knew people" at the jail, "and would ‘make sure' that Kevin was ‘f***ed' every day unless he told them what they wanted to hear." Ruettiger straddled Kevin's legs, pressing his testicles into Kevin's knees. He grabbed the back of Kevin's shirt and pulled his face close. "Your family doesn't love you," he shouted. "So just say you did it." Finally, Kevin claims in the suit, he was shown pictures of his dead daughter, her mouth still covered with duct tape, nude from the waist down, taken moments after she had been pulled from the creek. "Riley is in the room with you right now," the lawsuit quotes Guilfoyle as saying. "She is in pain and needs closure."Today, in recalling this part of the interrogation, Kevin weeps. "I didn't know what had happened to her," he says. "When I saw the pictures . . . I don't even know how to describe it. When you see your daughter dead, with dirt and mud on her face . . . ." His voice trails off. "But the awful truth is," he says, "I wanted to see more. I wanted to see if I could find anything in those pictures that would help me figure out for myself what had happened, who had done this to my baby."
Kevin's account of the interrogation continues: Swearengen burst into the room, out of breath and saying he had just talked to Tomczak. "Hurry back. I can help this kid if he acts now," the detective quoted the state's attorney as saying. "I can make a deal for him."
Kevin says that Swearengen suggested the same "accident" scenario that he had proposed to Melissa nearly nine hours earlier. "It's now or never," the lawsuit claims the detective said. "Say it was an accident. Get your help from the State's Attorney so you can go home to your family. If you pass it up, you will spend your life in prison. If you say it was an accident, it's involuntary manslaughter with a three to five year sentence. You'll serve half. Go home now on bond."
Promising a suspect leniency to confess is forbidden under Illinois law, and the detectives have denied in court pleadings that they did so. Since the prelude to Kevin's confession was not videotaped-a law requiring interrogations be videotaped would not go into effect for several more months-the purported promise pits detectives' word against Kevin's.
It was now after six in the morning. Beyond the walls of the sheriff's building dawn was arriving. Kevin had been up for more than 24 hours and he'd had little to eat. He had been undergoing questioning for nearly 12 hours. The terms of the "offer" echoed in his head. He knew he was innocent, he says. But if he could get out on bond, he could straighten this mess out.
At 8:32 a.m., detectives turned on the video camera and began to tape Kevin's statement. According to the sheriff's summary, this is what he said: He came home at about 1:30 a.m., ate a snack, and then watched television, including an adult video. Around 2:15, he went to the bathroom and swung the door open quickly, striking Riley and knocking her down. The girl appeared "lifeless," and Kevin thought she was dead. Panicking, he scooped her up and carried her to his car, retrieving some duct tape from the back. According to the summary, Kevin thought of driving to his mother-in-law's house, or perhaps taking Riley to the hospital. Instead, he decided to make her death look like an abduction. He duct-taped his daughter's mouth and bound her wrists together with tape. He drove to a bridge over Forsythe Creek and then carried the girl down a muddy bank, slipping on the way down. Before putting the girl in the water, he inserted his finger inside her to make it look like she had been sexually assaulted. He then went home, cried for a while, and went to sleep.
A copy of the tape has not been released to the public, but Zellner has viewed it and she claims Kevin's manner is vague and halting. "They were putting words in his mouth," she claims. Rather than providing a running narrative, she says, Kevin often simply answered "yes" or "no" to the detectives' questions. Beyond that, she says, the details left several obvious questions unanswered. Why would a father with CPR training make no attempt to revive his daughter? Why was no duct tape found? If he slipped in the mud, why were his clothes not muddy? How could a lightweight bathroom door knock a little girl out so completely that she appeared dead? Why was no blood or other physical evidence found in the Ford Escape? And, most telling, how could detectives ignore that Kevin had not provided a single piece of information that only the killer would have known, such as the whereabouts of Riley's capri pants?
All told, Kevin was interrogated that night for more than 14 hours; only 20 minutes were taped. Just before he was booked and taken to jail, Kevin says, the last thing he heard was the sound of the detectives in the hallway, laughing and congratulating themselves.
The idea is not just to get a confession, it’s to get the suspect to reveal details they wouldn’t have known about otherwise in their confession. Confessions can be unreliable, just like any other witness testimony. If the suspect reveals something that they shouldn’t know unless they were at the crime scene, then that’s good evidence.