Convicted Sex Offender Richard Cox Walked Through Girls Locker Rooms for Months While One Virginia County Refused to Act

A convicted child sex offender spent months walking naked through girls locker rooms in two Virginia counties.

This week, one of those counties finally held him accountable in a courtroom.

But the official who let him keep offending for months never had to answer a single question about it.

A Registered Predator Used Gender Identity to Access Girls Locker Rooms for Months

Richard Kenneth Cox is a 59-year-old Tier III sex offender.

He is also, according to court filings, a man who insists he is a woman.

On Thursday, an Arlington County Circuit Court judge found Cox guilty of 12 felony counts of sex-offender loitering after he pleaded no contest to every single one.

The judge didn't need a trial. Cox simply had no defense left.

Each of those 12 counts carries a five-year maximum. Do the math and Cox is staring down 60 years before his other cases are even factored in.

He's not done. Fourteen more charges are waiting in the wings. Five accuse him of indecent liberties with a child. Five more are indecent exposure. Three charge him with being on school property as a registered offender, and one is identity theft.

That trial starts in January 2027.

Here is what Cox actually did. Starting in 2024, he signed into nine different Arlington Public Schools facilities in a single month, using women's and girls' locker rooms at Washington-Liberty High School, Wakefield High School, and the Barcroft Sports & Fitness Center.

Police were called to Barcroft in December 2024 after a report of a naked man standing in the women's shower with an erection.

An Arlington mother walked into the Washington-Liberty locker room with her nine-year-old daughter and found Cox naked inside.

A 17-year-old lifeguard testified she saw the same thing.

In court, Cox didn't deny being there. He demanded the judge order prosecutors to use female pronouns for him instead.

Cox got into every one of those rooms using the same justification: Arlington Public Schools, Arlington County, and Fairfax County all have policies letting anyone use the locker room matching how they identify, not their actual sex.

Fairfax County Had Its Chance to Stop Him and Chose Not To

Arlington didn't catch Cox first. Fairfax County did – and let him walk.

In June 2024, Cox was accused of exposing himself in a women's locker room at a Fairfax Planet Fitness.

Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Steve Descano's office dropped the charge before it went anywhere.

Descano's office later told reporters they don't prosecute cases when a defendant doesn't have a lawyer – even a defendant who is a registered sex offender accused of exposing himself to women.

Cox didn't stop. He went on to expose himself in three more Fairfax County rec centers – Oakmont, Audrey Moore, and Franconia – all places where children were present.

Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis never charged him for any of it. Davis has publicly defended that decision by pointing to the same gender-identity locker room policy set by the county's Board of Supervisors.

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said the quiet part out loud: had Descano done his job the first time, Cox would never have made it to Arlington to find more victims.

Even a Democratic state senator, Dave Marsden, said Fairfax "underreacted here in a very fairly serious manner" and called out Descano by name.

Only one of those two counties has a convicted predator behind bars tonight.

This isn't the first time a Virginia gender-identity facility policy has ended in a victimized child. In 2021, a male Loudoun County student wearing a skirt sexually assaulted a girl in a Stone Bridge High School bathroom – and a special grand jury later found school administrators tried to bury it rather than warn parents. That case became the spark for a statewide parental-rights revolt. Some called it a fluke at the time. It wasn't. It was a preview.

That's the pattern conservatives have been screaming about for years, and Richard Cox just proved it with a court record instead of a hypothetical. Write a policy that lets any man claim a feeling and walk into a room full of children, and sooner or later a predator will use it exactly the way predators use everything – to get close to victims nobody is watching closely enough.

Steve Descano didn't get fooled by Richard Cox. He had the paperwork. He had the Tier III sex-offender registry. He chose to let ideology outrun judgment, and for months afterward, little girls in two counties paid for that choice every time they changed for gym class. Arlington's Commonwealth's Attorney did her job. Fairfax's did not, and as of this week, he still hasn't been made to answer for it.

Sources:

• Arlington County Commonwealth's Attorney's Office, "Richard K. Cox Guilty of 12 Felony Charges of Loitering After Conviction of an Offense Prohibiting Proximity to Children," Arlington County Government, October 1, 2026.
• Nick Minock, "Richard Cox pleads 'No Contest' to loitering on APS grounds despite sex offender status," WJLA/7News, October 2026.
• Nick Minock, "Arlington school exposure charges restored against sex offender Richard Cox," WJLA/7News, August 2026.
• "Virginia repeat sex offender found guilty of 12 felony loitering charges in Arlington," FOX 5 DC, October 2026.
• Nick Minock, "Virginia Attorney General criticizes Fairfax's handling of sex offender Richard Cox's case," WJLA/7News.
• Nick Minock, "Democratic lawmaker calls out Steve Descano for not prosecuting sex offender in Fairfax," WJLA/7News.
• "They Failed at Every Juncture: Loudoun County Mishandled Bathroom Sex Assault, Grand Jury Finds," National Review.
• "Steve Descano: America's Worst Prosecutor," AEI.