Who Killed The Beauty Queen?

On Dec. 15, 2005, the small town of Russellville, Ark., was rocked by the news that 19-year-old college student and aspiring beauty queen Nona Dirksmeyer had been found murdered inside her apartment.

Nona's boyfriend Kevin Jones says he had been trying to reach her numerous times by phone but that his calls and messages had gone unanswered. Eventually, he and his mother decided to stop by Nona's apartment, where they discovered Nona's body.

As correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports, Nona had been murdered, beaten to death and left in her blood-spattered living room.

As paramedics responded to the 911 call, Kevin called Nona's stepfather, Duane Dipert, who in turn called his wife - and Nona's mother - Carol. "He met me close to the elevators. And I was just tinglin' all over. And I said, 'She's dead, isn't she?' And he said, 'Yeah,'" Carol remembers.

It was a grisly end to a life Nona struggled to fill with beauty. "I think she was just a really caring person that didn't wanna see anything go hungry or be abused," Nona's mother recalled.

Beautiful as she was, Nona was a most unlikely beauty queen. "She was really shy. Like almost painfully shy," remembers Nona's friend Adrielle Churchill, who had already won a beauty pageant.

Asked what attracted him to Nona, Kevin says, "If I didn't say her looks, I would probably by lying. I mean 'cause that's a big part of it, you know, when you're young. And her personality, too."

When Nona started competing in pageants, Kevin started to notice changes in his girlfriend. "It did help her self esteem a lot," he says.

By the time they were at Dover High School, Nona and Kevin were inseparable.

Kevin's mother Janice Jones, a school librarian, says Nona and Kevin were good for each other. "She just made him a kinder, sweeter person. He gave her confidence, and supported and cheered her on in her struggles," Janice says.

And Nona had a great deal to struggle with. She said years earlier, when she was just a child, she was sexually abused by her biological father. He died when she was just ten. And for years, she told almost no one about the abuse. But she did tell Kevin just after they started dating.

Carol says her daughter never told her, and that she didn't find out about the abuse until Nona's father was dead. Nona made preventing child abuse her cause when she appeared in pageants.

By the summer of 2005, Nona and Kevin had finished their first year of college together at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville. But Kevin was transferring, some 90 minutes away, to the University of Arkansas.

"I didn't like the fact that I had to be away from her," Kevin says. "I really looked forward to going back home on the weekends."

And Kevin was "back home" on Dec. 15, 2005. The couple had already spent time together, and Kevin says he expected to hear from Nona after she took a final exam, but didn't.

Kevin says he always managed to get a hold of Nona. He continued to call and message her until about 6 p.m., when he had promised to escort his mother to a school holiday dinner.

When the time came to drive to the party, Kevin says he was concerned that Nona hadn't called back. "And he said, 'Mom, I can't go to this party and wonder if she's okay,'" Janice remembers.

Kevin contacted his friend Ryan, who was delivering pizza in the area. He asked Ryan to check if Nona's car was parked outside her apartment. It was.

Ryan knocked on the door and told Kevin there was no answer. That's when Kevin and his mom raced to Nona's apartment.

Kevin and Ryan tried but failed to open the front door, so they ran around to the sliding door in the back. Kevin says he forced open the sliding glass door, ran inside, and turned Nona over.

When police arrived, they had to make sense of the gruesome scene. Was Kevin really a grieving boyfriend? And why was he covered in so much blood?

It's detective work 101: when one part of a couple is murdered, the survivor is usually a suspect. So when Nona was found dead on the floor of her living room, police wanted to talk to her longtime boyfriend.

Police believe Nona was beaten to death with the heavy metal base of a floor lamp.

"I walked in and saw a large pool of blood around the head, several abrasions to the neck and the shoulder," remembers James Bacon, who was the Russellville police chief and one of the first at the crime scene.

The murder weapon was a few feet from Nona's body, and there were blood stains on the light bulb. There was no sign of sexual assault and no sign of a break-in.

But Kevin was covered in Nona's blood. Kevin says he had just finished trying to revive her, while his mother and his friend looked on.

It wasn't just Kevin's appearance that Chief Bacon thought was strange: it was also his behavior. "When I got to the apartment, he was standing just inside the door. And he stuck his hand out like he wanted to shake hands. And then said, 'Oh, I can't.' Then did his hands like this to show me they were covered in blood," Bacon recalls.

That night, Kevin spent hours at the police station. He never asked for a lawyer.

Police paid attention to everything he said during the questioning, but they paid even more attention to what he did while he was alone in the interrogation room. Kevin was videotaped slamming the back of a chair in frustration, then was calm.

Asked what that tells him about Kevin, Bacon says, "Well, it tells me that he does have the capability of striking somebody or striking something, which he did at that point."

Police believe it all began as a fight and that the killer, says Bacon, struck Nona first. "In the face. The medical examiner reports indicate there are blows to the face, to them I believe above the eye and in the cheek … that are consistent with like a palm-heel slap."

As the fight escalated, Bacon believes Nona tried to defend herself, and the killer pulled out a knife.

But Bacon says the killer couldn't bring himself to cut Nona. "And again, that's consistent with a crime of passion. Because that's a difficult thing for some people to do," the police chief says.

Soon after that, Bacon believes the fight turned deadly. "The floor lamp is slammed into the back of the head. And is now the fatal blow," he says.

But people who know Kevin, like Adrielle, say he would never hurt Nona. "If someone says, 'Well, the boyfriend did it,' there might be different situations where with different guys you would say, 'Well, yeah he always had a temper. I could just see how he snapped.' But, that was just never the case with Kevin," she says.

"When Nona and Kevin were together I always just saw him as a different person. Just a little bit kinder, and sweeter, and gentle. Because that's the way he always was with her," says Kevin's mother Janice.

But police were starting to suspect there might be another side to Kevin, and they wanted to know everything he did on the day of the murder.

Kevin said he could account for his whereabouts at the time of the murder.

Police say they were being careful and detailed in their investigation, and Bacon says that in a period of about a week, investigators interviewed about 50 different people.

On the eve of Nona's funeral, Kevin voluntarily returned to the Russellville Police Department. "I'll do anything that you guys want me to do. I'll do a DNA test, I'll do anything," he told investigators.

He did everything police wanted, and even agreed to take that lie detector test. But that might have been a big mistake: investigators say Kevin failed the polygraph miserably.

Kevin maintained his innocence, while Bacon told him there was no doubt in his mind that he had killed Nona.

Kevin says he was "real scared."

Kevin had more reason to be afraid than he knew, because by now, six days after the murder, police had the closest thing yet to a smoking gun. Remember the blood found on the light bulb? It turns out there was a palm print on that bulb, and it was Kevin's.

"The only way that print could've gotten there…the only way the print could have got there is in the process of the crime. That's the only way and it's yours!" an investigator told Kevin.

To the naked eye it looked just like a small bloodstain, but to crime scene investigators, it matched perfectly with Kevin's print in Nona's blood on the murder weapon.

And police had developed a theory about why Kevin was covered in so much blood when they arrived: they believe he was trying to contaminate the crime scene. "He meticulously articulated everything to the Nth degree so that he could come back and say anything that you find is accountable because I went in and grabbed the body and now look me, cross-contamination," Bacon says.

But why would Kevin want Nona dead?

To hear Kevin tell it, Nona wasn't just his girlfriend for now, she was his partner forever. "I knew I was going to marry her. There wasn't a question about it to me," he says.

"How'd you know?" Schlesinger asks.

"I don't know. I didn't see it any other way," Kevin says.

That was why, police now believe, Kevin flew into a murderous rage when he found something unexpected while visiting Nona the morning of Dec. 15.

Bacon believes Kevin found an empty condom wrapper, which police say was sitting on Nona's kitchen counter. They say it was part of Kevin's motive.

"Did you see the condom wrapper in the kitchen?" an investigator asked Kevin.

"No… So there was one? Then she was raped!" Kevin said.

"We don't know that. So did you see it, or touch it?" the investigator asked.

"I didn't even know it was there. She and I never used condoms," Kevin replied.

It didn't take long for police to find out that, while Kevin might have thought he was Nona's only boyfriend, there were other men.

Police interviewed her other lovers, but cleared all of them.

The investigation kept leading back to Kevin, and just six days after Nona's murder, lead Detective Mark Frost told him he was no longer just the prime suspect - he was now the only suspect.

"You cannot deny this any more. Okay? Here's the deal. An altercation went down between you and Nona," Frost said.

"No it didn't," Kevin replied.

"It went down because she's seeing other guys," Frost said.

"No, I didn't," Kevin said.

"You do know you found out, and there was an altercation," Frost said.

"I never found out. I had no idea," Kevin insisted.

"At first, I was scared and nervous. Because it's the police. They have a lot of power. And they have the power to put someone in jail for the rest of their life if they want to," Kevin recalls.

"Did that register on you that you could go to the penitentiary for the rest of your life?" Schlesinger asks.

"At that point, yeah, it did. And then I thought, 'No, I didn't do this. They're not gonna put me in jail for something that I didn't do,'" Kevin says.

Police built their case against Kevin methodically; the bloody floor lamp with his palm print on it, and the empty condom wrapper, would become two central pieces of evidence against him.

But Kevin kept giving police information, willingly. On the night police called him a murderer, Kevin had come in on his own.

At that point, Kevin says he didn't even have a lawyer. "I was under the impression I had nothing to hide. So why would I need a lawyer?" he explains.

Kevin's interrogation dragged on behind closed doors for nearly seven hours.

After that session, Bacon says he was "very" convinced Kevin was the killer, and says he wanted to arrest him for murder. But the Pope County prosecutor wasn't convinced he had a case yet, and Bacon had to let Kevin go.

Kevin, by now accused but not yet charged with Nona's murder, went to her funeral the following morning.

Nona's mother Carol and stepfather Duane knew Kevin was a suspect. "Kevin was like crying and I said, 'Don't let him sit with me,'" Carol remembers.

"He was just blubbering away for an uncomfortably long time," says Duane, who thinks the tears were all an act.

But according to Kevin, the pain couldn't have been more real. "Nothing at that point mattered to me," he says. "Because I was hollow; all I could think about were the times that she and I spent together, and that I'd never get to spend another time with her like that again."

But Nona's stepfather doesn't believe any of it, and calls Kevin a "con artist" and a "manipulator."

More than three months after the murder, on March 31, 2006, Kevin was arrested. "That's when it really hit me that I could possibly go to jail. There were no guarantees that I had a life. My life would be in the hands of 12 people," he says.

And 18 months after Nona's death, Kevin would go to trial for murder.

Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Phillips had built his case on blood: Nona's blood was on the lamp used to kill her, and embedded in her blood was Kevin's palm print.

The palm print was on the light bulb, and the entire case came down to that bulb. It was the best evidence discovered by Chief Bacon, who believes Kevin bludgeoned Nona to death with the lamp.

And Bacon says that's when the lamp snapped apart. "And it breaks, the natural instinct is to try to grab it. In that scramble to grab it is when the blood print is deposited on the bulb," Bacon says.

Kevin and his family steeled themselves for the trial and its outcome.

"Did you acknowledge the possibility that your son could go to the penitentiary?" Schlesinger asks Janice.

"No, No," she says.

But Kevin says, "I did."

But Nona's mother Carol thought a prison term for Kevin would not be enough. "Kevin is a murderer. And he deserves to forfeit his life. He took someone's life. And he deserves to forfeit his," she said.

The courtroom was closed to cameras. Kevin never took the stand, and jurors were soon influenced by the state's most compelling evidence.

Juror Jennifer Finley says the palm print on the light bulb was a "big factor."

But Kevin says he doesn't even remember touching the bulb.

"Was he guilty in your mind when you first sat down," Schlesinger asks juror Kim Willhite.

"You bet," Willhite says. "And statistically it's usually someone close to the person. And here they had the boyfriend. And they had him with the bloody palm print."

It wasn't just that there was blood on the bulb; it was the texture of the blood that was critical. Was it wet or dry when it was discovered?

If the blood was dry, that proved it had time to harden, and that meant Kevin left it while murdering Nona hours before police were called. But if the blood was still wet when police arrived, it meant that Kevin was telling the truth, and it must have been left when he was trying to revive Nona, just before the 911 call.

Words are important here. This is how police and prosecutors described the texture of the blood: "tacky."

"It could have been tacky," Bacon said.

"The appearance of tacky," the prosecutor said.

"Tacky" would be a word that would course through the courtroom.

In fact, it created a huge problem for Tom Bevel, the prosecution's blood expert, because it contradicted his own theory that blood was put on the bulb at the time of the murder. "Blood on the bulb, on both sides, was placed there at the time of the killing, as opposed to some later time frame," he explains.

"If this blood is tacky, could it have been deposited on this light bulb at the time of death?" Schlesinger asks.

"If the blood is tacky, it certainly could not have been deposited there at the time of death," Bevel says. "No way."

But Bacon stands by his initial observation, and his word, tacky. "It was the best way that I knew how to explain it. Five days later when I looked at it, it had the same appearance," he says.

"When it would certainly have been dry," Schlesinger remarks.

"Correct," Bacon agrees.

Jurors says that word - "tacky" - was very important in this case.

And it's a potent weapon seized by Kevin's lawyers, Michael Robbins, Kenny Johnson, and Bill Bristow. "If any portion of it had the consistency of being tacky, then that's indicative of it being put there at the time the body was discovered," Robbins explains.

But prosecutors also have that condom wrapper, which police say Kevin found at Nona's and it sent him into a rage. Police considered checking it for DNA, but chose instead to check for fingerprints that might identify who touched it more accurately.

"The crime lab told us you had a choice, because if we do fingerprints, we are going to potentially destroy DNA. If we do DNA we're gonna potentially destroy fingerprints," Bacon explains.

No fingerprints were found. But it turned out there was some DNA left on the wrapper. And Kevin's legal team found it: the DNA was male, but not belonging to Kevin.

Police believe that supports their theory that Kevin's motive was jealousy. But the defense charged the police work was sloppy. They also zeroed in on Nona's cell phone. Who had she been in touch with the day she died? Kevin's lawyers asked to examine that phone, to the great embarrassment of the lead detective.

"And he finally said, 'Look, I'm embarrassed to tell you this. But the investigator gave the cell phone to the stepfather,'" Johnson says.

It seemed strange but Mark Frost, the lead investigator, gave Nona's phone to Duane Dipert, Nona's stepfather, in the middle of the investigation.

"Tell me why you wanted her cell phone back?" Schlesinger asks Duane Dipert.

"First of all I'm a cheapskate. You talk to anybody…," he explains. "And I could use it at that time, 'cause everything was activated. So I start puttin' my numbers in, and takin' her numbers off."

"Do you know how strange that sounds that you would take this cell phone because by your own admission you're a cheapskate?" Schlesinger asks.

"Well, yeah," Dipert admits.

"It's a perception and reality thing again," prosecutor Phillips says. "The reality is that everything the state could've obtained from the phone was obtained. And that you should never give evidence back on a pending case, period. And that was done."

Those closest to Nona were convinced: even if the police made some mistakes, they did get the right man. "They had overwhelming evidence against him which you can't refute," Carol says.

For months, Kevin's life had hung in the balance. Now he waited for the jury's verdict.

When jurors began deliberating the case, the opinions in the jury room were split down the middle. Once they calmed down, they started combing through the evidence, piece by piece.

"We laid out a timeline. We looked at the cell phone. We looked at evidence from the testimony. We looked at the tape of him being interrogated. Everything. We looked, we pored over," juror Kim Willhite recalls.

They went home the first day without reaching a verdict. But then, midway through the second day, they reached a decision: not guilty.

"I felt like 10,000 pounds had been lifted off my shoulders," Kevin remembers.

"I was sittin' there with my mouth hangin' open, not guilty. And so I stood up and says, 'You got away with it, Kevin. You got away with it,'" Nona's stepfather Duane recalls.

"I was in a state of shock for a few seconds. I couldn't do anything. And it's just like everything was in slow motion," Nona's mother Carol adds.

"I'm not a criminologist. I'm not a blood expert. But I looked at everything they gave us in the jury room. There just wasn't enough to convict. There wasn't anything that pointed to Kevin as the killer," explains juror Kim Willhite.

For 18 months, Kevin had lived as an accused murderer, and now, it was over.

"It was a horrible thing that happened and a horrible situation. But at that point, I was just happy that I was a free man and that people would stop saying the things about me they'd said. And people would stop judging my family and me," Kevin says.

It was a tough loss for prosecutor Jeff Phillips. "There was still just a sick feeling of letting Nona's mom down a little bit. Still have that today," he says.

"Is Kevin innocent or is he not guilty, if you know what I mean?" Schlesinger asks.

"Kevin was not proven guilty. There was not evidence to prove him guilty," Finley says.

But former police chief James Bacon insists Kevin's still the killer. "And when you have to watch somebody walk out the door, and you're convicted that, in your own heart you've got the man responsible, it hurts," he says.

Janice knows her son is not guilty in the eyes of the law, but she also knows that some people still believe Kevin is guilty. "It is very hurtful. It is very frustrating," she says.

And Janice is still fighting to clear Kevin's name. "I made a promise to Kevin when he was in jail and sitting at the cemetery with my hand on Nona's gravestone, I have promised both of those kids that I would keep looking and searching until we found the person who did this," she says.

And Janice Jones may get her wish. Remember that DNA they found on the condom wrapper? After the trial, Kevin's defense team continued looking for a match, and just three days ago, attorney Michael Robbins announced that they had found one.

"I think this person is a viable suspect and the investigation into this individual needs to go forward," Robbins tells 48 Hours.

The person matched to the DNA has not been publicly named. But now, a special prosecutor has been appointed to look into the case.

"Hopefully it will eliminate all doubt that I was the person that did this," Kevin says.

But Nona's mother Carol remains convinced that police had the right man all along. "Doesn't change my opinion any of him being the murderer because we always thought all along that the condom wrapper was the trigger and that just reinforces it my mind," she says.

Whatever the outcome of the new investigation, for her family and friends, Nona's death is a painful end to a life filled with beauty, but haunted by cruelty.

"She should just be remembered as this remarkable person who came through so much," Adrielle says. "If you're going to remember her as a beauty queen, you should remember her as a girl who didn't win right away and kept doing it because she enjoyed it."

After his acquittal, Kevin went back to college. He says he wants to become a lawyer.

Arkansas Tech University established a music scholarship in Nona Dirksmeyer's memory.
Produced By Allen Alter, Jamie Stolz, and Daria Hirsch