Nona Dirksmeyer Was A Beauty Queen Who Used Her Platform To Help Shine Light On Sexual Abuse. Now She Is Gone.

👑Nona Carol Dirksmeyer👑

"What A Beautiful Difference One Single Life Made"

She was a sweet, shy, smart, funny and lovely with the gift of a great golden voice that resonated like no other. She was goal oriented and down to earth. Nona was nice to everyone that she met. It was almost impossible for her to be rude.

Nona was born on December 26th, 1985 in Zachary, East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana to Paul and a nurse named Carol Yvette Larpenter Dirksmeyer. Nona had four brothers and one sister. 

As a child, Nona was sexually abused by Paul, who died when she was just ten. She didn't tell her mother about the abuse until after he father was gone.

"It was horrible. It’s such the end of my world. I just couldn’t believe something like that would happen. But I knew enough to know that she was telling the truth," said Carol Dirksmeyer.

Nona met Kevin Jones in Kindergarten and they grew up together. He was one of the few people that Nona confided in about the abuse inflicted on her by her father. By the time they were at Dover High School, Nona and Kevin were inseparable.

In high school Nona's best friend, Chelsea Huckaby, revealed to her mother Margie that Nona was cutting herself. Margie, was the first adult to hear about the abuse and helped Nona tell her mother.

Nona graduated Dover High School in 2004. 

After high school she attended Arkansas Tech University with Kevin. By the summer of 2005 they had finished their first year of college together. But Kevin was transferring, some 90 minutes away, to the University of Arkansas. 

Sometime after her father died, Nona and her mother, Carol, moved to Russelville. Carol then took up with Duane Dipert and later married him. Dipert was a strict guy and by fall of 2005, Nona was 19-years-old and living in her own apartment close by.

Nona was also a member of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters; former Pope County Fair Queen and Miss Teen Mount Nebo. She was crowned Miss Petit Jean Valley 2005 and went on to also compete in the Miss Arkansas Pageant. Nona hoped that if she won Miss Arkansas, she'd be able to go around to the schools and educate people about child abuse.


Nona was a sophomore music education major, participating as a member of both the Concert Chorale and the Chamber Choir. And had been a member of the First Christian Church Disciples of Christ and sang in the church choir. She was a soprano with a full voice. 

Nona and Kevin were engaged and would visit her on weekends.  The rest of the time stayed linked through late internet chats, texts and emoticons. When Kevin didn't answer, she would try to get his attention by sending him sarcastic messages asking if he was alive.

It was Christmas time, 2005, and Kevin, home from college, went directly to Nona’s apartment and spent an evening there. On the 15th, Kevin had left the apartment and went to his parents house in Dover, arriving just after midnight. He called Nona, as per their routine, to tell her that he made it safely. 

When Kevin woke up later that day he turned on his phone to find a text message from Nona saying, "“good morning cuddle muffin. i love you and hope you have a great day.”

Nona's plans for later that evening were to spend it with a little girl as a part of the as part of  the Big Sisters’ organization. Those plans would never meet fruition.

Kevin expected to hear from Nona after she took a final exam, but he didn't. He called and messaged her until about 6 p.m., when he had promised to escort his mother ,Janice, to a school holiday dinner where she worked.

"Mom, I can't go to this party and wonder if she's okay," Janice remembered.

From the car, Kevin called his buddy, a pizza delivery man named Ryan and asked him to check on Nona. Her car was parked outside her apartment and her upstairs lights were on. Ryan knocked on the door, but Nona didn't answer. When he told Kevin this, Kevin and his mom raced to Nona's apartment. When they got there, Kevin realized that he didn’t have his keys, so Ryan and Kevin knocked and knocked and rang the doorbell. Still no one answered. The two men raced frantically to the back sliding glass door. Kevin wasn't sure if they'd be able to open it because Nona always kept a stick in it to hold it shut. The stick was not there. Without looking, Kevin grabbed the hand. Ryan touched Kevin and said, "Do you not see her?"

Nona was laying in her front room, motionless and naked expect for her little white socks. Kevin threw open the door and ran inside. There was blood on her face, her eyes were closed and a pool blood was underneath her body. Kevin turned her over and tried CPR.  Then he just lifted her in his arms and held her to him. He talked to her and prayed that everything was going to be OK. At one point, Ryan let Kevin's mom in. Janice stood there beside them, in shock and called 911. 

When the ambulance and police arrived they took Kevin, who was covered in blood, aside. He then cried out and asked them if someone had done this to Nona. And they told him yes. And then he asked them if she was dead. And they affirmed that, yes, she was.

Before long, Nona's mother arrived. 

"It was just a big shock. Devastating. It was awful," said Carol Dirksmeyer. "I told them I wanted to see my baby. It was awful. Of course they said ‘you can’t.’ They had the crime scene tape up."

At first, Carol thought that maybe her daughter had committed suicide, but soon it was clear that Nona had her life brutally cut short by someone else.

As investigators surveyed the scene they noticed that there was no forced entry. An empty condom wrapper was found lying on a counter a few feet away from Nona's body. But there was no physical evidence she had been raped. Her head had been smashed, apparently with the heavy base of a lamp lying nearby. There were blood stains on the light bulb. Whoever struck the fatal blow had first used his fist to hit her face so hard it left bruising on her brain. Then she had been stabbed repeatedly, which left shallow cuts around her neck and shoulders. And then, before swinging the lamp base, she was strangled with such force that the hyoid bone broke in her neck.

Police then asked Kevin if he'd come down town and answer a few questions. A few questioned turned into many. During the questioning, Kevin said he could account for his whereabouts at the time of the murder. Before they let him go three hours later, the police asked Kevin if he killed Nona.

"I would kill myself before i'd hurt her," Kevin replied.

After they let Kevin go, they interviewed a few other men that Nona was with while he was away to college. Kevin told the police that he had no idea that he wasn't the only guy that Nona was sleeping with.

Nona's stepfather had even been interviewed. He claimed that he was Christmas shopping at the time of the murder and had receipts to prove it. Carol claimed that Nona's stepfather had also called her numerous times that day.

" And I told him that day, I said, 'You called me like eight or ten times,' which was unusual at work. He hardly ever calls me at work," remembered Carol.

Sometime after Kevin left the police station, he went to see Nona’s mother to help make out funeral arrangements with the family. Carol also wanted him to pick out the clothes that Nona would be wearing for the visitation.

Six days later, on the day before Nona's funeral, Kevin had called police to tell them about rumors that a man was seen leaving Nona’s place the day of the murder. While he was on the line, the police asked if perhaps he could come downtown again. Some more questions, just a few, they told him. He’d be done before the visitation, they assured him of that. 

"I'll do anything that you guys want me to do. I'll do a DNA test, I'll do anything," Kevin told investigators.

After about 20 minutes worth of questions investigators asked Kevin if he'd take a lie detector test, to which he agreed.  The examiner told Kevin that he failed miserably. 

"The man who gave it to me told me that he has not seen anybody fail a test worse in his 28 years of giving lie detector tests," said Kevin. 

The examiner said to Kevin that there was no doubt in his mind that Kevin was the killer. Kevin was told to get a lawyer, but he never asked for one. He was afraid that it would make him look guilty. Instead, he tried to convince them of his innocence. That didn't work because, besides the failed lie detector test, investigators found a bloody palm print on the lamp that killed Nona and it belonged to Kevin. However, they didn't arrest him that night and after seven hours of questioning, they let him go.

Everyone wondered why Kevin never showed up at the visitation for Nona. 

"And all the sudden, it kinda—like a light bulb going off in my head. I said, “You know, wouldn’t it be funny if it’s the boyfriend?” said Nona's stepfather.

Somewhere that evening, between 11:30 p.m. and 12:00 a.m., police showed up at Carol's house. Carol was told that Kevin was the killer and that he was a sociopath with a narcissistic  personality. She knew that her daughter was killed by someone she knew, Non would have never let a stranger into the house. The moment the police told her it was Kevin, Carol knew in her heart that he was the one that took Nona's life away.

To investigators, Nona's crime scene had looked staged and the fact that Kevin was covered in so much blood made them suspicious. They theorized that Kevin tried to touch everything he could to contaminate the scene in order to have a valid excuse if his DNA was found on something it shouldn't have been. Investigators believed that Kevin found the condom wrapper, the one that police had found on the counter at the crime scene, and flew into a murderous rage and killed Nona.

The next morning, Kevin went to Nona's funeral. 

"Kevin was like crying and I said, 'Don't let him sit with me,'" Carol remembered.

Nona's stepfather was convinced that Kevin's tears were fake. 

"Nothing at that point mattered to me," Kevin said. "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."

The same day, then Police Chief James Bacon had a press conference during which he claimed that he cleared all the persons of interests but one. No names were mentioned, but the whole town knew that that person was Kevin.

On March 31st, 2006, Kevin was arrested. His trial was held in the nearby city of Ozark in attempts to get him a fair trial. However, some jurors already had their minds made up about him. In an interview after the trial, juror Kim Willhite was asked if she thought that Kevin was guilty the moment she sat down, Kim replied, "You bet. 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."

Police had the condom wrapper tested for fingerprints, none were found. Kevin's defense team, however, had the wrapper tested and found unknown male DNA. Police believed that supported their theory that Kevin's motive was jealousy. But the defense charged the police work was sloppy. Kevin's lawyers asked to examine Nona's phone, which had been found at the crime scene, but was missing it's battery. The lead investigator, Mark Frost, told Kevin's lawyers that he had given the phone to Nona's step father in the middle of the investigation.  Nona's step father claimed he wanted to use it and took Nona's numbers out and put his in.

Allegedly, that wasn't the only mistake that investigators had made. It was said that the only place they finger printed at the crime scene was around Nona's body. There was blood near the front door and on the Venetian blinds. The sliding glass door was never dusted for fingerprints and they didn't bother to take footprints from the floor. Investigators allegedly had never even went up stairs. 

During the trial, Kevin's grandmother told the jury that her grandson couldn't have killed Nona because he was with her at the time of the murder. This threw a wrench into the prosecution's timeline of Nona's murder, but they thought that she was lying anyway.

The defense also presented the photos that the police took of Kevin the first night he was questioned, the night of  Nona's murder. Kevin didn't have a scratch on him.  And the person that had administered Kevin's lie detector test, wasn’t a certified polygraph examiner.

If Kevin was found guilty, Carol didn't want life in prison for him, she wanted the death penalty. 

"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 jurors went home the first day without reaching a verdict. On the second day, after eight hours, Kevin was found not guilty. Kevin and his family was relieved, but Nona's family had a difference of opinion.

"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 recalled.

"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," Carol Added.

Even though Kevin's dad, Hiram, spent every last dollar he had paying his son's legal team, he asked them for a favor. He didn't know how he was going to pay for it, but he asked them if they would investigate Nona's death and try to find the real killer. The lawyers agreed and investigator, preacher and part-time Dover policeman, Todd Stephie, to keep investigating the case.

One of the things that Kevin's legal team did was to try to find a match to the DNA found on the condom wrapper. They went back through the men that Nona had been seeing before her death and collected some DNA by going through garbage cans and such. None of their DNA matched what was taken from the crime scene.

All hope wasn't lost and through his police chief, Stephie learned that Nona's neighbor, Gary Dunn, had been booked on burglary. Dunn's bedroom window looked directly across to Nona's. Stephie simply asked Dunn if he would give him his fingerprints and DNA sample, Dunn agreed. And so, Nona's parents payed the $600 to have it tested. A couple of weeks later, the results came back and it was a match. Now Dunn's alibi had to be rechecked.

Dunn had originally told investigators that he had been shopping with his mom at the time of Nona's murder. After Stephie toiled through the boxes and boxes of papers pertaining to the case, he was about to give up when he found Dunn's receipt. It turned out that Dunn hadn't been shopping with his mom on the 15th like he had claimed, but the 13th.

A new prosecutor was on the case now and he found the evidence that Kevin's legal team was digging up against Dunn compelling and worth taking another look at Nona's neighbor. And one year after Kevin's acquittal, Dunn was charged with Nona's murder.

Dunn's trial began in April of 2010. His wife testified that he was violent in bed and that weeks before Nona's death, she caught him hanging around Nona's front door in the middle of the night.

During Dunn's trial, in order to cast a shadow of doubt in the jury's mind about the guilt of Dunn, his defense team threw attention back on Kevin. They claimed that Kevin's family were liars and were covering for him. It worked, and the judged declared a mistrial.

Dunn's second trial began in 2011 and this time the judge allowed the prosecutor to reveal the fact that Dunn was an ex-con with a violent past.

In 2002, a woman named Kelly Jo Fitzharris went for a jog. She passed by Dunn and then heard footsteps behind her. When Kelly looked behind her and saw Dunn with a huge stick. He hit her over the head with it and knocked her down. He began beating her, but she managed to escape and ran away. Police came a little later and found Dunn hiding in the water. He was arrested and spent 18 months in jail.

After two days of deliberation, the jury in Dunn's trial were deadlocked and once again the judge declared a mistrial.

In December of 2011, Kevin filed a $10 million lawsuit against the city’s former chief and one of its officers, accusing them of ignoring evidence that pointed to his innocence. Dunn was also named in the lawsuit, saying that Dunn lied to investigators to support an allegedly false alibi that he was away from his apartment at the time of the killing. Also, Dunn submitted to a polygraph exam, which the suit says indicated that Dunn lied when he denied killing Nona. And the person that administered the polygraph "slanted" it in Dunn's favor.

The lawsuit was dismissed because the statute of limitations had passed.

Kevin now is married and a criminal defense attorney who practices law in Russelville. 

Carol no longer believes Kevin is her daughter's murderer.

Dunn was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2017 on two counts of possession of firearms by certain persons. He was released on parole in August of 2018, but less than four months later he was back in custody. Dunn was charged with kidnapping, attempted kidnapping and indecent exposure in two separate incidences on the same night. Last year, Dunn's requested a change of venue for his trial and it was moved to Ozark. In November of 2019, Dunn was found guilty and sentence to 15 years in prison.

Nona's case remains unsolved.