Death and the Beauty Queen

Michael Robbins, Kevin Jones' attorney: When you’ve got something that was this—this serious, this bad, this girl was brutally murdered—

Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent: Somebody’s gotta pay.

Michael Robbins:Somebody has to pay. 

Kevin Jones’s lawyers were well aware of what his father Hiram already knew all too well: most of Russellville had come to believe Kevin was guilty.

Kenny Johnson, Jones' attorney: It was just a nightmare. 

So Hiram bet the farm, literally, on a trio of well known and respected lawyers — Michael Robins, Kenny Johnson and Bill Bristow.

Kenny Johnson: First off  I was impressed with ‘em.

With Kevin, that is, said Kenny Johnson.

Johnson: His open reaction to questions, his volunteering information.  He volunteered his D.N.A., volunteered his blood.

But when Bristow and the others looked carefully at the case, they were intrigued. There was only one piece of evidence at all: The bloody palm print on the light bulb.

A bloody print left there in the late morning by a murderer?  Why, no… as the defense would claim.

Bill Bristow, attorney: It is a totally innocent situation.  The blood got on the light bulb at the time the body was discovered when he’s trying to—

Morrison: —revive her or something?

Bristow: —yes...

Morrison: He touched the light bulb?

Bristow: Yeah. The EMT said the lamp was within a foot of the body.

As they poked around, said the lawyers, they kept finding odd things  about the investigation conducted by that first time homicide detective, Mark Frost…

Bristow: The only area that was fingerprinted was the area around the body, there was—blood near the front door, there was blood on the Venetian blinds—an empty condom wrapper a short distance from the body.  The police go upstairs to see if that’s been flushed, do not fingerprint the flush handle at the commode, don’t DNA that, don’t DNA anything up there.  There was nothing done except just in the area around the body.

Nor was that bloody palm print the only evidence on the lamp whose heavy base was used to kill Nona.  Turned out police had lifted some fingerprints from the base of that lamp, too...

Kenny Johnson: And the prints that were on the business end of the murder weapon, the rod and base, were not Kevin Jones’ prints.

Morrison: They were some unidentified person?

Defense: Some unidentified.

Might have been DNA. There, and other places, too... but..

Johnson: None of that was done.  None of that was done.  We did it.  We tried.  We found the DNA.  We sent the prophylactic wrapper off to a lab and they found the DNA.  It was like it didn’t matter.  The DNA was some other male’s.

Then there was the strange business of Nona’s cell phone. It was at the scene of the murder, but the battery was missing.

The murderer must have taken the battery, must have handled the phone, said the defense, but it was never checked for prints or DNA.

Kenny Johnson: And so it’s a vital piece of evidence. Could have been tested for fingerprints, for DNA.

The defense asked for months to get a look at the phone, perhaps check its electronic history to see who Nona had been texting, or talking to, but when they finally got the phone, and took it to  a forensic expert t out the information, they discovered that its memory had been erased.

And that’s when the state admits that they had given the cell phone to Nona’s stepfather, Duane Dipert. Everything had been erased totally.

The investigator had given the phone to Duane, claiming there was no more information to be gained from it.

Michael Robbins: They did not do everything they could with the phone.

And why would Duane take Nona’s phone?  Simple, he said. He needed a phone. He was frugal.

Duane Dipert, Nona's stepfather:  I had fought for several months how to get my old phone onto this other contract and be efficient about it.

Frugality? The defense, suspecting a darker reason, jumped all over that..

Michael Robbins:  don’t believe that he got it because he’s—

Morrison: You think—

Robbins: --frugal.

Morrison: --he erased that intentionally.

Robbins: I think—yes, I do.

Duane, quite vigorously, denied that.

But losing the phone’s memory was a blow because, even though phone company experts were able to retrieve the messages sent to Nona, her responses, which might have identified a suspect, had been lost forever..

And then there were Kevin’s hands. A defense expert testified the killer would have sustained cuts and bruises in the attack on Nona, but...

Kenny Johnson: The police took photographs of Kevin, front and back of his hands, took his shirt off.  Kevin didn’t have a scratch, bruise, or an abrasion on him.

And what about that polygraph test. Remember what Kevin said the examiner told him?

Kevin Jones: He had not seen anybody fail a test worse in his 28 or some odd years of giving lie detector tests.

Well, the defense said it checked the polygrapher’s record.

Robbins: The person that was, that administered the test. He wasn’t a certified polygraph examiner.

Johnson: It was an attempt to get him to confess.  That’s all it was.

Is that what was going on here?  The prosecution had introduced this video of the interrogation... said it showed Kevin to be aggressive, possibly violent.

But that prosecution tactic may have backfired. Because the defense had the jury look at all three hours  of the tape...  and they watched a young man who looked mostly lost, and confused and stricken with grief.

So, in the end, it all seemed to come down to Kevin’s grandmother. The woman who testified that she saw him at the family’s gas station at just about the time the prosecution claimed he was 20 miles away, killing his girlfriend.

The jury, composed of the good citizens of Ozark, knew that down the road in Russellville, these questions were hotly debated. And thus they retired to contemplate the murder of Nona Dirksmeyer.