Who Killed The Beauty Queen?

A Beauty Queen Falls Victim To An Ugly Crime

(CBS)  It's detective work 101: when one part of a couple is murdered, the survivor is usually a suspect. So when Nona was found murdered, 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."

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."

And he 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?