Who Killed The Beauty Queen?

A Beauty Queen Falls Victim To An Ugly Crime

(CBS)  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.

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 the only suspect.

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

"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."