Nona Dirksmeyer Is Dead!

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.