Promise of 4th trial prompts questions

LITTLE ROCK — Three trials. Two defendants. No convictions.

After Gary Dunn’s most recent mistrial - his second - special prosecutors said they would try him a third time in the 2005 murder of Arkansas Tech University sophomore Nona Dirksmeyer.

That would make it the fourth trial in this murder case.

Dirksmeyer’s boyfriend, Kevin Jones, was acquitted in the case in 2007.

At what price justice?

The succession oftrials in Dirksmeyer’s case has taken a heavy emotional toll on the three families involved. And capital-murder trials aren’t cheap.

Efforts by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to obtain a breakdown of expenses incurred during the trials failed.

The Public Defender Commission, which covers the cost of defense attorneys and all related expenses - attorneys’ fees, expert witnesses, hotel and travel charges, for example - said twice last week that it needs more time to figure out what information can be made public.

The state Office of the Prosecutor Coordinator in Little Rock, which oversees the special prosecuting attorneys involved in the trials, referred questions about the cost to the prosecuting attorney in Pope County - where the murder occurred.

Pope County Prosecuting Attorney David Gibbons said a gag order prevents him from revealing trial costs. If the order is lifted or if special prosecutors decide not to retry Dunn, Gibbons said, he will provide the information.

Both of Dunn’s trials in Johnson County Circuit Court, where they were moved because of pretrial publicity, lasted three weeks. Attorneys from both sides were in Clarksville an unknown number of days beforehand to prepare for the case.

In Dunn’s first trial, special prosecutors H.G. Foster and Jack McQuary represented the state. In the second, they were joined by Assistant Attorney General Kent Holt.

The defense team in both trials consisted of Little Rock attorneys Bill James, Jeff Rosenzweig and George “Birc” Morledge; two victim witness coordinators, and an investigator from the public defender’s office.

The state called two expert witnesses to testify on the physical DNA evidence; the defense called one.

Both of Dunn’s trials ended with deadlocked juries. In each instance, eight jurors voted for acquittal and four voted for conviction.

Jury members from the most recent trial, which concluded Jan. 28, said they don’t think a third one will end in a conviction.

The problem, four jurors said, is a lack of evidence, which they attributed to a flawed investigation by the Russellville Police Department.

“It appears the police dropped the ball,” a female juror said on condition of anonymity. “Unfortunately for the Dirksmeyer family, nothing can be done about that now.”

Juror Margie Gordon agreed.

“I don’t know why the state keeps trying it. Even if he did commit this crime, there wasn’t enough evidence from the Police Department to convict him.”

Jury foreman Steve Jacobs said, “They’ve got to find better ways to collect evidence, process it and maintain it.”

Jurors said they felt badly about the lack of resolution in the case but that they couldn’t deliver a guilty verdict just to make everyone feel better.

“The Dirksmeyers. The Joneses. The Dunns. Three families’ lives have been turned upside down over and over again,” Gordon said.

“I asked the Lord to lead me and guide me and keep my mind open about this case. There just wasn’t enough evidence to convict this man.”

ABOUT DIRKSMEYER

Graceful, petite and blessed with a great, big voice, Nona Dirksmeyer, 19, left her hometown of Dover for Arkansas Tech in 2004.

She declared a major in music.

Her mother, Carol Dipert, was reluctant to let Dirksmeyerlive on her own in nearby Russellville. But the young woman, eager to spread her wings, persuaded her mother to let her move into an apartment with a girlfriend.

A year later, Dirksmeyer decided to get her own place at Inglewood Manor Apartments. It was a small complex, with only 18 units.

The apartments were arranged in a terraced setting. Dirksmeyer’s building was on the lower level. Across the parking lot and up a hill, a second set of apartments looked over hers. That’s where Dunn, his wife, and two stepchildren lived.

Once she was living alone, Dirksmeyer was extremely conscious of security, one of her friends said.

“I went to pick her up a lot,” Sarah Bailey said. “I always had to call before she would come out.”

Only three people had keys to the apartment: Dirksmeyer, her mother and Kevin Jones.

Dirksmeyer was a private person, a young woman who learned early in life that even those you love can’t always be trusted.

Sexually abused by her father as a child, Dirksmeyer kept the secret long after his death. At 14, she began cutting herself. Finally, she opened up, telling Jones, a trusted adult friend and her mother what had happened.

In college, Dirksmeyer used her troubled past to create a platform after a friend persuaded her to enter beauty pageants. While not at all confident about her looks, Dirksmeyer saw an opportunity to help children who had suffered just as she had. She also enjoyed the new venue that pageants provided for her musical abilities.

In her free time, Dirksmeyer hung out with a few close girlfriends and Jones.

At the beginning of the fall semester in 2005, however, Jones transferred from Arkansas Tech to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Dirksmeyer became despondent. She worried that their four-year relationship wouldn’t survive the separation.

By the end of the semester, the couple were arguing frequently. Jones was seeing other women; Nona was seeing other men. Still, they clung to their relationship.

At 6:50 p.m. on Dec. 15, 2005, Dirksmeyer’s mother received a call from her husband, who said something had happened to Dirksmeyer and that he would pick Dipert up from the hospital where she worked.

When her husband emerged from the elevator, Dipert knew.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” she asked, collapsing.

The couple raced to Dirksmeyer’s apartment.

“Please, let me see my baby,” Dipert pleaded with the officers standing outside.

Police refused.

Inside, Dirksmeyer lay on the living-room floor - naked, beaten, stabbed, strangled and bludgeoned with a floor lamp.

Less than a week later, investigators told Carol and Duane Dipert that Jones was Dirksmeyer’s killer.

ABOUT JONES

Kevin Jones went to trial in 2007, accused of killing his girlfriend in a fit of jealous rage.

His mother, Janice, cringed every time she heard the talk around town that her redheaded son had committed such an atrocious act.

She was with Jones the night he found Dirksmeyer’s body. Her hysteria rendered a 911 call to police nearly unintelligible.

A mother of two sons, Janice Jones had considered Dirksmeyer a member of the family - a daughter.

Kevin Jones was acquitted of the murder in 2007. Still, speculation continues. And still, his mother remains his staunchest defender.

After Dirksmeyer’s death, Jones told people that he wanted to become a lawyer. He currently works as a logger with his father, Hiram. It’s unknown whether he still wants to attend law school. Because of a gag order in the case, the Joneses cannot talk to the media.

The Jones family has lost much because of the accusations against Kevin: their home, which had to be sold to cover costs incurred by the case; their privacy; and a community’s trust.

Only recently was Janice Jones able to restore a relationship with Carol Dipert. On the last day of Dunn’s second trial, they walked into the courtroom as a united front, with Kevin Jones between them.

Still, Janice Jones remains in a difficult position.

She wants justice for Dirksmeyer. She wants justice for her son, who, until someone is convicted of the murder, remains a suspect in the public’s eye.

And each time Dunn goes on trial, so does Jones.

ABOUT DUNN

The only physical evidence against Dunn is a partial DNA profile obtained from a condom wrapper found on Dirksmeyer’s kitchen counter on the night of the murder.

That partial profile means he can’t be excluded from the group of people who touched it: at least two other men and Dirksmeyer.

And that, jurors say, is the crux of the problem.

Prosecutors can’t directly link him to Dirksmeyer’s body. They can’t directly link him to her murder. And the only thing that may indicate that he was in the apartment is a condom wrapper.

Dunn’s attorneys argued in both of his trials that Jones left the wrapper there to stage the crime scene and to suggest that rape was the motive.

A medical examiner has testified repeatedly that Dirksmeyer’s body showed no signs of sexual trauma or assault.

The two Dunn trials were almost identical in nature, with only a few exceptions. In the second trial, a jogger attacked by Dunn in 2002 testified. And the defense called a gynecologist to rebut testimony from Dunn’s wife that his preference for rough sex forced her to have a hysterectomy.

The jogger testified that Dunn chased her through a Russellville park for no apparent reason and beat her up.

Defense attorneys implied through cross-examination that the jogger wasn’t telling the whole story and that some sort of altercation between the two may have prompted the attack.

Jurors said the jogger’s testimony didn’t connect Dunn to Dirksmeyer’s murder.

“What he did to her didn’t have nothing to do with this tragedy. He served his time,” Gordon said.

One of the female jurors, who requested anonymity, agreed, saying the judge’s instructions regarding the jogger’s testimony made it clear that they could consider her story only in determining motive or intent in Dirksmeyer’s death.

“It just seemed like, in my opinion, those were two different crimes,” the juror said.

Jacobs, the jury foreman, said: “You can’t not consider [her testimony] because the judge wouldn’t have allowed her to testify if there wasn’t something significant there.

“We had to be very careful with it. Some just didn’t really want to use it at all. They said, ‘We’re just not going to pay any attention to that because we’re not supposed to.’ And I said, ‘They wanted to let you know he might have a motive. That was their way of letting you know.’”

The motive in Dirksmeyer’s death, prosecutors say, was an attempted rape that went awry.

But, jurors noted that the jogger said Dunn didn’t try to rape her, just that he became angry for no reason and threatened to kill her.

And then there was the condom wrapper.

Gordon questioned where police said it was found, and the fact that it had Dirksmeyer’s DNA on it.

“Don’t too many young women leave condom wrappers on the kitchen counter like after-dinner mints,” she said, especially when the young woman in question had a mother who often dropped in unannounced to clean her apartment.

Others felt that a partial profile didn’t prove anything, especially since others had touched the wrapper.

In the end though, the specter of Jones raised the most doubt, jurors said.

For the first few days of Dunn’s second trial, there was no mention of him at all.

“When we started, I got really frustrated,” Gordon said. “If I was the prosecution, I wouldn’t have wasted all that time telling me that Kevin Jones was innocent.

“They should have focused on Gary.”

The jury’s inability to reach a unanimous decision devastated Dunn’s family - especially his mother, Martha, who is suffering from a recurrence of cancer.

She wept as he left the courtroom.

As he awaits a retrial, Dunn remains in jail, where he’s been since August 2008.

How this story was written Frye used testimony from Gary Dunn’s most recent trial to write this article.

Most of the information, especially that pertaining to Nona Dirksmeyer, was culled from three key witnesses: Carol Dipert, Janice Jones and Kevin Jones. Frye also relied on testimony from other witnesses to confirm and/or add details.

Because of a standing gag order, none of the family members or attorneys could comment for this article.