New evidence discovered in Dermond slayings

This week marks the nine-year anniversary of the slayings of Russell and Shirley Dermond, residents of the quiet and prestigious gated Great Waters community in Putnam County.

And although the murderer(s) still have not been found, Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills may have some new evidence to lead him to make an arrest.

Although he won’t provide too many details, Sills said he has made two trips to Houston, Texas, in the past six months regarding the Dermond case. He drove there in early December with his Suburban filled with boxes of physical evidence, which he took to a private lab.

“It’s considered one of the state-of-the-art labs of its type in the world,” he said. “I loaded all the boxes of evidence I had and drove it out there and consulted with those people, gave them a PowerPoint presentation of (photos of) the scene, and consulted with them. There were some scientists and administrative people there… and we have had some positive results from that, but I won’t say more than that.”

Those “positive results” generated a return trip to the lab in February, but that trip was by airplane and Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit District Attorney T. Wright Barksdale accompanied Sills.

“And now we have some potentially positive results from that,” Sills said, emphasizing the word potentially because “some more tests have to be done.”

Regarding Barksdale taking the trip with him, Sills said people need to understand that “even though we’re not in an arrest situation, we still talk about the case all the time.”

Two to three years ago, Sills was optimistic about some new technology the FBI had that could help solve the case. When asked this week about that technology, Sills said it was related to cellular phones.

“We did get the results back and it gave us some information, but nothing specific,” he explained. “But it is information that we may be able to tie to something else later down the road.”

As he has done all along, the veteran sheriff asks anyone who knows anything about the case to call him.

Regarding the many people who, in the past, shared their imaginings such as the elderly couple who was killed by alligators or the mafia, or those who accused him of not following up on the FBI special unit’s profile of the murderer, Sills said he wanted people to know he has explored every lead possible, although some more so than others.

Noting that he has personally watched the FBI do profiles in the past, Sills said the profile provided by the FBI could apply to 90% of the male population in America.

“Basically they said it’s a male who likes to collect guns and knives,” he described. “You have to have more information about the case to make a profile.”

Regarding the mob hitmen theory, Sills said: “Here we have conflicting things when looking for a pattern. The hit man walks in with a gun and shoots you in the head with a .22 magnum and then they walk out. They’re not going to pick up your body and carry it off and cut off your head after you’re dead in another location. And they’re not going to beat you (severely in the head) with a hammer and pick you up and put you in a boat and take you six miles down the lake somewhere and tie two cement blocks to you. They just don’t do that. So there are so many conflicting things here.”

Since the beginning, Sills has tried to stay on top of cases around the country that had any similarities to the Dermonds case. Some cases he’s looked at had one similarity, but none have had more than that.

History of the case

Russell Dermond, 88, and his wife, Shirley, 87, were slain sometime between May 2-3, 2014. They had accepted an invitation to attend a Derby Day Party at a friend’s home but never showed up at the party. The friend, Marianne Wade, told the newspaper writer in 2019 that when the couple never showed up, she and others became concerned and repeatedly tried to phone the Dermonds to no avail.

So, Wade had a mutual friend take some of the roses from the party over to the Dermonds.

When the friend went to their house and received no answer, he looked through a window and saw Russell Dermond’s lifeless, decapitated body in the garage. Shirley Dermond’s body was discovered in Lake Oconee more than a week later by fishermen.

Sills has said the difference between this case and the other homicide cases he worked is that he can find no criminal nexus to the victims.

“These people lived a very simple life,” he said, noting he could not even find a motive.

Described by friends as fun with a delightful sense of humor and loved by everyone, the Dermonds were parents of four, grandparents of nine, and sweethearts who were married 68 years when they died.

Regarding their murders, which Sills described as “brutal,” gunshot residue on Russell Dermond’s shirt reveals he may have been shot in the head before being beheaded postmortem with a knife.

“Could the gunshot residue have gotten on his shirt from some other source? The answer is ‘yes,’” Sills said. “We know they had a terrible problem with squirrels getting in the attic through the soffits, and he occasionally shot at them with his rifle, but it’s highly unlikely that was the case.”

Sills said he believes the killer took Mr. Dermond’s head to remove any chance of finding evidence, i.e. the bullet. He said Russell was wearing boxer shorts, a t-shirt, blue bathrobe and LL Bean slippers when his body was found, so it was unlikely he had been outside shooting at squirrels.

Shirley Dermond had been working a crossword puzzle from the last issue of USA Today, which was left opened on the kitchen table. The house and the couple’s attire seemed as if they were following their normal morning routine the day their lives ended so brutally.

“It stays with me more than any case,” Sills said last week. “It was a terrible murder and it’s nine years down the road and we still don’t know who did it, but I think about it every day.”