This week will mark 12 years since the brutal slayings of Russell and Shirley Dermond in the Lake Oconee area.
The unusual manner of the elderly couple’s deaths and their still-unsolved case garnered national media attention when it happened and continues to be a topic of blogs, podcasts, and true-crime television shows.
Russell and Shirley Dermond had retired in the late 1990s and moved to a home in a gated community on Lake Oconee. They enjoyed an active social life in the area and were supposed to attend a May 3, 2014, Kentucky Derby party at a friend’s house. When they didn’t show up, the hostess asked their neighbor to take some flowers from the party to the Dermonds and let them know they’d been missed.
The neighbor found 88-year-old Russell Dermond’s decapitated body in the garage of the Dermonds’ house and immediately called authorities. Shirley Dermond, 87, was nowhere to be found, and a search for her ensued, with a reward posted for information leading to her whereabouts.
Ten days later, her body, tied to cement blocks, was found in Lake Oconee by fishermen.
Now in his 30th year as sheriff of Putnam County, the Dermond case is the only unsolved murder in Sheriff Howard R. Sills’ career. The years have not lessened his determination to solve the case.
The growing pile of file boxes remains stacked in his office beside his desk chair, where he quickly can retrieve a folder or document as needed.
When he was recently asked a “why did the killer do such-and-such” question, Sills did not hesitate.
“I cannot answer that question,” he said. “I highly suspect that if I had the answer, I would already have had somebody in jail and hopefully by now would’ve had them in prison; or better yet, be sending them on to hell by way of execution.”
As he talked with reporters recently, Sills mentioned that he is keeping a close eye on the Nancy Guthrie case in Arizona, which is also in the national spotlight because the missing 84-year-old is the mother of a national TV news journalist.
Sills noted that the Dermonds at one time lived in Maricopa County, Arizona, about 100 miles away from where Guthrie was abducted.
“They’ve got more than I had,” Sills said. “Well, they don’t have a body, but they have a video of the perpetrator with a gun. They’ve got an elderly victim who was at home (like the Dermonds), but they’ve got nothing since then. They’ve got a ransom notice; I never got any kind of ransom notice. I’ve been interested in it because they didn’t make a quick arrest. They’ve obviously got DNA, but obviously not enough for CODIS.
"So, there are similarities between the Guthrie case and the Dermond case from the standpoint of victimology and nothing being seen, no witnesses.”
During the discussion, Sills said he never thought he’d be at this point with the Dermond case.
“I never thought that we wouldn’t get a call (of a tip),” he explained. “I just never thought of that. I never thought that there would be a similar crime. There have been a couple of decapitations, but I have been unable to establish a nexus between those and this one. … The few leads that we had that have been plausible, well, people don’t understand — you can’t just call in here and say ‘Joe Blow is a bad person and did this.’ This is not TV; I can’t go get a warrant for Joe Blow’s DNA because we got some freakin’ anonymous call. I’ve got to have some nexus.”
In the past couple of years, he has taken evidence from the Dermonds’ house to private labs for additional DNA testing. Sills interrupted the thought to give a little background. He explained that he, his own deputies and detectives, the Jones County Sheriff’s Office, and the FBI initially worked the scene at the Dermonds’ house.
Although he is convinced the murders did not take place at the house, he does not know where they happened.
“There’s no scientific evidence it happened there,” he explained. “There is a lack of evidence, not evidence but a lack of evidence.”
Neither do they know the exact time of the murders.
Sills said Mrs. Dermond had worked most of the Friday newspaper’s crossword puzzle, which was on the table beside her coffee cup, and the weekend edition of USA Today was in the driveway. So they believe it happened on Saturday, but they didn’t receive a call about it until Tuesday afternoon, when the neighbors called to report Mr. Dermond’s body in the garage.
“We kept that crime scene for over a month,” he said. “We did the luminol lights, did all that stuff. We never left the crime scene. We parked the mobile command center out front, and a deputy stayed there for at least a month until I didn’t want to get another search warrant and didn’t need to go back. I wanted to be able to go there to check it out anytime we thought of something else. That’s why we kept it so long.”
Items from the house and bodies were immediately taken to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s forensics laboratory, where Sills made a presentation of what all he’d found, the details of why he brought it, and what he wanted tested. He said the GBI told him there was no DNA evidence on any of the items.
Sills said he called the Duval County Sheriff’s Office in Jacksonville, Fla., because they have their own Cold Case Unit.
Two detectives from DCSO came and reviewed the case and the work done in the labs. They advised him that the Georgia lab had not tested some of the items and should have been tested.
“So, the more I talked to them and read about new methods and ways to solve crimes, as I often do, I decided to take it to Othram and then to Sorenson Forensics (private labs),” he said.
He wouldn’t go into detail about what was found, but he did say he recently sent six or seven items to the private labs that he hadn't previously sent. Noting that he uses forfeiture funds to pay for private testing, Sills explained that he personally takes the evidence with him throughout the trip to ensure it does not get lost or damaged.
“So I’ve been very cautious with this evidence,” he said. “And of course, the chain of evidence. You always want your chain of custody to be as small, with as few links as you can have.”
He described how bulky the items were to transport and how he had to remove all the seats from the vehicles or reserve extra seats on the plane to accommodate all the packages.
One of those items was the kitchen sink, which was tested to determine whether hands had been washed or blood had been washed away, but no evidence of blood was found.
When asked about tips, Sills said they are still coming in.
“Every time someone watches a TV program or podcast, they call,” he said. “It’s not constant anymore, but they’re still coming in.”
Regarding the notion that the Mafia was involved, Sills said yes, Russell Dermond is from New Jersey, but he grew up there. He went and served in WWII, went to college, worked at a clock factory, “and obviously there’s a hotbed of Mafia activity at the clock company,” he quipped sarcastically.
Sills did try to obtain the clock company’s personnel records, “but they just don’t have them anymore."
“I have no reason to believe that’s not true," he said. "Why would some company that’s been out of business for years still have their records? There’s no mystery. I mean, if it was a hit, I still say a hired killer would’ve simply shot them in the head and left. And it was not a drug-crazed bunch of Mansonite types; they would’ve left a mess inside of that house.”
He also said there’s absolutely no evidence the murders had anything to do with the Dermonds’ late son, who had been in prison.
Meanwhile, the sheriff continues to review photos of the Dermonds’ house from that day, reviews all the evidence, and waits to hear back from the lab on the latest items he sent for testing.