These high-profile unsolved killings of the past decade haunt Middle Georgia
A suicide note in 2017.
A former beauty queen’s disappearance in 2005.
A couple’s gruesome deaths on Lake Oconee five years ago.
Though not many high-profile slayings over the past decade of stumped investigators in Middle Georgia, the cases that remain unsolved still haunt residents and law enforcement alike.
Over the last 10 years, some of these crimes have baffled investigators from the beginning, while new light has been cast that have led to arrests.
Here’s a look back at these notable cases from 2010 to 2019.
Shirley and Russell Dermond
Few homicides in recent decades have attracted wider interest here than the shocking killings of Shirley and Russell Dermond.
Both were in their late 80s and their May 2014 slayings left many stunned.
Married for 68 years, they’d moved away from metro Atlanta around the turn of the century and retired to the Great Waters subdivision, a gated enclave on Lake Oconee. Their four-bedroom, $650,000 home in a wooded cul-de-sac overlooked a cove on the lake’s Putnam County shoreline about 12 miles northeast of Eatonton.
The circumstances of their deaths are as gruesome as they are unfathomable.
On May 6, 2014 — after they hadn’t shown up for a neighbor’s Kentucky Derby party three days earlier —concerned friends, a husband and wife, stopped by the Dermond house on Carolyn Drive. The front door was unlocked.
Inside, in the Dermonds’ two-car garage, the body of 88-year-old Russell J. “Russ” Dermond was lying in a small pool of blood between the couple’s Lexus SUV and Lincoln Town Car. His head had been cut off.
Shirley Wilcox Dermond, 87, was nowhere to be found. A week and half would pass before fishermen discovered her body in the lake. By water, the spot she surfaced was about five miles from her house. She had been weighed down with concrete blocks that were bound to a rope around her legs. She had not been decapitated and appeared to have been killed by a blow to the head.
What remains more than five years later is a cold case that has to this point defied explanation.
There are no suspects. The Dermonds had no known enemies, although the sheriff has also said their deaths at least seem to be the handiwork of “a vicious enemy” — or at very least someone with such a capacity for savagery.
The killings rattled Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills, calling the mystery a “yoke around my neck.”
Shar’bora Yankita Shyrell Daniels
The death of 18-year-old Shar’bora Yankita Shyrell Daniels has baffled investigators for more than seven years.
The recent Central High School graduate had been talking on the phone in the wee hours of June 19, 2012, when a bullet fired from somewhere outside her family’s house on Macon’s west side struck her in the head.
Daniels died hours later. Authorities have no known suspects in the case and it is possible the fatal shot was fired from some distant location.
The Telegraph, on the day of the shooting, reported:
Daniels’ father, Alfred, said his daughter never got into trouble and didn’t have any enemies. She was planning to attend Macon State College in the fall, then after a year transfer to Clark Atlanta University. She eventually wanted to pursue a career in fashion design. “She was an A/B student,” Alfred Daniels said. “She told me she was two points away from being an honors graduate. She liked to speak Spanish on Facebook.” Daniels said everyone called his daughter by her nickname of “Shy.” Alfred Daniels said he and his wife were asleep in their room when their 16-year-old son Christopher started banging on the bedroom door, telling them there was “something wrong with Shy.” A bullet entered Christopher’s bedroom while he was playing a video game and passed into the next room, where Shar’Bora was talking on the phone. Christopher told his parents he had heard a “pop” sound, which he thought came from his sister’s phone. As Alfred Daniels and his wife examined her, he said he could feel his daughter’s heart beat rapidly. He said he saw wall board scattered around his daughter. “I couldn’t see what was wrong,” he said. “Then I turned her head onto her side and that’s where (the gunshot wound) was.”
Yvonne Jackson
Police have little evidence in the still-unsolved death of 41-year-old Yvonne Jackson on March 30, 2012.
Jackson’s body was found that Friday morning in an upstairs bedroom in a burning duplex apartment on Patterson Street near Napier Avenue in Macon.
Arson was suspected in the case.
Firefighters were called to the residence about 10:20 a.m. They found a stove that appeared to be turned on, but the blaze was mostly upstairs, The Telegraph reported at the time, adding notes from the scene:
Charity Harris stood in the street with more than a dozen other people waiting for news about the fire. Many were crying and talking on cell phones. Harris said she had known Jackson since high school, and the two went to the same church, New Hope Baptist on Burton Avenue. The women had talked on the phone Thursday night. Harris said she had called Jackson to talk about church. “We were laughing and talking,” she said. “She was a person who always kept people laughing.” Harris sent Jackson a text message about 8:30 a.m. Friday. Jackson didn’t respond.
Tara Grinstead
Grinstead vanished from her home in Ocilla in Irwin County in the fall of 2005.
The investigation for years turned up little as to what had become of her.
But in early 2017, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation received a tip and that February the authorities announced a pair of arrests.
Perhaps no disappearance in modern state history has attracted more media attention than the vanishing of Grinstead, a former beauty queen and high school history teacher.
Grinstead’s disappearance was the subject of the first season of “Up and Vanished,” a popular true crime podcast hosted by Payne Lindsey.
Sabrina Long
For nearly three decades the mystery surrounding the disappearance of 19-year-old Sabrina Long remained a Macon mystery.
And plenty of questions remain, but in late 2018 some answers began to emerge with an arrest in the case.
Melinda McSwain, a former Southwest High schoolmate of Long’s was jailed in October 2018 in connection with Long’s August 1991 kidnapping. McSwain, 47, has since been indicted on felony and malice murder charges.
Long was last seen at a house on Ashland Drive below Rocky Creek Road in Macon where she lived with her stepfather. Her remains have never been found.
Exactly what led investigators to arrest McSwain, a motel housekeeper who for years has lived in Coffee County in south Georgia, remains unclear. McSwain has been held at the Bibb jail without bond for more than a year now.
At a bond hearing in February, details emerged that McSwain was linked to one of Long’s neighbors back in 1991, a boy named Keith Loyd, who was also a Southwest High schoolmate of Long’s. In the early ‘90s, Loyd lived with his parents a few doors away from Long and her stepfather.
On Sept. 25, 2017, Loyd was struck by a freight train in what authorities have declared a suicide along some railroad tracks in downtown Macon. At the February hearing, McSwain’s lawyer mentioned an apparent suicide note that Loyd left.
“One of the other people involved in this case is deceased,” the lawyer, Gregory Bushway, said, “and apparently he left some letter indicating his responsibility in [the Long case], maybe indicating that Miss McSwain may have participated in this.”
Prosecutor Dorothy Hull later revealed that McSwain’s own words implicated her: “The defendant has given multiple statements to law enforcement in which she admits being involved in the kidnapping of Sabrina, and she has admitted being involved in her murder.”
Long was last seen alive the night of Aug. 14, 1991, when her boyfriend dropped her off at her stepdad’s place. She called her mom sometime around midnight and mentioned that she was going to see Loyd, her neighbor and friend. Loyd, Sabrina had said, wanted her to help him with a birthday gift for his mother.
“Sabrina told her mother that something seemed strange about Keith’s request,” Hull said, “and Sabrina said she would call her mom back after she talked to Keith (Loyd.)”
But Sabrina never called back.
Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.
This story was originally published December 30, 2019 at 5:00 AM.