Possible clues unearthed last year may help cops find suspect in Dermond murders at Oconee
On Friday, eight years to the day that investigators began probing the grisly deaths of Shirley and Russell Dermond, the county sheriff hunting their still-at-large killer or killers revealed that a potential lead could provide a crucial break in the near-decade-cold case.
Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills told The Telegraph last May that he and his investigators were “trying to obtain data of a highly technical nature that I believe will be fruitful. ... I’ve obtained some of it and I have reason to believe that when I obtain the rest of the data and sort it out that it may well lead me to a suspect or suspects in this case.”
That information has, of late, become available.
Sills told The Telegraph on Friday that the possible lead is “not a silver bullet for sure, but it’s something we’re gonna really look into.”
Though he declined to divulge the exact nature of what investigators are examining, the sheriff said, “We have acquired data from telecommunications devices that were in the areas of the Dermond home and where Mrs. Dermond’s body was recovered.”
He said investigators were “now analyzing data to see if we can identify persons who were in the proximity of both locations at the time we suspect the murders occurred.”
Sills declined to say whether the lead involves cellphone data, but such measures, which are now commonly used by law enforcement officials, would not be an unlikely avenue to try.
The investigation into the Dermond slayings began the morning of May 6, 2014, when Russell Dermond’s decapitated body was found lying in a puddle of blood inside his closed carport.
Russell Joseph “Russ” Dermond, 88, had last been seen on May 2, 2014, the day before that year’s Kentucky Derby. A neighbor had invited the Dermonds to a Derby party, but they never showed up. Friends of the couple grew concerned.
After not hearing from the Dermonds for a few days, the friends went to check on the pair at their lakefront house that is nestled in a wooded cove on Carolyn Drive.
The 3,200-square-foot, $1 million home in Great Waters subdivision, lies just under 10 miles due south of Interstate 20 and a dozen or so miles northeast of downtown Eatonton.
The body of Shirley Wilcox Dermond, who was 87, turned up May 16, 2014, 10 days after her husband’s. Her body had been weighed down with concrete blocks but surfaced in about 90 feet of water, tangled in treetops just below the surface.
It was found by fishermen. The spot where her body, which had not been decapitated, was discovered is about 5 miles down the lake from the home the Dermonds, New Jersey natives, had retired to about a decade and a half prior.
Autopsies revealed that the Dermonds, who’d been married for 68 years, died of head wounds, but exactly how or what they were killed with is unknown.
Investigators have since scoured the couple’s financial and other records for clues, but so far nothing has helped. Russell Dermond, once an avid golfer, had retired from corporate life in the Northeast in the late 1980s and moved to Georgia to run a chain of Atlanta-area fast-food restaurants.
Information from Telegraph archives contributed to this report.