As friends and family recently gathered in a storefront church to memorialize Russell and Shirley Dermond, a deputy with the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department dutifully recorded the tag number of each of the cars parked outside.
It is a task unlikely to produce any new leads in a bedeviling mystery that, according to the lead investigator, is not much closer to being solved today than it was exactly one year ago. That’s when neighbors found the decapitated body of 88-year-old Russell Dermond inside the garage of the couple’s home in Reynolds Plantation, a gated community located on Lake Oconee, about 80 miles southeast of Atlanta.
Ten days later, fishermen recovered the body of 87-year-old Shirley Dermond near Wallace Dam in Lake Oconee. Her husband’s head remains missing.
“We are still aggressively pursuing anything that’s remotely viable,” said Howard Sills, now in his 20th year as Putnam’s sheriff, emphasizing ‘remotely.’ “And we’re casting a wide net.”
With so little to go on, Sills is discounting no lead, even those that strain credibility.
Some believe terrorists were responsible, or maybe a religious cult, though as the sheriff points out, “When those people kill someone, they want everyone to know it.”
While Sills has identified a “person of interest,” he cautioned that shouldn’t be interpreted to mean a suspect. Investigators have interviewed him twice.
There “seems to be no motive. There’s no reason he’d be involved in this,” said Sills, a widely respected lawman who serves as president of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association.
“He wasn’t truthful about some things,” the sheriff continued. “And he knows I know that.”
There have been more concrete developments, namely “a valuable piece of forensic evidence” that gives him hope. He asked The Atlanta Journal-Constitution not to disclose specifics of that evidence so as not to tip off the perpetrators.
The new information is unlikely to lead to any arrests but could prove valuable to prosecutors if the culprit or culprits are ever apprehended.
The killers, he believes, were driven by personal animus, perhaps their own, perhaps on behalf of someone else.
“I am convinced that the people who killed the Dermonds knew the Dermonds,” Sills said. “They knew the house to some extent. They’d been there before.”
But there are contradictions to almost every theory that’s been developed.
For instance, the clinical way in which Russell Dermond was beheaded would seemingly indicate the work of a professional. But the haphazard way in which his wife’s body was disposed of, weighed down by a pair of 30-pound concrete blocks, doesn’t point to a contract killing.
“A professional assassin shoots you in the head with a .22-magnum,” Sills said. “They don’t beat a woman with a bat, or whatever she was beaten with, then tie her down with inadequate anchoring.”
FBI profilers haven’t fared much better narrowing down the person or persons who might be responsible. They told Sills to be on the lookout for a gun and knife enthusiast.
“That eliminates just about no one, at least in this part of the country,” Sills said.
David Key, the Dermonds’ pastor, said most Putnam residents refuse to believe someone local could be responsible.
“There seems to be a broad understanding that no one in this community could be that depraved,” Key said. “This kind of evil seems very un-American.”
People in the community aren’t so much afraid as they are haunted, said the pastor.
“Normally, we solve murders here,” said Key, adding that support for Sills remains firm.
The sheriff said even though the case has presented obvious challenges from the start, he is certain he will find the culprits.
“I knew it was going to be a difficult case because the head wasn’t there,” he said. Decapitations are rare in the U.S., no more than three of four per year, he said. Sills had one such incident years ago, though that beheading was performed more as a matter of convenience.
“And that was only because the killers were two lazy bastards who dug a round hole and couldn’t fit the body in there,” the sheriff said.
He’s focused much of his attention to the dead couple’s past, from their financial records to Russell Dermond’s professional life, first as an executive with a New York clock manufacturer, then as the owner of several fast food chain restaurants in metro Atlanta before retiring 20 years ago.
Sills has yet to find anyone with a significant beef against him, at least the kind that would drive someone to murder.
“It’s almost impossible to process,” eldest son Keith Dermond, who lives in Jacksonville, told The AJC last winter. He did not respond to a recent request for comment. “We all have our theories, but none of them make sense.”
Some have speculated that the Dermonds’ children may be involved, perhaps driven by a financial need. But each had verifiable alibis at the time when their parents were killed, and Sills said they’ve been cooperative throughout his investigation.
The circumstances of their mother’s death also point away from any financial motive, at least on their children’s behalf. The couple were each other’s executors, Sills said, and it seems the killers did not intend for Shirley Dermond’s body to be found. As long as she was missing, her assets would remain frozen.
But money could still play a factor in Dermonds’ deaths, even though no valuables were stolen from their 3,500 square-foot home, which was sold Friday for $760,000.
“They may have expected to find something that wasn’t there,” Sills said. He could’ve just as well been describing his investigation.
The search for the Dermonds’ killers has consumed the gruff but genial sheriff, who canceled a long-planned European vacation because “it just didn’t feel right, not with this thing still unresolved.” He finds little time for fishing or reading, two reliable refuges from the demands of his job.
Still, he remains determined, trusting a gut guided by four decades of police experience.
“I’ve never worked on a murder case that didn’t get solved,” he said. “But, if you had told me a year ago I’d still be working this investigation, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
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