New evidence discovered in recent days in the mysterious, still-unsolved slayings of Russell and Shirley Dermond, a Lake Oconee husband and wife whose gruesome killings shocked the region a decade ago, has injected a long-awaited jolt of energy into the hunt for a suspect.
Tuesday, the sheriff in Putnam County, where the deaths happened in early May 2014, received word that DNA trace evidence had been found by a forensics laboratory in Utah.
Sheriff Howard Sills, in February, hand-delivered several items of potential evidence to the lab. At least one of those items, a piece of clothing belonging to Russell Dermond, who was decapitated, was found to contain DNA from an unknown individual.
Sills told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the discovery involved so-called “touch DNA” that could have been left by an assailant. “I don’t know that criminals at the time would have been concerned with touch DNA,” he said. The technique can detect miniscule samples of skin cells left on an item that has been casually touched.
The sheriff was quick to note, however, that no suspect has been identified and that further testing is underway.
“It’s the best evidence we have developed in 10 years,” Sills said Wednesday.
On May 6, 2014, Russell Dermond, 88, was found dead in the carport of his $1 million home in the Great Waters subdivision, a gated golfing and boating enclave 60 miles southeast of Atlanta.
His wife, 87, was nowhere to be found. Ten days later, Shirley Dermond’s body turned up in the lake, about 5 miles by boat from the couple’s house. Her body had been weighed down with concrete blocks, but it became tangled in underwater trees and a pair of fishermen spotted it.
In the years since the slayings, viable leads have been scant to nonexistent.
Speaking of this week’s development, the sheriff said, “I am ever-optimistic that this will lead somewhere.”
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