April 18, 2022 • 41 mins
After seven years, the murders of Russell Dermond, 88 and his 87-year-old wife Shirley, remain unsolved. Friends go to check on the couple days after the Dermonds did not show up for a planned Kentucky Derby party. The headless body of Russell Dermond is found in the garage. Police say there is no forced entry to the home, nor is the house ransacked. Shirley Dermond's body is found 5 miles away, murdered and floating in a lake. Her body has been weighted down by cement blocks. Today on Body Bags, forensics expert and professor Joseph Scott Morgan explains what possible evidence may have been left behind.
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. You work your entire
life trying to build something out of nothing. Now, you
even survived World War Two as a decorated veteran of
the Navy, come home, marry your sweetheart and stayed married
(00:33):
for decades, and from the ground up you build restaurant
franchises and you become quite successful. And after all that time,
you've built something that you can look back on with pride.
You've got a family to four kids, and then you
decide to retire, and boyd where you retired to is
a beautiful place. But that location where Russell and Shirley
(00:56):
Dermott retired to has but I'm a benchmark for absolute
horror and it ends up and one of the most
notorious unsolved double homicides in the history of the state
of Georgia. Today we're gonna talk about the Dermot Birds.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this his body bags. Well.
(01:24):
Jackie Howard's back here with me today. She's the executive
producer of Crime Stories Nancy Grace. Jackie, won't you to
tell us about the dermonts year old Russell Dermond and
his wife seven year old Shirley Dermott had been married
for decades, as you said, Joe, sixty eight years. They
lived in Reynolds Plantation in a three thousand sciftfoot house.
(01:48):
That's a gated community on the banks of Lake o'conee
in Georgia. It's about eighty miles southeast of Atlanta. As
you said, Russell Dermont was in the restaurant business for years.
This couple was very socially active in their community. In fact,
they were supposed to attend a Kentucky Derby party and
(02:08):
didn't show up. After several more days passed and neighbors
and friends had not heard from the Dermans, they decided
to conduct their own welfare check. They went to the
home and entered through a screen porch where Russell Derman
typically watched television. Everything seemed fine, Russell was not there.
They decided to check out the garage to look for cars,
(02:30):
and there they found a grisome sight. They discovered Russell
Derman's body slumped down behind one of the couple's corps.
Shirley Derman was nowhere to be found. Cases like this
have always just absolutely sent a chill up my spine.
And the reason why is that as death investigators were
always observing the abnormal in context of the normal. Can
(02:52):
you imagine being a neighbor in this beautiful, big colic setting.
I mean, these homes are worth just an astronomical amount
of money and you walk in and you find some
kind of horror show like this, and that's what happened
to this fellow that discovered Russell Derman's remains. And you
know when you kind of set the stage when you
see the Derman's home, it kind of sits up on
(03:14):
a bluff or a knowle, overlooking beautiful lake of Coney,
which is very deep. It's actually a river that's been
damned up, and uh a lot of people fish their
ski big recreation area, and you're you have all these
multimillion dollar homes that kind of surround this place. And
the interesting thing about it, you know, when wealthy people
(03:34):
live in areas like this, they're getting something for their money.
They don't just want maybe opulence, they want security. And
there's only one way by roads you can get into
this place. And that's a central point of access, a
guard shack, if you will. When the police were called,
the first thing that they had to look at and
in trying to discover what happened to this family is
(03:55):
point of the entry. This murder did not seem to
be a raw break gone wrong. There was no force
to entry into the house. The house had not been ransacked,
nothing had been stolen. So what's the first thing that
you do. Well, you're you're gonna walk around the perimeter
of the place. You want to see if anybody has
knocked out windows. You know, if there's windows that are
(04:16):
raised for instance, Um, you want to see if the
doors the points of entry, you know, standard entry, not windows,
but you know, any kind of door. If there's a
ground level basement door that has access to the exterior
and an upper main door, uh, maybe a side door
where the garage is, you want to account for those
and see if the door locks have been jimmied in
(04:39):
any way, or if someone has actually kicked the door in.
You know, lots of times in forensics we look for
things like tool marks on the door, on the door
facings and that sort of thing, or compromises of the
of the door knob, or maybe even footprints on the
door where someone has pounded away with their foot. We
look to see if the frame of the door is
intact or is it Leonard And that happens with great frequency,
(05:02):
but there was no indication of that at the scene,
and you know, that kind of heightens the mystery. Year
So you mentioned that there's only one way in to
this gated community, Actually there's two. They could have come
by water. So if no one was noted a stranger,
someone that was out of place coming in the gated community,
(05:25):
does that mean then that they came by water And
how does that impact an investigation? Yeah, I think it's
quite possible. A matter of fact, I think there's a
higher probability that's that's how this home was accessed, because
there's no indication, there's no investigative marks along the way
where they say that there is a specific vehicle that
(05:46):
drove up to this house. And think about coming in
by boat. You can do it kind of stealthily. You know,
maybe you're running your engine, for instance, out in the
open water, but then you cut it and you began
to paddle in. If you've got a couple of people
manning the boat, that's certainly easy to accomplish. So you're
not gonna necessarily leave as much evidence behind. There's obviously
(06:08):
not gonna be tire tracks left behind, you can get
access to the to the dock. If it's dark outside,
you can move with great stealth to gain access and listen.
If you're inside the house and you don't hear a
car pull up, you're completely taken out of wares. No
boat's not gonna make a lot of noise if the
engine is killed before you arrive at the dock, you
(06:30):
just kind of glide in there. You secure the boat,
you step off the boat, and you've got this evil
intent in mind. But you know, it's like the old adage,
why why do bank robbers rob the bank? Well, that's
because that's where the money is. And when you see
a home like this that you can easily see when
you're driving down the main channel of this lake, you
(06:50):
can actually look up there and see it, and wouldn't
it be a plumb prize And you think, hey, I
bet those people have money there or whatever the motivation
was behind it. But I tell you this, just like
we said, there was no signs of forced injury. Nothing's
missing out of the home, and for me, that's a
huge red flag. So unless there is evidence left at
(07:13):
the dock, the dock was rammed, somebody was hurt and
there was blood. Because there is water and dirt, you know,
you're gonna have mud. Somebody may have stepped into the shoreline.
So in absence of all of those things, Joe, it
would seem that you are reliant then on either eyewitnesses
or video witnesses. Yeah, and then even more peripheral to that,
(07:38):
you know, you you would be relying upon ear witnesses
as well. And that's something that people don't think about
a lot. You know, what did you hear you know,
at that particular point in time? You know, because I
mean how many how many times have we heard stories
about people that are killed and someone that didn't actually
see it. They'll say, hey, I heard gunshots, all right,
or I heard somebody screaming, you know, or I heard
(08:01):
a car pull up. So many times that's a that's
a point that we can return to. But the most
essential factor involved in this is that even if if
it's something that you see, or if it's something that
you hear, at what point in time did you hear it? Because,
as you know, the most valuable commodity that we have
(08:22):
in forensic investigations is in fact minutes, seconds, hours, days, weeks, months,
that time element is what we deal in. That's our currency,
if you will. So you have to be able to
match it up. And to this point there's there's not
You don't have either one of these things, you know,
the first time that there's an indication that something is up.
(08:47):
Other than the fact that they didn't attend this Kentucky
Derby party, um is the fact that this genoman walked
in the house and he found Russell Norham there lying
on the floor in his garage. Other than the fact
that ear witnesses as you call them, set the timeline,
does it really give you anything else? Because if they
(09:08):
did not hear anyone screaming, they can say, oh I
heard a boat, but you're on a lake. What does
that really tell you? Yeah, it's like living next to
the highway, you know, Oh I heard a car. Really wow,
that's really gonna be useful, you know, it's I'm not
trying to be snarky, but it's just it's just the
fact that, um, you know, you got as you put
you know, you've got boats running around all the time,
(09:28):
people night fish. You know, if this is when this
event occurred, you know, it wouldn't be anything to hear
you know, some guy in a in a bass boat
and running up and down the lake, you know, and
those engines are quite loud. But if it was something smaller,
say like a tiny skiff with a smaller boat motor,
or they had an electric motor, that you're not going
to hear at all. Um. You know, that goes back
(09:49):
to this issue of stealth. So you really left at
at you know, with this case, you're really left, as
an investigator, scratch in your head saying, I don't have
any kind of whit us at all to these events.
The only thing that is really left behind are these forensics.
You know that what what are the bodies telling us?
What is the scene telling us? And we've already you know,
(10:11):
kind of talked about the scene. Now there's no signs
or force and entry or struggle. You know, we say
that all the time on the news and whatnot, and
we say it in our reports as well, you know,
because it's one of the things that we look for
if we have some kind of horrific crime that has
taken place, we want to know, well, was there a
fight that ensued? Youve got toppled furniture. Do you have
anything here that really gives us an indication that there
(10:33):
was some kind of problem that had happened where they've
taken unawares for instance, where they compliant in in in
this particular case. And you know, so the investigators don't
really have a lot to work on, and I think
that that's the reason that this case is still unsolved
to this day. Jackie. And the things that we're talking
(10:53):
about right now, Joe, the entry from the water, the
lack of evidence, the earwitnesses, the video witness is are
so significant because Russell Dermott is dead, but Shirley Dermont
is missing. Yeah, that's the case. And of course if
you're an investigator and look, they were able to size
(11:16):
up pretty quickly from the neighbors and witnesses. You know,
these two are a pair. You know, you generally don't
see one without the other. They go around, he said,
they're very social. They have friends that live in this community.
I think that Shirley was involved in bridge. Russell used
to play golf, but he had he had stopped doing
that and he didn't really fish. They got rid of
their boats, so he's in that home. She's in that home.
(11:38):
When they go out, you know, they're generally together. They
are a couple, So that's that's indicative of the lifestyle.
You know that they had lad and it gives you
an ideas from a behavior standpoint of what you would
expect in this kind of dynamic, in this environment, that
they were probably there together whenever this horrific thing took place.
(11:59):
But when the investigators showed up, they're working assumption at
that moment time is yeah, we have we have Mr
Dermot deceased here in the garage, but Sirley is nowhere
to be found. And we go back to this theme.
You know what I had mentioned this This house is big.
It's three thousand square foot home that's occupied by two
people in a very very wealthy area. Your default position,
(12:23):
all of a sudden is, well, maybe somebody snatched her.
Maybe they've kidnapped her and taken off with her. And
but if that's the case, there's nobody falling us. There's
no letters, there's no note left behind to say that
these are our ransom demands. That's not happening. All they
know is that she is seemingly just vanished into thin air.
(13:04):
When you have no witnesses, sometimes the the dead have
to be relied upon to bear witness and give testimony
to all the remains, and in this case, all we
had was Russell Dermot's body. We've talked about the complexities
of this investigation already with no sign of struggle. But Joe,
what we do have is a body in the garage,
(13:27):
Russell Dermont. Joe. Russell was decapitated. His head has never
been found. How do we do this investigation that begs
so many questions? Jackie. You know, when you begin to
think about a body, apps and a head um, you know,
first off, what's what's the rationale? And I think that
for many people, investigators included, when you look at a
(13:48):
case like this, you think that you've got to some
type of psychopathic madman that's running around the countryside. And
that's kind of our default position because it's such a
horrific act. However, that's that's not always the case when
it comes to the dismemberment of remains are partial dismemberment
in this case, Remember, his head is the only part
(14:10):
of his body that is missing. Everything else is intact.
And with Russell's remains, there was evidence, at least in
my mind, after reading and reviewing the autopsy reports that
his head was taken, and I think that we need
to check this box first. His head was taken postmortem.
Of course, we have any mortum and postmortem post mortem
(14:31):
means after death. And the reason I think that is
that per the information that was relayed from the friends
of pathologists, there are no what we referred to as
focal areas of hemorrhage in the tissue of the neck.
And also it's interesting to note that when the investigators
got to the scene and they saw his his body
(14:54):
that at the scene it has been consistently described that
there was only a tiny bit of blood that was
immediately adjacent to what was remaining of his neck. Now,
if this had been say an event where they had
taken a knife or some sharp object and cut Russell
(15:16):
Derman's throat on the way to a decapitation, we do
know this that there would have been blood everywhere. You
say why, the reason is is that we've discussed before
on bodybacks how vascular the head is. It requires a
tremendous amount of blood and you would have to go
through uh, you'd have to go through the juggler veins,
(15:37):
you'd have to go through the carotid arteries, all the
while the heart is pumping until of course, life ceases.
But all the while you're just you will have an
uh an area that's literally flooded with blood. That's not
the case. So whoever did this, whoever did this, took
time with his remains and took his head off. And
(15:59):
if folks at home will kind of consider their spine,
uh their neck in particular the vertebral bodies that support
our neck. If you will go from the base of
your skull, let's see one. Let's C two, C three,
C four, C five count down. And his head was
removed at the C five level, and the doctors described
(16:24):
that they went all the way through all of the tissue,
the soft tissue again with no hemorrhage. And they have apparently,
and this is important, transsected the C five verebra. And
when they say transsected, that means that they didn't go
through the disk, they actually cut through bone. And from
an evidentially standpoint, that's a very y important Jackie. So
(16:49):
at autopsy, one of the things that's done when you
have any kind of dismemberment case is that, as horrible
as it is to be part of an investigation like this,
you as a forensic scientists, you have a particular skill
set that you can bring to bear that can actually
identify what the instrument was that brought about this decapitation.
(17:13):
And it's important because they said that the Sea five
was actually transsected, so that means that you're gonna have
marks on the bone. So anybody that's listening to this,
if you have a saw in your home, I want
you to think about the way the teeth look on
saw or even a serrated knife. You know, they have
a very specific pattern. And even if a saw or
(17:33):
serrated knife is made by the same manufacturer, that pattern
is going to change over the course of the use
of that instrument. It will slightly change and it will
make the signature, the tool mark signature left behind unique
to that particular instrument. So at autopsy I can almost
guarantee what they had done is where that bone was
(17:57):
transsected that Sea five. Keep that in mind, Sea five
the a cervical vertebra. They would have completely dissected out
the remainder of that Sea five vertebra, and then they
took it and they placed it into a container with
what we call formula. The formulae is kind of like
(18:17):
from aldehyde. It's a preservative, and they're going to hang
on to that jack. And let me tell you why,
because at some point in time, if they're able to
find out who perpetrated this crime, get wind of it,
if they can put their hands on that tool that
they took his head off with, they can have a
(18:38):
tool market examiner look at that remaining bone and compare
that to the instrument that was used by these perpetrators
to decapitate Russell Dermot. Okay, I got two very specific questions,
were you, Joe, First, what is transsected? When you hear
this term transsected, trans means going across, So they're actually
cutting across the bone. Almost if you think about sawing
(19:02):
a piece of wood, Okay, you're not going to cut
it lengthwise, You're gonna cut it across the grain, essentially.
And if you'll just imagine that whoever was doing this,
whoever was doing this, was essentially sawing more than likely
on the back of the neck because you get you
get quicker access to those bony prominences back there that
(19:24):
support and hold it literally hold the head in place.
So you want to be able to take the head
off at that point because you can remove it and
then do whatever it is that you plan on doing
with Okay, my second question is, as you were talking
about the C one, two, three, four, and five, I'm
reaching back to the back of my head in my
neck trying to feel and figure out what you're talking about.
(19:47):
What should I be feeling? How am I going to
identify and know what you're talking about here? It will
walk me through knowing where that is. So our head
is actually supported and I think we've mentioned this before
on other episodes, but our head is actually reported by
C one otherwise known as the Atlas. And people that
don't know what the Atlas is, it's it refers back
(20:09):
to Greek mythology. I think one of the earliest entities
within Greek mythology who was Atlas. And you see these
images of this gigantic man holding up the earth on
his back, and he's the Atlas, He's the supporter. So
SEE one actually works as a support body. It supports
our head. I'm not going to be able to feel
(20:32):
see one correct. Well, if you go up and you
press tightly enough, you can go up to the base
of your skull, the very base where your skull connects
onto onto the spine and if you press hard enough,
you can actually feel it right there. But you need
to count down essentially approximately every two inches you're gonna
come to a new vertebral body. So and that's kind
(20:55):
of a you know, I'm kind of a big guy,
So I'm kind of moving down the back of my
neck right now and I'm counting down one and a
half to two inches every moment. And you can feel
because there's a little depression that's where your disk actually sits.
So you get down from one to two, two to three,
three to four, four to five, and you're right on
top of it. So what the doctor is saying is
(21:16):
that instead of going through that kind of depressed soft
area where a disk is, people here about getting a
slip disc. It's kind of cartilaginist. It's softer than the bone.
This individual that cut through uh Russell Derman's neck actually
went through a bony prominence, you know, actually transsected or
cut into the bone. And they made a big mistake
(21:39):
when they did that because every time they would drag
that saw across that specific area, the teeth of whatever
this instrument is, and they've never been very specific about
it is leaving behind definitive markings on the surface of
that mam. So microscopically, if you can get your hands
on whatever bladed was that generated this and compare it
(22:02):
microscopically to those marks that are left on the bone,
you can have a tie back. The question is can
they put that instrument into the hands of an individual.
And it's not just the specific instrument, but it's also
it's also a class or family they of of instruments. Say,
for instance, they can look at and say, well, this
is this wasn't a limb saw, this was a carpenter saw,
(22:25):
or this was a hack saw, or for all I know,
it could be a circular saw. But with that, it's
another question that's asked because even when you're sawing, even
when you're doing this, this would have left behind quite
a bit of blood just in this action, and not
just that but bone, dust, tissue, that sort of thing.
(22:45):
So I really wonder if they hadn't placed him on
something in order to facilitate this, like a piece of
cloth or shirts or something like that, and then gather
things up and took that with them as well, because remember,
his head's missing, Jackie, so is a owne bone. Joe
regardless of where it is in the body. The bones
in the neck, the C one, C two are smaller
(23:08):
just in general from the size. And we've talked about
it linked dismemberment, about how really difficult it is to
do that. Is it any different when you're trying to
do it at the neck? You know, I would opind
that it's probably a bit more simple because if you're
doing it posteriorly, which we all know now because we've
talked about this on on body bags, anatomically posterior means
(23:31):
from the rear, okay, the backside, and so h the
as I stated earlier, when you begin to kind of
fill your cervical spine, it's very close to the surface.
It's not like, say, for instance, if we went to
the leg, to the upper leg where the femur is
our big thigh bone. You've got to go through a
lot of soft tissue to get down to the femur.
I mean a lot, and it's a mess when you
(23:53):
do that. But in the cervical region, those bony prominences
or those those bony ructures, and they are very very close.
Now I can tell you this. You were talking about
differences in bone, there will be bone density issues, because
every bone has a structure in and of itself. But
if you were to take a look at bone um microscopically,
(24:17):
bone is bone, you know you're gonna see it, and
you can't necessarily pick a point of origin. I'm sure
that there are some pathology types and anatomy types that
would probably argue with me on that, But for our
purposes here, bone is in fact bone, It's just can
you get access to it? And this is more important.
Do you have the tools and the knowledge to be
able to pull this off? To facilitate it? What's your
(24:39):
level of nerve here? I think about that, you know,
I mean, how many people do we know that are
wandering around the general population that have actually decapitated somebody?
Just let that sink in just for a second. Now
we get so numb to all the violence in our world,
but just just for a moment, pause and think about
who out there would have the nerves of Steve All
(25:01):
to take someone's life and then not flee, but stay
around long enough to acquire instruments or have instruments to
take a head off with. And I got one more
interesting little aside that I don't know how many other
people have really addressed in Russell Derman's death, and that
(25:22):
is they don't really have a lot of injuries to
his body. But there's one that really stands out to
me that is actually not post mortem, not post mortem,
it's anti mortum. And the doctor makes note of it.
And if everybody will take their right hand and extend
it out and consider your hand just for a moment
(25:44):
and look at your index finger. That's the finger that's
right adjacent to your thumb. Right there. Russell Derman sustained
a crushing injury, a crushing injury Jackie, to his right
index finger. The doctor says specifically that it is a
him a ragic injury, and that means that this is
(26:05):
an anti mortem injury. This can only occur in life,
so that means that his heart was still pumping and
it literally crushed his finger. Now to me, you begin
to talk about things like this and why would his
finger be crushed? Well, why would it? And I really
(26:26):
wonder if people were not trying to exact information from him.
Maybe it was information relative to money. Do you have
money here? You're gonna pay pay the price with pain
here if you don't give us the information and they
crushed his finger in life. Imagine not painful that was.
And maybe he told him something that they didn't want
(26:48):
to hear, and it's at that moment that took his life.
So there's one other fascinating piece of evidence that came
out in the police investigation into Russell Derman's death. Even
though he was to appitated, they found gunshot residue on
his collar. Yeah, they did. And how in the world
are you going to have gunshot residue deposition UM arising
(27:14):
on your collar and to say that it's on the collar,
I guess, I guess you could say that it is um.
It could be any area in the collar. It could
be posterior, anterior, it could be lateral. They just simply
say um on the surface of the collar. And that
has led many people to think that the rationale behind
decapitating Russell Dermott was that he had been executed, possibly
(27:38):
with a single gunshot wound of the head. Now this
raises another problem. You know that you have taken this
guy's life potentially with gunfire. You have enough smarts about
you to know if that bullet is recovered that they
could in fact pair that up with a weapon out there.
(27:58):
So what do you do? Know your default position is, well,
the simplest thing I can do is I can't. I
certainly can't do some type of postmortem surgery on him
and removed his bullet. May have to take his head
because in taking his head, I know that I'm going
to take that projectile. Over the years that I've covered
(28:39):
this case, I've often wondered what was going on with
Shirley Dermott and when the police first arrived there, she
was nowhere to be found, And it has often really
bothered me. I think about my own wife, you know,
what state of mind, what she had been in, what
was going on with her? Where did they find her?
Joe investigators trolled the lake, but to no avail. They
(29:00):
did not find Shirley's body. They also searched the wooded
area surrounding the home no body. But on the sixteenth
of May, which was approximately a little over two weeks later,
Shirley Derman's bloated body was discovered floating on Lake a
Coney by two fishermen. It was about five miles away
(29:21):
from the couple's home. There are several important points in
the discovery of Shirley's body, Joe, So let's take them
one by one. First, is the fact that when Shirley
Dermot's body was found, it was obvious that the intention
was for her body to not be found. Two large
cinder blocks had been tied to her body that way
(29:44):
to thirty pounds each. Wouldn't sixty pounds be enough to
keep a body submerged. No, no, it would not, particularly
as bodies begin to blow, which always happens. I mean,
it happens, um you know, people talk about this all
the time. I can confirm for you. As decomposition develops, uh,
(30:10):
the body begins to swell with gas. And when bodies,
when you have bodies that are found in water, the
body essentially becomes almost like a a booie. It will
float to the top. The air, you know, forces it
up until the body in some way is punctured and
the air is released. Then it can sometimes um re
(30:33):
submerge at that point in time. But you know, you
mentioned an important part here, Jackie, is the fact that
these blocks were with her body, and they weren't just
with her body. And this is this is ghastly, It's
absolutely ghastly. These blocks were actually secure to her ankles.
(30:53):
So if you think of the way a balloon looks,
where we hold a balloon by string in our end
and then the balloon floats high above us um, that's
similar to this configuration. These blocks were actually secured to
Shirley Derman's ankles with what's referred to as para cord,
(31:14):
and para cord. You see it in the military a lot.
You also see people that do camping securing things. It's
a woven nylon rope that has very specific pattern to it,
and it's a multicolor growth that they used, and they
all have different strengths, you know, the kind of weight
that they can support and this sort of thing. But
with her, it was bound wrapped around her several times
(31:40):
at her ankles. I mean, somebody really took the time
to make sure that buddy wasn't going anywhere. That in
itself is very significant, Joe, because we know that the
body was found about five miles from the couple's home.
The current in this lake, even though you talked about
there's a channel in this lake that's deep, the current
(32:02):
in this lake, given that it is a lake, there's
not gonna be a current really, So we're not talking
about the body drifting five miles from the home, so
it's very obvious that they moved her body, intending it
at this distance to never be found. Yeah, you're right,
and there's been several people that have talked about this
from the perspective of damn releases. Now, for anybody that's
(32:24):
never been on a lake where there's been a damn release,
it's something powerful when the water is released out of
the dam into the lower lake, which in this case
is Lake Sinclair says below Lake o'coney. It's a tremendous
amount of force, but it's still not enough to drag
her body with this amount of weight on it through
this channel and then deposit it where it was, Because
(32:45):
that's that's even more interesting here, Jackie. That's why I
believe that whoever did this had a great familiarity with
this area, because not only was she literally five miles downstream,
but her body you had to make in order to
get to the location when she was found, and she
was found by fisherman, you had to make a sharp
(33:05):
right hand turn off the main channel and go back
up into a cove. Jackie. It's almost if if people
at home will just kind of envision what a fish
hook looks like and the long stem of the fish
hook is the long axis. Pretend that's the channel, and
then it goes down, curves back up to the point.
That point on the fish hook is where the body
(33:27):
would have been found. So it would it, in my opinion,
at least the people would have had to have transported
her body to that location and pushed her off into
this area. I think one of the things they didn't
count on. Maybe they weren't so familiar with the depth
in this area, because when you combine the depth of
(33:48):
the water, maybe a damn release lack of rain. This
is you know, it's in the warm months, maybe the
water levels down just a wee bit, and then you
think about decomposition the body. Right, that's how these fishermen
noticed her in the water at that amount of time.
Can you imagine, can you actually imagine going out and
(34:08):
you're just going fishing for the day, You're just going fishing,
and suddenly you look down in the water and here's
this poor woman's body. It's been sitting there for a
protracted period of time. It's an absolute horse show. So
then we get to the autopsy. Joe Shirley Dermond was
killed by blunt force trauma, and the pathologist suspect that
(34:35):
it was caused by a hammer. What gave them those indications.
That's a very significant finding that the pathologist came up with.
I want to back up just a little bit, just
so that folks understand meantimes, when we're talking about homicides
involving females, we we always wonder if there's a sexual component,
and one of the things we look for is to
see the status of the clothing. That's actually how we
(34:57):
refer to it. I want you to know that Mrs
Derman remains. She was completely clothed. I mean she had
on everything from a floral patterned shirt. She still had
a brawn bright green pants, She had underpants on, even
had her socks on with her shoes with orthopedic inserts.
And this is kind of significant. She actually had two
(35:18):
breastpads in place. Did you know that she had undergone
a radical double missectomy, and so all of that was intact.
There was nothing to indicate that this was anything of
some kind of sexual nature, at least based upon the
clothing status. So when the doctor received the body at
the medical Examiner's office, he did a very very thorough
(35:40):
job of examining her, looked at the knots actually her
the rigging that came along with, you know, her body
being submerged actually entered entered the morgue with her. And
it's very interesting that when you begin to look at
the knots, this is what we referred to in forensics
as complex not tying, which means that somebody probably had
(36:03):
experienced tying nuts, working with rope and that sort of thing,
and to secure because her these these blocks were still
secure to her body. And one little side I don't
think that people may be aware of. Did you know
that these blocks had actually been painted red. These weren't
just like standard blocks that you would see at a
construction site. These things were red. And I found that
(36:25):
absolutely fascinating, you know. So that's another big piece of evidence.
And then talking about the the fatal injuries that she
had sustained. UM, the way the doctor actually describes these
there is um her death is actually related to what's
referred to specifically as blunt force trauma. But UM, she
(36:47):
was struck they think at least twice, maybe three times
with something that had a rounded, flat leading edge. UM.
And we we talked about this just previously in in
one of our other cases on bodybags, referring to a
claw hammer. You think about the end of a hammer.
(37:09):
A hammer, you know, has essentially the dimensions on the
business end of the hammer where it looks. It can
be the size of say the face of a quarter
if the quarters leaning flat. And so what happens is
when a skull is struck with a hammer. Did you
know that you can sustain a what's referred to as
(37:30):
a pattern injury there? Um, that is actually a circular
fracture underlying the pattern on the skin, and it it mirrors,
it mirrors the oncoming the oncoming hammers it strikes. This
is referred to as a depressed skull fracture where the
table external table of the skull actually collapses and it
drives in to the brain. Of course, this leads to
(37:54):
um huge hemorrhage um within the brain, and of course
the person winds up dying as a result. This particularly,
you began to think about how many times she was struck.
But this is a real act of violence. Um, This
is not like you know, even with Mr Dermott, we
think about him being shot. Um, if that is in
(38:15):
fact what had happened. Remember, we still don't have have
his head at this point. Um, that's kind of a
quick way to die when you think about it. But no, not, not,
not this Jackie. She was beaten multiple times with a hammer,
her skull actually collapsed in on her brain, and then
she was tied up post mortum. How do I know
that it was post mortem because where those bindings were
(38:39):
placed over her ankles and she was essentially anchored with
this destructure that they had created, there was no underlying
hemorrhage in those areas surrounding her her ankles. So it's
not like she had been tied up before death and
been questioned or anything like that. Her hands weren't bound,
it's just her ankles. So this was that was done
(39:00):
after death. They took their time in planning this, and
then you begin to think about, well they got in
a boat and drove five mills with this poor woman's body.
You know, where did all of this take place? Did
they kill her in the yard because there was no
blood in the house. They didn't find any blood that
I know of out in the yard. I wonder if
(39:20):
they brought in dogs to sniff for it. And if
you put her on a boat, and you kill her
on the boat, then dogs are not necessarily gonna be
able to track that area. You're not gonna have any
evidence of it. Did they take her out in the
middle of the lake and beat her to death with
a hammer and then drive the other the rest of
the distance and deposit her body weigh down stream in
(39:41):
this little cove where they thought that no one would
ever find her. Of course they did, And to this
day we still don't have any further answers. I said,
who did this? So, Joe, it's been seven years since
the Germans were murdered two thousand fourteen. We are still
no closer to finding out who did this? Will we
ever be? Think as time goes by, there's there's always
(40:02):
a possibility. I have to always hold out hope in
any case involving death. I mean, death is what I've
always dealt in as an investigator. But you know, at
this point, to this point, at least the forensics are done.
What's going to have to happen here is that the
public and the police are gonna have to come together
on this case, this unsolved case. This is going to
(40:24):
be heavily reliant upon shoe leather, as they say, you know,
still pressing every lead that you possibly can. And this
is one other thing that's kind of troubling to me
is that many of the people that lived near the
Dermans were aged, and it's not like, you know, you're
(40:47):
around a bunch of mid twenty somethings that are going
to be around for a few years that can still
offer up information. My my fear, I think is that
anybody that might have some kind of recollection as to
what they remember back all these years looking in the
rear view mirror, they still gonna be around to give
us further information or to highlight something, or to come
up with a new nugget of data that's going to
(41:09):
push this case forward. And that that's the one troubling
aspect with this. I'm just hoping that at some point
in time, somebody is going to say something that they
probably wish that they wouldn't have said in retrospect, but
it winds up unlocking the answers in this kid, I'm
(41:30):
Joseph Scott More and this is Body Backs
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. You work your entire
life trying to build something out of nothing. Now, you
even survived World War Two as a decorated veteran of
the Navy, come home, marry your sweetheart and stayed married
(00:33):
for decades, and from the ground up you build restaurant
franchises and you become quite successful. And after all that time,
you've built something that you can look back on with pride.
You've got a family to four kids, and then you
decide to retire, and boyd where you retired to is
a beautiful place. But that location where Russell and Shirley
(00:56):
Dermott retired to has but I'm a benchmark for absolute
horror and it ends up and one of the most
notorious unsolved double homicides in the history of the state
of Georgia. Today we're gonna talk about the Dermot Birds.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this his body bags. Well.
(01:24):
Jackie Howard's back here with me today. She's the executive
producer of Crime Stories Nancy Grace. Jackie, won't you to
tell us about the dermonts year old Russell Dermond and
his wife seven year old Shirley Dermott had been married
for decades, as you said, Joe, sixty eight years. They
lived in Reynolds Plantation in a three thousand sciftfoot house.
(01:48):
That's a gated community on the banks of Lake o'conee
in Georgia. It's about eighty miles southeast of Atlanta. As
you said, Russell Dermont was in the restaurant business for years.
This couple was very socially active in their community. In fact,
they were supposed to attend a Kentucky Derby party and
(02:08):
didn't show up. After several more days passed and neighbors
and friends had not heard from the Dermans, they decided
to conduct their own welfare check. They went to the
home and entered through a screen porch where Russell Derman
typically watched television. Everything seemed fine, Russell was not there.
They decided to check out the garage to look for cars,
(02:30):
and there they found a grisome sight. They discovered Russell
Derman's body slumped down behind one of the couple's corps.
Shirley Derman was nowhere to be found. Cases like this
have always just absolutely sent a chill up my spine.
And the reason why is that as death investigators were
always observing the abnormal in context of the normal. Can
(02:52):
you imagine being a neighbor in this beautiful, big colic setting.
I mean, these homes are worth just an astronomical amount
of money and you walk in and you find some
kind of horror show like this, and that's what happened
to this fellow that discovered Russell Derman's remains. And you
know when you kind of set the stage when you
see the Derman's home, it kind of sits up on
(03:14):
a bluff or a knowle, overlooking beautiful lake of Coney,
which is very deep. It's actually a river that's been
damned up, and uh a lot of people fish their
ski big recreation area, and you're you have all these
multimillion dollar homes that kind of surround this place. And
the interesting thing about it, you know, when wealthy people
(03:34):
live in areas like this, they're getting something for their money.
They don't just want maybe opulence, they want security. And
there's only one way by roads you can get into
this place. And that's a central point of access, a
guard shack, if you will. When the police were called,
the first thing that they had to look at and
in trying to discover what happened to this family is
(03:55):
point of the entry. This murder did not seem to
be a raw break gone wrong. There was no force
to entry into the house. The house had not been ransacked,
nothing had been stolen. So what's the first thing that
you do. Well, you're you're gonna walk around the perimeter
of the place. You want to see if anybody has
knocked out windows. You know, if there's windows that are
(04:16):
raised for instance, Um, you want to see if the
doors the points of entry, you know, standard entry, not windows,
but you know, any kind of door. If there's a
ground level basement door that has access to the exterior
and an upper main door, uh, maybe a side door
where the garage is, you want to account for those
and see if the door locks have been jimmied in
(04:39):
any way, or if someone has actually kicked the door in.
You know, lots of times in forensics we look for
things like tool marks on the door, on the door
facings and that sort of thing, or compromises of the
of the door knob, or maybe even footprints on the
door where someone has pounded away with their foot. We
look to see if the frame of the door is
intact or is it Leonard And that happens with great frequency,
(05:02):
but there was no indication of that at the scene,
and you know, that kind of heightens the mystery. Year
So you mentioned that there's only one way in to
this gated community, Actually there's two. They could have come
by water. So if no one was noted a stranger,
someone that was out of place coming in the gated community,
(05:25):
does that mean then that they came by water And
how does that impact an investigation? Yeah, I think it's
quite possible. A matter of fact, I think there's a
higher probability that's that's how this home was accessed, because
there's no indication, there's no investigative marks along the way
where they say that there is a specific vehicle that
(05:46):
drove up to this house. And think about coming in
by boat. You can do it kind of stealthily. You know,
maybe you're running your engine, for instance, out in the
open water, but then you cut it and you began
to paddle in. If you've got a couple of people
manning the boat, that's certainly easy to accomplish. So you're
not gonna necessarily leave as much evidence behind. There's obviously
(06:08):
not gonna be tire tracks left behind, you can get
access to the to the dock. If it's dark outside,
you can move with great stealth to gain access and listen.
If you're inside the house and you don't hear a
car pull up, you're completely taken out of wares. No
boat's not gonna make a lot of noise if the
engine is killed before you arrive at the dock, you
(06:30):
just kind of glide in there. You secure the boat,
you step off the boat, and you've got this evil
intent in mind. But you know, it's like the old adage,
why why do bank robbers rob the bank? Well, that's
because that's where the money is. And when you see
a home like this that you can easily see when
you're driving down the main channel of this lake, you
(06:50):
can actually look up there and see it, and wouldn't
it be a plumb prize And you think, hey, I
bet those people have money there or whatever the motivation
was behind it. But I tell you this, just like
we said, there was no signs of forced injury. Nothing's
missing out of the home, and for me, that's a
huge red flag. So unless there is evidence left at
(07:13):
the dock, the dock was rammed, somebody was hurt and
there was blood. Because there is water and dirt, you know,
you're gonna have mud. Somebody may have stepped into the shoreline.
So in absence of all of those things, Joe, it
would seem that you are reliant then on either eyewitnesses
or video witnesses. Yeah, and then even more peripheral to that,
(07:38):
you know, you you would be relying upon ear witnesses
as well. And that's something that people don't think about
a lot. You know, what did you hear you know,
at that particular point in time? You know, because I
mean how many how many times have we heard stories
about people that are killed and someone that didn't actually
see it. They'll say, hey, I heard gunshots, all right,
or I heard somebody screaming, you know, or I heard
(08:01):
a car pull up. So many times that's a that's
a point that we can return to. But the most
essential factor involved in this is that even if if
it's something that you see, or if it's something that
you hear, at what point in time did you hear it? Because,
as you know, the most valuable commodity that we have
(08:22):
in forensic investigations is in fact minutes, seconds, hours, days, weeks, months,
that time element is what we deal in. That's our currency,
if you will. So you have to be able to
match it up. And to this point there's there's not
You don't have either one of these things, you know,
the first time that there's an indication that something is up.
(08:47):
Other than the fact that they didn't attend this Kentucky
Derby party, um is the fact that this genoman walked
in the house and he found Russell Norham there lying
on the floor in his garage. Other than the fact
that ear witnesses as you call them, set the timeline,
does it really give you anything else? Because if they
(09:08):
did not hear anyone screaming, they can say, oh I
heard a boat, but you're on a lake. What does
that really tell you? Yeah, it's like living next to
the highway, you know, Oh I heard a car. Really wow,
that's really gonna be useful, you know, it's I'm not
trying to be snarky, but it's just it's just the
fact that, um, you know, you got as you put
you know, you've got boats running around all the time,
(09:28):
people night fish. You know, if this is when this
event occurred, you know, it wouldn't be anything to hear
you know, some guy in a in a bass boat
and running up and down the lake, you know, and
those engines are quite loud. But if it was something smaller,
say like a tiny skiff with a smaller boat motor,
or they had an electric motor, that you're not going
to hear at all. Um. You know, that goes back
(09:49):
to this issue of stealth. So you really left at
at you know, with this case, you're really left, as
an investigator, scratch in your head saying, I don't have
any kind of whit us at all to these events.
The only thing that is really left behind are these forensics.
You know that what what are the bodies telling us?
What is the scene telling us? And we've already you know,
(10:11):
kind of talked about the scene. Now there's no signs
or force and entry or struggle. You know, we say
that all the time on the news and whatnot, and
we say it in our reports as well, you know,
because it's one of the things that we look for
if we have some kind of horrific crime that has
taken place, we want to know, well, was there a
fight that ensued? Youve got toppled furniture. Do you have
anything here that really gives us an indication that there
(10:33):
was some kind of problem that had happened where they've
taken unawares for instance, where they compliant in in in
this particular case. And you know, so the investigators don't
really have a lot to work on, and I think
that that's the reason that this case is still unsolved
to this day. Jackie. And the things that we're talking
(10:53):
about right now, Joe, the entry from the water, the
lack of evidence, the earwitnesses, the video witness is are
so significant because Russell Dermott is dead, but Shirley Dermont
is missing. Yeah, that's the case. And of course if
you're an investigator and look, they were able to size
(11:16):
up pretty quickly from the neighbors and witnesses. You know,
these two are a pair. You know, you generally don't
see one without the other. They go around, he said,
they're very social. They have friends that live in this community.
I think that Shirley was involved in bridge. Russell used
to play golf, but he had he had stopped doing
that and he didn't really fish. They got rid of
their boats, so he's in that home. She's in that home.
(11:38):
When they go out, you know, they're generally together. They
are a couple, So that's that's indicative of the lifestyle.
You know that they had lad and it gives you
an ideas from a behavior standpoint of what you would
expect in this kind of dynamic, in this environment, that
they were probably there together whenever this horrific thing took place.
(11:59):
But when the investigators showed up, they're working assumption at
that moment time is yeah, we have we have Mr
Dermot deceased here in the garage, but Sirley is nowhere
to be found. And we go back to this theme.
You know what I had mentioned this This house is big.
It's three thousand square foot home that's occupied by two
people in a very very wealthy area. Your default position,
(12:23):
all of a sudden is, well, maybe somebody snatched her.
Maybe they've kidnapped her and taken off with her. And
but if that's the case, there's nobody falling us. There's
no letters, there's no note left behind to say that
these are our ransom demands. That's not happening. All they
know is that she is seemingly just vanished into thin air.
(13:04):
When you have no witnesses, sometimes the the dead have
to be relied upon to bear witness and give testimony
to all the remains, and in this case, all we
had was Russell Dermot's body. We've talked about the complexities
of this investigation already with no sign of struggle. But Joe,
what we do have is a body in the garage,
(13:27):
Russell Dermont. Joe. Russell was decapitated. His head has never
been found. How do we do this investigation that begs
so many questions? Jackie. You know, when you begin to
think about a body, apps and a head um, you know,
first off, what's what's the rationale? And I think that
for many people, investigators included, when you look at a
(13:48):
case like this, you think that you've got to some
type of psychopathic madman that's running around the countryside. And
that's kind of our default position because it's such a
horrific act. However, that's that's not always the case when
it comes to the dismemberment of remains are partial dismemberment
in this case, Remember, his head is the only part
(14:10):
of his body that is missing. Everything else is intact.
And with Russell's remains, there was evidence, at least in
my mind, after reading and reviewing the autopsy reports that
his head was taken, and I think that we need
to check this box first. His head was taken postmortem.
Of course, we have any mortum and postmortem post mortem
(14:31):
means after death. And the reason I think that is
that per the information that was relayed from the friends
of pathologists, there are no what we referred to as
focal areas of hemorrhage in the tissue of the neck.
And also it's interesting to note that when the investigators
got to the scene and they saw his his body
(14:54):
that at the scene it has been consistently described that
there was only a tiny bit of blood that was
immediately adjacent to what was remaining of his neck. Now,
if this had been say an event where they had
taken a knife or some sharp object and cut Russell
(15:16):
Derman's throat on the way to a decapitation, we do
know this that there would have been blood everywhere. You
say why, the reason is is that we've discussed before
on bodybacks how vascular the head is. It requires a
tremendous amount of blood and you would have to go
through uh, you'd have to go through the juggler veins,
(15:37):
you'd have to go through the carotid arteries, all the
while the heart is pumping until of course, life ceases.
But all the while you're just you will have an
uh an area that's literally flooded with blood. That's not
the case. So whoever did this, whoever did this, took
time with his remains and took his head off. And
(15:59):
if folks at home will kind of consider their spine,
uh their neck in particular the vertebral bodies that support
our neck. If you will go from the base of
your skull, let's see one. Let's C two, C three,
C four, C five count down. And his head was
removed at the C five level, and the doctors described
(16:24):
that they went all the way through all of the tissue,
the soft tissue again with no hemorrhage. And they have apparently,
and this is important, transsected the C five verebra. And
when they say transsected, that means that they didn't go
through the disk, they actually cut through bone. And from
an evidentially standpoint, that's a very y important Jackie. So
(16:49):
at autopsy, one of the things that's done when you
have any kind of dismemberment case is that, as horrible
as it is to be part of an investigation like this,
you as a forensic scientists, you have a particular skill
set that you can bring to bear that can actually
identify what the instrument was that brought about this decapitation.
(17:13):
And it's important because they said that the Sea five
was actually transsected, so that means that you're gonna have
marks on the bone. So anybody that's listening to this,
if you have a saw in your home, I want
you to think about the way the teeth look on
saw or even a serrated knife. You know, they have
a very specific pattern. And even if a saw or
(17:33):
serrated knife is made by the same manufacturer, that pattern
is going to change over the course of the use
of that instrument. It will slightly change and it will
make the signature, the tool mark signature left behind unique
to that particular instrument. So at autopsy I can almost
guarantee what they had done is where that bone was
(17:57):
transsected that Sea five. Keep that in mind, Sea five
the a cervical vertebra. They would have completely dissected out
the remainder of that Sea five vertebra, and then they
took it and they placed it into a container with
what we call formula. The formulae is kind of like
(18:17):
from aldehyde. It's a preservative, and they're going to hang
on to that jack. And let me tell you why,
because at some point in time, if they're able to
find out who perpetrated this crime, get wind of it,
if they can put their hands on that tool that
they took his head off with, they can have a
(18:38):
tool market examiner look at that remaining bone and compare
that to the instrument that was used by these perpetrators
to decapitate Russell Dermot. Okay, I got two very specific questions,
were you, Joe, First, what is transsected? When you hear
this term transsected, trans means going across, So they're actually
cutting across the bone. Almost if you think about sawing
(19:02):
a piece of wood, Okay, you're not going to cut
it lengthwise, You're gonna cut it across the grain, essentially.
And if you'll just imagine that whoever was doing this,
whoever was doing this, was essentially sawing more than likely
on the back of the neck because you get you
get quicker access to those bony prominences back there that
(19:24):
support and hold it literally hold the head in place.
So you want to be able to take the head
off at that point because you can remove it and
then do whatever it is that you plan on doing
with Okay, my second question is, as you were talking
about the C one, two, three, four, and five, I'm
reaching back to the back of my head in my
neck trying to feel and figure out what you're talking about.
(19:47):
What should I be feeling? How am I going to
identify and know what you're talking about here? It will
walk me through knowing where that is. So our head
is actually supported and I think we've mentioned this before
on other episodes, but our head is actually reported by
C one otherwise known as the Atlas. And people that
don't know what the Atlas is, it's it refers back
(20:09):
to Greek mythology. I think one of the earliest entities
within Greek mythology who was Atlas. And you see these
images of this gigantic man holding up the earth on
his back, and he's the Atlas, He's the supporter. So
SEE one actually works as a support body. It supports
our head. I'm not going to be able to feel
(20:32):
see one correct. Well, if you go up and you
press tightly enough, you can go up to the base
of your skull, the very base where your skull connects
onto onto the spine and if you press hard enough,
you can actually feel it right there. But you need
to count down essentially approximately every two inches you're gonna
come to a new vertebral body. So and that's kind
(20:55):
of a you know, I'm kind of a big guy,
So I'm kind of moving down the back of my
neck right now and I'm counting down one and a
half to two inches every moment. And you can feel
because there's a little depression that's where your disk actually sits.
So you get down from one to two, two to three,
three to four, four to five, and you're right on
top of it. So what the doctor is saying is
(21:16):
that instead of going through that kind of depressed soft
area where a disk is, people here about getting a
slip disc. It's kind of cartilaginist. It's softer than the bone.
This individual that cut through uh Russell Derman's neck actually
went through a bony prominence, you know, actually transsected or
cut into the bone. And they made a big mistake
(21:39):
when they did that because every time they would drag
that saw across that specific area, the teeth of whatever
this instrument is, and they've never been very specific about
it is leaving behind definitive markings on the surface of
that mam. So microscopically, if you can get your hands
on whatever bladed was that generated this and compare it
(22:02):
microscopically to those marks that are left on the bone,
you can have a tie back. The question is can
they put that instrument into the hands of an individual.
And it's not just the specific instrument, but it's also
it's also a class or family they of of instruments. Say,
for instance, they can look at and say, well, this
is this wasn't a limb saw, this was a carpenter saw,
(22:25):
or this was a hack saw, or for all I know,
it could be a circular saw. But with that, it's
another question that's asked because even when you're sawing, even
when you're doing this, this would have left behind quite
a bit of blood just in this action, and not
just that but bone, dust, tissue, that sort of thing.
(22:45):
So I really wonder if they hadn't placed him on
something in order to facilitate this, like a piece of
cloth or shirts or something like that, and then gather
things up and took that with them as well, because remember,
his head's missing, Jackie, so is a owne bone. Joe
regardless of where it is in the body. The bones
in the neck, the C one, C two are smaller
(23:08):
just in general from the size. And we've talked about
it linked dismemberment, about how really difficult it is to
do that. Is it any different when you're trying to
do it at the neck? You know, I would opind
that it's probably a bit more simple because if you're
doing it posteriorly, which we all know now because we've
talked about this on on body bags, anatomically posterior means
(23:31):
from the rear, okay, the backside, and so h the
as I stated earlier, when you begin to kind of
fill your cervical spine, it's very close to the surface.
It's not like, say, for instance, if we went to
the leg, to the upper leg where the femur is
our big thigh bone. You've got to go through a
lot of soft tissue to get down to the femur.
I mean a lot, and it's a mess when you
(23:53):
do that. But in the cervical region, those bony prominences
or those those bony ructures, and they are very very close.
Now I can tell you this. You were talking about
differences in bone, there will be bone density issues, because
every bone has a structure in and of itself. But
if you were to take a look at bone um microscopically,
(24:17):
bone is bone, you know you're gonna see it, and
you can't necessarily pick a point of origin. I'm sure
that there are some pathology types and anatomy types that
would probably argue with me on that, But for our
purposes here, bone is in fact bone, It's just can
you get access to it? And this is more important.
Do you have the tools and the knowledge to be
able to pull this off? To facilitate it? What's your
(24:39):
level of nerve here? I think about that, you know,
I mean, how many people do we know that are
wandering around the general population that have actually decapitated somebody?
Just let that sink in just for a second. Now
we get so numb to all the violence in our world,
but just just for a moment, pause and think about
who out there would have the nerves of Steve All
(25:01):
to take someone's life and then not flee, but stay
around long enough to acquire instruments or have instruments to
take a head off with. And I got one more
interesting little aside that I don't know how many other
people have really addressed in Russell Derman's death, and that
(25:22):
is they don't really have a lot of injuries to
his body. But there's one that really stands out to
me that is actually not post mortem, not post mortem,
it's anti mortum. And the doctor makes note of it.
And if everybody will take their right hand and extend
it out and consider your hand just for a moment
(25:44):
and look at your index finger. That's the finger that's
right adjacent to your thumb. Right there. Russell Derman sustained
a crushing injury, a crushing injury Jackie, to his right
index finger. The doctor says specifically that it is a
him a ragic injury, and that means that this is
(26:05):
an anti mortem injury. This can only occur in life,
so that means that his heart was still pumping and
it literally crushed his finger. Now to me, you begin
to talk about things like this and why would his
finger be crushed? Well, why would it? And I really
(26:26):
wonder if people were not trying to exact information from him.
Maybe it was information relative to money. Do you have
money here? You're gonna pay pay the price with pain
here if you don't give us the information and they
crushed his finger in life. Imagine not painful that was.
And maybe he told him something that they didn't want
(26:48):
to hear, and it's at that moment that took his life.
So there's one other fascinating piece of evidence that came
out in the police investigation into Russell Derman's death. Even
though he was to appitated, they found gunshot residue on
his collar. Yeah, they did. And how in the world
are you going to have gunshot residue deposition UM arising
(27:14):
on your collar and to say that it's on the collar,
I guess, I guess you could say that it is um.
It could be any area in the collar. It could
be posterior, anterior, it could be lateral. They just simply
say um on the surface of the collar. And that
has led many people to think that the rationale behind
decapitating Russell Dermott was that he had been executed, possibly
(27:38):
with a single gunshot wound of the head. Now this
raises another problem. You know that you have taken this
guy's life potentially with gunfire. You have enough smarts about
you to know if that bullet is recovered that they
could in fact pair that up with a weapon out there.
(27:58):
So what do you do? Know your default position is, well,
the simplest thing I can do is I can't. I
certainly can't do some type of postmortem surgery on him
and removed his bullet. May have to take his head
because in taking his head, I know that I'm going
to take that projectile. Over the years that I've covered
(28:39):
this case, I've often wondered what was going on with
Shirley Dermott and when the police first arrived there, she
was nowhere to be found, And it has often really
bothered me. I think about my own wife, you know,
what state of mind, what she had been in, what
was going on with her? Where did they find her?
Joe investigators trolled the lake, but to no avail. They
(29:00):
did not find Shirley's body. They also searched the wooded
area surrounding the home no body. But on the sixteenth
of May, which was approximately a little over two weeks later,
Shirley Derman's bloated body was discovered floating on Lake a
Coney by two fishermen. It was about five miles away
(29:21):
from the couple's home. There are several important points in
the discovery of Shirley's body, Joe, So let's take them
one by one. First, is the fact that when Shirley
Dermot's body was found, it was obvious that the intention
was for her body to not be found. Two large
cinder blocks had been tied to her body that way
(29:44):
to thirty pounds each. Wouldn't sixty pounds be enough to
keep a body submerged. No, no, it would not, particularly
as bodies begin to blow, which always happens. I mean,
it happens, um you know, people talk about this all
the time. I can confirm for you. As decomposition develops, uh,
(30:10):
the body begins to swell with gas. And when bodies,
when you have bodies that are found in water, the
body essentially becomes almost like a a booie. It will
float to the top. The air, you know, forces it
up until the body in some way is punctured and
the air is released. Then it can sometimes um re
(30:33):
submerge at that point in time. But you know, you
mentioned an important part here, Jackie, is the fact that
these blocks were with her body, and they weren't just
with her body. And this is this is ghastly, It's
absolutely ghastly. These blocks were actually secure to her ankles.
(30:53):
So if you think of the way a balloon looks,
where we hold a balloon by string in our end
and then the balloon floats high above us um, that's
similar to this configuration. These blocks were actually secured to
Shirley Derman's ankles with what's referred to as para cord,
(31:14):
and para cord. You see it in the military a lot.
You also see people that do camping securing things. It's
a woven nylon rope that has very specific pattern to it,
and it's a multicolor growth that they used, and they
all have different strengths, you know, the kind of weight
that they can support and this sort of thing. But
with her, it was bound wrapped around her several times
(31:40):
at her ankles. I mean, somebody really took the time
to make sure that buddy wasn't going anywhere. That in
itself is very significant, Joe, because we know that the
body was found about five miles from the couple's home.
The current in this lake, even though you talked about
there's a channel in this lake that's deep, the current
(32:02):
in this lake, given that it is a lake, there's
not gonna be a current really, So we're not talking
about the body drifting five miles from the home, so
it's very obvious that they moved her body, intending it
at this distance to never be found. Yeah, you're right,
and there's been several people that have talked about this
from the perspective of damn releases. Now, for anybody that's
(32:24):
never been on a lake where there's been a damn release,
it's something powerful when the water is released out of
the dam into the lower lake, which in this case
is Lake Sinclair says below Lake o'coney. It's a tremendous
amount of force, but it's still not enough to drag
her body with this amount of weight on it through
this channel and then deposit it where it was, Because
(32:45):
that's that's even more interesting here, Jackie. That's why I
believe that whoever did this had a great familiarity with
this area, because not only was she literally five miles downstream,
but her body you had to make in order to
get to the location when she was found, and she
was found by fisherman, you had to make a sharp
(33:05):
right hand turn off the main channel and go back
up into a cove. Jackie. It's almost if if people
at home will just kind of envision what a fish
hook looks like and the long stem of the fish
hook is the long axis. Pretend that's the channel, and
then it goes down, curves back up to the point.
That point on the fish hook is where the body
(33:27):
would have been found. So it would it, in my opinion,
at least the people would have had to have transported
her body to that location and pushed her off into
this area. I think one of the things they didn't
count on. Maybe they weren't so familiar with the depth
in this area, because when you combine the depth of
(33:48):
the water, maybe a damn release lack of rain. This
is you know, it's in the warm months, maybe the
water levels down just a wee bit, and then you
think about decomposition the body. Right, that's how these fishermen
noticed her in the water at that amount of time.
Can you imagine, can you actually imagine going out and
(34:08):
you're just going fishing for the day, You're just going fishing,
and suddenly you look down in the water and here's
this poor woman's body. It's been sitting there for a
protracted period of time. It's an absolute horse show. So
then we get to the autopsy. Joe Shirley Dermond was
killed by blunt force trauma, and the pathologist suspect that
(34:35):
it was caused by a hammer. What gave them those indications.
That's a very significant finding that the pathologist came up with.
I want to back up just a little bit, just
so that folks understand meantimes, when we're talking about homicides
involving females, we we always wonder if there's a sexual component,
and one of the things we look for is to
see the status of the clothing. That's actually how we
(34:57):
refer to it. I want you to know that Mrs
Derman remains. She was completely clothed. I mean she had
on everything from a floral patterned shirt. She still had
a brawn bright green pants, She had underpants on, even
had her socks on with her shoes with orthopedic inserts.
And this is kind of significant. She actually had two
(35:18):
breastpads in place. Did you know that she had undergone
a radical double missectomy, and so all of that was intact.
There was nothing to indicate that this was anything of
some kind of sexual nature, at least based upon the
clothing status. So when the doctor received the body at
the medical Examiner's office, he did a very very thorough
(35:40):
job of examining her, looked at the knots actually her
the rigging that came along with, you know, her body
being submerged actually entered entered the morgue with her. And
it's very interesting that when you begin to look at
the knots, this is what we referred to in forensics
as complex not tying, which means that somebody probably had
(36:03):
experienced tying nuts, working with rope and that sort of thing,
and to secure because her these these blocks were still
secure to her body. And one little side I don't
think that people may be aware of. Did you know
that these blocks had actually been painted red. These weren't
just like standard blocks that you would see at a
construction site. These things were red. And I found that
(36:25):
absolutely fascinating, you know. So that's another big piece of evidence.
And then talking about the the fatal injuries that she
had sustained. UM, the way the doctor actually describes these
there is um her death is actually related to what's
referred to specifically as blunt force trauma. But UM, she
(36:47):
was struck they think at least twice, maybe three times
with something that had a rounded, flat leading edge. UM.
And we we talked about this just previously in in
one of our other cases on bodybags, referring to a
claw hammer. You think about the end of a hammer.
(37:09):
A hammer, you know, has essentially the dimensions on the
business end of the hammer where it looks. It can
be the size of say the face of a quarter
if the quarters leaning flat. And so what happens is
when a skull is struck with a hammer. Did you
know that you can sustain a what's referred to as
(37:30):
a pattern injury there? Um, that is actually a circular
fracture underlying the pattern on the skin, and it it mirrors,
it mirrors the oncoming the oncoming hammers it strikes. This
is referred to as a depressed skull fracture where the
table external table of the skull actually collapses and it
drives in to the brain. Of course, this leads to
(37:54):
um huge hemorrhage um within the brain, and of course
the person winds up dying as a result. This particularly,
you began to think about how many times she was struck.
But this is a real act of violence. Um, This
is not like you know, even with Mr Dermott, we
think about him being shot. Um, if that is in
(38:15):
fact what had happened. Remember, we still don't have have
his head at this point. Um, that's kind of a
quick way to die when you think about it. But no, not, not,
not this Jackie. She was beaten multiple times with a hammer,
her skull actually collapsed in on her brain, and then
she was tied up post mortum. How do I know
that it was post mortem because where those bindings were
(38:39):
placed over her ankles and she was essentially anchored with
this destructure that they had created, there was no underlying
hemorrhage in those areas surrounding her her ankles. So it's
not like she had been tied up before death and
been questioned or anything like that. Her hands weren't bound,
it's just her ankles. So this was that was done
(39:00):
after death. They took their time in planning this, and
then you begin to think about, well they got in
a boat and drove five mills with this poor woman's body.
You know, where did all of this take place? Did
they kill her in the yard because there was no
blood in the house. They didn't find any blood that
I know of out in the yard. I wonder if
(39:20):
they brought in dogs to sniff for it. And if
you put her on a boat, and you kill her
on the boat, then dogs are not necessarily gonna be
able to track that area. You're not gonna have any
evidence of it. Did they take her out in the
middle of the lake and beat her to death with
a hammer and then drive the other the rest of
the distance and deposit her body weigh down stream in
(39:41):
this little cove where they thought that no one would
ever find her. Of course they did, And to this
day we still don't have any further answers. I said,
who did this? So, Joe, it's been seven years since
the Germans were murdered two thousand fourteen. We are still
no closer to finding out who did this? Will we
ever be? Think as time goes by, there's there's always
(40:02):
a possibility. I have to always hold out hope in
any case involving death. I mean, death is what I've
always dealt in as an investigator. But you know, at
this point, to this point, at least the forensics are done.
What's going to have to happen here is that the
public and the police are gonna have to come together
on this case, this unsolved case. This is going to
(40:24):
be heavily reliant upon shoe leather, as they say, you know,
still pressing every lead that you possibly can. And this
is one other thing that's kind of troubling to me
is that many of the people that lived near the
Dermans were aged, and it's not like, you know, you're
(40:47):
around a bunch of mid twenty somethings that are going
to be around for a few years that can still
offer up information. My my fear, I think is that
anybody that might have some kind of recollection as to
what they remember back all these years looking in the
rear view mirror, they still gonna be around to give
us further information or to highlight something, or to come
up with a new nugget of data that's going to
(41:09):
push this case forward. And that that's the one troubling
aspect with this. I'm just hoping that at some point
in time, somebody is going to say something that they
probably wish that they wouldn't have said in retrospect, but
it winds up unlocking the answers in this kid, I'm
(41:30):
Joseph Scott More and this is Body Backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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