May 15, 2024 • 40 mins
The double homicide of Russell and Shirley Dermond rocked their gated community along Lake Oconee in Georgia.. The decapitated body of 88-year-old Russell Dermond was found in the garage and his wife of 68 years, 87-year Shirley Dermond was found in Lake Oconee weighted down with cinder blocks, 10 days after Russell's body was found. On this episode of Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan, you will learn about the evidence investigators found at the crime scene as well as what can be learned from a body that may have been in a lake for 10 days. The double homicide has gone unsolved for 10 years and the head of Russell Dermond has never been found. How was this elderly couple, married 68 years, murdered and why?
Transcript Highlights
00:00:08 Introduction about murders
00:05:00 Discussion about neighbor checking on Dermond’s
00:09:34 Talk about unsolved murders, 10 years
00:14:04 Discussion about Shirley Dermond body found in lake
00:19:05 Discussion of Russell Dermond head, it’s missing
00:23:51 Discussion about Shirley was weighted down
00:28:08 Talk after 10 years, case still unsolved
00:31:39 Discussion of lack of blood at scene
00:34:52 Talk about how head was removed
00:37:57 Talk about DNA evidence
00:40:28 Conclusion: After a decade, new evidence might solve the case
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I truly love bodies
of water. For some reason, something clicked in me a
few years ago. I used to like going to the mountains,
mountains where I would find peace and maybe a respite.
(00:32):
But as I've gotten older, water almost has a healing
effect on me. I think that people can understand that
that go and spend time at the beach, perhaps and
you listen to the waves, you feel the sun on
your skin. Some people like going to the lake, as
they say, and just sit and stare at a lake,
(00:54):
maybe in a lawn chair, and they are pretty. But
I've developed a real affinity. A lot of it has
to do with the boat that I have now that's
an old boat. I've developed a real affinity for rivers.
The thing about a river is that you know it
has a beginning and an end, but what's underneath it
(01:17):
is completely different than what's beneath a lake because it's
always changing. Something is just beneath the surface that you
can't necessarily see. And hey, just because it's beneath the
surface one day and one specific location does not mean
it will be in the same place the next day.
Because rivers change much like a life. I'm not the
(01:40):
first person to make that conclusion. Rivers have been compared
to life for years and years our journey, if you will.
There's something peaceful about them, though. I want to chat
a bit with you today about a river that actually
turns into a lake, and then another lake, and then
(02:02):
becomes a river once again. I want to talk to
you about one of the most interesting and tragic, unsolved
double homicides in recent memory in the state of Georgia,
the Dermotts. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body
(02:24):
Backs today. You know we're we're going to talk about
the Cooney River, but it's actually Lake of Coney there
in eastern central Georgia. And boy, what a tale this is.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
It is a tail. It is one of these stories
you tell around the campfire to scare kids. Today we
are talking about the unsolved, free planned, heinous murder of
eighty eight year old Russell Dermott and his bride, eighty
seven year old Shirley Durmot. Sheriff Howard Zille says, quote,
(03:01):
these people committed a heinous crime, depraved act. They need
to be caught.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
And he's right, dude, it's been going on for a
decade ten years.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, And all I'm thinking is as you plan your life,
you know, and you oftentimes we have that picture when
we're younger of finding that partner that will remain with
us for our life, as we raise children and move
through our careers and things like that, and then we
get to that part of life where maybe we're sitting
on the back porch overlooking a lake like a coney
(03:32):
and you marvel at where the lake can take you.
I always I've always liked being around water because it
gives me the idea that, you know, I could get
on that water and go around the world from here.
You know, this is my entry. And in this particular case,
Russell Dermott and Shirley Dermott were at they they were
they're past the eighteen holes in the clubhouse. They're eighty
(03:55):
eight and eighty seven, respectively, and they've got this beautiful
house on the lake. They have been married for sixty
eight years.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Wow, six and eight years.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Still very active. You know. Russell had gone to a
publix earlier in the week, but it was in twenty fourteen.
May first was the day he was at the publics.
They had plans surely, and Russell Durmot had plans to
watch the Kentucky Derby with some friends on Saturday the third,
(04:28):
May third. When they don't show up, you know, the
friends are concerned, they're curious, they're not overly, you know,
not freaking out over it, but yea that they call them.
And you know, when you get to be eighty eight
eighty seven in that area, you know, when you don't
show up for something at somebody's house, you know they
might call and check on you, but they don't really look.
You've earned the right to not do what you want
(04:49):
to not do kind of thing anyway, So they gave
it a couple of days. You know, they were expected
on the third and when nobody could get them on
the phone. It took a couple of days. But on
May sixth a neighbor said, enough's enough. Haven't heard from him.
I've got to find out what's going on with the Dermans,
you know, and I think most of us would be
(05:09):
kind of like that. So he goes over and he
notices the front door is unlocked. Now that's a big
one here. You're in a gaety community, but you still
lock your doors, especially when you're an older couple, but
they're not. The door's open. He looks around the house,
can't see anything in terms of people, doesn't see Shirley,
doesn't see Russell. He goes around looking and finds Russell.
(05:32):
He finds Russell in the in the in the garage.
He's on the floor and he's not well. Joe, there
wasn't a whole lot missing from the house, but Russell's
head was missing, and Sureley is nowhere to be found.
So this guy's studying did Surely and Russell get into
(05:54):
a fight and she whacked his head off and took off.
Because that's what he's finding. Russell Dermand, eighty eight years
old is dead in the garage, head off. But it's
not a real bloody scene, Joe, No.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
It's not. And the reason it's not a real bloody
scene is that the investigators revealed we did find out
this information that the body in the area approximating the
body had been surrounded by towels, Dave, and their supposition
is that the towels are placed down in order to
soak up any kind of blood that was there and
(06:31):
also prevent it from coming under and out of the
garage door.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Wait a minute, they chopped the guy's head off, and
they were concerned about keeping it hidden so no blood
gets under the garage, so nobody from the outside would
notice it.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
That's not something we usually find for murderers who cut
people's heads off.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Dude, I got to tell you that's why. First off,
let's go back to this shrend. Can you imagine that
you know this this you know equally elderly couple, their
friends that had invited them over. They show up and
people that they had broken bread with, people they had
(07:10):
hung out with. You know, they was a it was
a Kentucky Derby party, and you know what's associated with
Kentucky Derby, julibs. And you get to thinking about the
fact that over the years they'd probably had a few
adult beverages with one another and they were going to
go celebrate. Because I like to watch Kentucky Derby just
as much as the next guy, because it's exciting, it's
(07:31):
a unique event. But you show up because you're concerned
about your friends, and you walk in and you have
the headless corpse of this man that you have spent
time with, you've laughed with. You got a lot in
common because as you said, they're in the Sunset years,
They're in the Golden years.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
I got to ask you something because Joe, you mentioned
to me that you have been covering this story since
it happened. That we mentioned as an unsolved murder from
twenty fourteen. But there's new evidence that we're going to
get into. But you actually have been on this since
it started, since the bodies, since Russell's body was recovered
in that garage. Now do you remember what it was
like in terms of news coverage at that time? Were
(08:10):
people talking about, Hey, where's his wife? Did she chop
his head off and run?
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Yeah? I do remember it, and here's why I remember it.
First off, I got to give you the name, and
you know the name, and I consider him to be
in media. One of my closest friends is Vinnie Politan,
who's ONTV. Now, well, when this occurred, HLN was still
a thing, you know, we're talking about twenty fourteen. Oh yeah,
and it had happened during that period. Vinnie had gone
(08:35):
over to a local Atlanta news station by that time,
and almost immediately when he got there. Because Vinnie is
so good at true crime, he might be one of
the best I've ever encountered. First off, he cares about people,
and he actually started a program on this particular channel
called Georgia Mysteries, and this is one of the first
(08:57):
cases he profiled. We did extensive coverage of this, and
I went over and would travel from Alabama. I was
already teaching teaching in Alabama, and I would drive back
and forth to the studio in Atlanta and we'd have
in depth conversations about this case. And then I think
I covered it on Nancy, I covered on a couple
of national news outlets, and I think as a former
(09:21):
investigator and a forensics guy, David, I just knew. I
just knew in my heart of hearts that Okay, six months' tops,
you're going to be able to find this out. You're
going to be able, And man, I've aged a decade.
I don't want to make this about me, but you know,
when you look back in time, you think I've aged
(09:43):
a decade since this occurred. And everybody that's been watching
this thing, you know, kind of play out, and there's
been all kinds of speculation about this. You know, you
think about you know something that you and I A
theme that runs through body Bag with homicides. We always
talk about intimate circle. Well, if you've got an intimate circle,
(10:05):
how big is it and who's involved in it? And
nothing that they really had in the initial offering seemed
as though that it would point back to anything in
the intimate circle. But I know this that some body
or some bodies felt so passionately about this elderly couple
(10:27):
that they felt like that they needed to be eradicated
from the face of the planet. Sixty plus years of marriage.
(10:53):
During that period of time, you have ups and you
have downs. What would compel a wife, Sureley Dermot to
essentially disappear, vanish into thin air, and in her wake
is left the headless corpse of her husband.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Now, Joe, my question for you on this because I
know you were there covering this, so you've got two
different perspectives as the forensic person looking at the facts
of the body, but you're also a human being who
is familiar with the geography of the area. Was there
a common theme to discussions about what they had found.
(11:38):
Was anybody really thinking that Shirley Drmod had done something
to her husband and she had taken off or was
it pretty much assumed that she was a victim. We
just had to find her body because of the case
of mentioning. You mentioned toals being put around Russell Dermand,
so there had to be preparation to prevent people from
(11:58):
finding what was going on there.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah, and look, I'm not saying that an elderly person
is incapable of committing some kind of act like this.
I've seen it happen. I don't know if it's been
this over the top, but the fact that this act
would be committed, and I'm referring to Russell and then
that person essentially vaporizes, They're gone, their vehicles are there.
(12:25):
You got a gated community. How does this happen? And
I think the curious thing about this is that, just
based upon Russell's remains, there is not a tremendous amount
of physical evidence, right, And that's kind of I know
that sounds odd because you're talking about a decapitated body,
(12:46):
but there was not a lot. And I have to
offer this up too, just to let you know, because
a lot of this falls back over into the share.
He's played this pretty close to the vest for ten years, right,
It's not like he's let it loose, okay, and just
but he has made significant efforts. He's reached out to
(13:08):
people in Europe, He's reached out to the news media
in New York and Los Angeles. He's even reached out
to inside addition, you know, to try to get assistance
with this case. He's had eyes on it. He's been
asking for help. There is an FBI reward for this case,
and still nothing. And I think that a lot of
people that have these ideas. I think many people did
(13:31):
early on that Wow, this looked like something that an
organized crime group would have done to them, because it's
one thing to have a headless corpse. Most of the
time you're going to find the head, but you don't
find the head, and also you don't have the wife.
(13:51):
And there were numerous press conferences that were held in
a ten day period starting on the sixth and moving
forward with this case, and that life changed on May sixteenth,
and it wasn't as a result of anything that the
(14:12):
authorities were doing. It happened to be a couple of
fishermen that were fishing out there and May. Just so
folks understand, in southern waters during May, you're at the
tail end of one of the big southern fishing seasons
and that's crappie fishing, and so you've got guys that
will go out and they will fish, and they'll essentially
(14:33):
just put jigs out in the water and jig because
they're trying to catch crappie. And that day almost five
miles away from the Dermot home, which by the way,
had its own boat dock. It sits right on the water.
This house is beautiful. I urge anybody that's never seen
an image of the house to go and check it
(14:53):
out and see how.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
The Google Earth stuff you can see and the pictures
that are available. It's a beautiful place it is.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
And it sits in a cove dave, so the cove
itself is off of the main channel. You've got to
go back out and get into the main channel and
go down and it's almost shaped like a fish hook
where Shirley Durman's body is eventually found by two fishermen.
And it's not like it's just floating there.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, right, Because Russell is dead, no head in the garage.
There's been towels placed around him so the blood won't
go into the garage door, so nobody will see from
the outside. Sureley is gone. And for ten days, they're
trying to figure out what happened. Her body is found
in the water by fishermen, but it wasn't floating. Why
was the body not floating, Joe, And by the way,
(15:43):
five miles away from their house. So she wasn't just
thrown off into the water. No, from the dock.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
No. No, it's when you think about, Okay, here's the
thing you have to consider, and I know that the
investigators did. And this is how the river plays into this.
As I mentioned early on, on damned rivers and all
these rivers there are controlled by thee it's called George
(16:13):
Power George Power Company because they're generating electricity. And so
you have WHATD refer to as if you've never lived
on a river like this. They have dam releases and
from time to time they'll raise and lower the level.
And buddy, let me tell you, if you've never been
on one side of a dam. When it's released, you
have this incredible just force that just kind of you know,
(16:36):
shoots out from this thing and it flows and it
creates its own its own there's already a natural current,
but it just intensifies that, but intensifies it to the
point where you're going to take the body of a
full grown woman that is weighted down with cinder blocks,
mind you, and drag it across that the bottom of
(17:00):
the channel. And oh, by the way, the body makes
a sharp right hand turn and goes back up in
a cove. It ain't happening. It's just that that defies
every every law of hydrology, if you will, it's there's
not enough current in the world. I guess there could be.
Somebody could catch me on that, But to make it
happen like that and the it would have to be perfect,
(17:22):
so perfect circumstances. So my contention is is that whoever
did this. First off, they didn't. They didn't put Shirley
into a car and drive her down to the cove
and toss her off the bank. Uh, that didn't happen,
because how do you account for not having a record
(17:44):
of a vehicle coming and going out of that security area?
How did they get access to it? My contention from
Jump Street has always been that the boat that transported
her body also transported the killer or killers to the dock.
They got off of the boat, perpetrated the crime, and
(18:04):
they killed him, spirited it off with his head. And
let's just continue on this fantastical journey. Here they're beating
her because they have money. They have money. I mean
Russell Durman. I don't know exactly what his net worth was,
but he had sold like a tremendous number of fast
food restaurants, if I'm not mistaken. They had cash, dude.
(18:28):
And how else you know, if you're trying to get
access to money perhaps or accounts, or you want something
from them, what will you do. You tie a little
old lady up in your boat and you bring her
husband's head with you, and you say, you either give
me what I want or this is going to happen
to you. And the thing about it is, I don't
(18:49):
know that anyone ever got anything, but I do know this.
They transported her person down that river. I don't know
what state the body was in when they finally arrived
in that cove, but they dumped her off the side,
and no one to this day even knows where.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Russell's rust's head is. Yeah, it's gone. Let me ask
you the joe. So you're saying that you believe the
perpetrators brought a boat landed at their dock, went into
the house with a plan to extricate money or jewels
or whatever. They kill Russell Dermond and cut his head off,
leave his body in the garage with towels around it
(19:27):
so the blood won't sleep out into the driveway under
the garage door. They then beat Shirley Dermond to the
point where they take her out onto the lake and
they use cinder blocks to weigh her body down. See
I didn't catch the part. I all along thought they're
going to take her body and just they're going to
(19:47):
kill her and throw her into the water and she's
going to drift. But they actually did not plan on
her coming to the surface by any means. They put
cinder blocks on her body after beating her to death.
I don't know. Is there a way you could find
out if she was dead when she went in the water.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
It's very difficult under these circumstances, given well ten days downrange,
yeah you could, And a lot of it has to
do with what the findings were relative to her lungs.
We're hoping that they did die. Tom testing and in
the lungs where you're looking, well, you're looking for the
(20:23):
little sea creatures. Uh, they're these these little skeletal entities
that kind of float around the water and they're unique
species wise, they're unique and you can actually find them
in the airway if if someone takes in a mouthful
of water and it comes into their lungs, well, that
that aquatic environment that they are in, dwelling it, it
(20:45):
has these little uh, these little structures in there, and
so in order to have them within you, if you're
in the midst of drowning, uh, you would have to
uptake those things into your lungs. And you know your lung,
your lung you're starving for oxygen anyway in a drowning event,
(21:06):
if it was a drowning and you're trying to take
in as much and so the lungs would would have
this in there. And that's one of the you know,
we've I think that we've mentioned this before, but there
are these cases where and it always baffles the mind,
where you have these cases of suspected drowning where you
don't know if it was a drowning or if they
were just placed in the water or dieton testing should
have been done from Jump Street in every single one
(21:28):
of these cases where homicides evolved. How much more so
when you've got a lady whose husband has been decapitated.
She's bound and tied to cinder blocks and dumped into water.
What they didn't count on was the fact that when
bodies begin to swell beneath the waves, they expand like
(21:49):
a gigantic balloon. If you've never seen it, it's something
you'll never forget. And they might not rise all the
way to the top, but there is so much air
that the body generates because as the body is beginning
to break down, you've got it at one level, which
is referred to as autolysis, where the body is consuming
(22:12):
itself well, it creates gas and the body expands. That's
why people talk about the bloated dead. And it happens
in dry environments too. You'll find them, you know, that
are swollen. Heat speeds it up. But even beneath the
surface of the water, you'll have bodies that are swelling
like this, and it gives this buoyancy to the body
that it would not otherwise have, and they begin to
(22:34):
float up, and it's so much so that they'll even
drag cinder blocks up with it. You know, something that's
been tied down. The only way you're going to kind
of defeat that is, if the body has been punctured
prior to where air can escape and that sort of thing.
So they have not released a tremendous amount of information
about her status. We do know that she sustained what
(22:56):
seems to be blunt force trauma. You know about her body.
But here's the thing, other than the center blocks, which
forensically you would hope that there would be some way
to tie those back to something. Did they take those
center blocks? As an investigator, you're thinking, did they find
center blocks? I don't know about you, Dave. Do you
have cinder blocks layer in your house? I got in
the back Maybe you've got one or two.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
I have some in the backyard.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Yet, Okay, I do too. So did the Germans have
center blocks? That'd be a question. I would ask what
style of center block is it? Because who was it
manufactured by? If you can kind of suss that out,
And then I think, probably more importantly is what kind
of bindings are you talking about? What kind of rope?
(23:39):
Because rope has to be cut, Dave, and when you
cut rope you leave a tool mark behind on those
freight ends, was there any kind of what's the point
of origin of the rope, Who was it manufactured by,
who was sold by? And was it rope that was
possessed by the Dermans or did this rope? Was this
rope brought with them? And what does that go to? Well,
(24:02):
that goes premeditation, because if you're showing, if you're if
you can demonstrate that this is in fact a rope
that did not belong to the Dermans, your next logical
step is going to be well, perpetrators may have showed
up with it, they were purposed to do something horrible.
They showed up in a stealthy manner on water because
(24:24):
who expects a killer to arrive by boat?
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Only the people that make the movie the TV.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Let me tell you something, if if you and I
had the story and we walked into a producer's office
in Hollywood, they'd say it out, this is ridiculous, We're
not doing this. And a lot of cases we cover
are like that. You just you can't believe that it's occurred.
What are you going to do at that point in time?
How do you determine the origin of these things? But
I can tell you this, I don't think that the
(24:52):
mystery of the disappearance of Shirley Dermot and her death
and the death and decapitation of her husband Russell necessarily
rest in Shirley's remains, but there might be some indication,
some you hope, in this case that might lead to
answers on the decapitative remains of Russell. Well, for folks
(25:32):
that are new to the German homicides, I think the
most obvious question is, well, who's heading up this investigation?
Who's in charge of this thing? Because you know, as
I'd mentioned, it's we're ten years down range, Dave, We're
ten years down range. And look, I know that I
went on about affluence and that sort of thing. At
this location. You have to understand that not all of
(25:55):
Putnam County, which is where this occurred, is affluent. You know,
it's an agri based environment. You know, you have people,
you have farms there, chicken houses and all that sort
of stuff. It's only a smaller portion of popular population
that lives along the shores of kind you know who
could afford it. But there is one person in that county,
(26:17):
in Putnam County, that is in fact the I don't know,
I guess the head constable, as they might say, the
high Sheriff and He's certainly an interesting character, isn't it day.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Well, it's funny when you start looking into a story
like this, and funny strange because you start looking at
the victims and in this particular case, knowing two things
about it. One, it's an unsolved crime involving some very
senior citizens that there's no reason for them to have
died in a horrible way like this. And the second
part is I knew that you had been intimately involved
(26:49):
in the coverage of this since it happened in twenty fourteen.
The sheriff here has been asked on a number of
occasions about the Georgia Bureau of investmentstigation and why he
hasn't reached out to them, And the sheriff has said,
his name's Howard Sheriff, Howard Sill, and he has said
(27:09):
that he's reached out to everybody one time or another,
but he doesn't have a lot of confidence. And I'm
being nice when I say this in the abilities of
the GBI, and he has a number of reasons for
feeling that way, but I do know this. He talked
about some evidence that caught my attention, and I made
some notes to ask you about it. Because Sheriff Smith
(27:31):
said it was incredibly brutal, and when we think about
somebody's head being lopped off, that's about as brutal as
it gets. But they've got the whoever did this, and
I'm going to assume it was more than one person.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
That's my assumption as well. Yeah, all right, Well.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
You've got a man eighty eight years old who has
had his head chopped off, and we have his wife
found ten days later with cinderblocks tied to her body
in the in the lake, and I'm thinking, why did
the perpetrators go to all that trouble with her body
when they've already got the husband dead. They left him
(28:10):
in the garage, they took his head with him because
he can't find the head still ten years later, having
found Russell Durman's head, But why was there a need
to go to all that trouble with his wife?
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Again? I have to think Dave. For me looking at
the case, I have to think that it's a point
of leverage to try to get it. Because even Sheriff
Sills had stated that he doesn't I don't want to
mistate here, but he essentially paraphrasing he doesn't have evidence
that she was killed there, and so that again goes
to my she was killed in the house. Yeah, that
(28:44):
she was killed at that location there, And that goes
to the spilling of blood, right, because I mean, if
you're going to brutalize someone, you would leave perhaps a
significant amount of their blood that would be in addition
to what you were finding with Russell's and you know,
to be able to hype that blood, do DNA on
it and all this sort of stuff. So is he
(29:05):
saying that she was killed on this vessel in the
middle of the lake or was she killed out near
the water and her body was tied down and she
was essentially placed into the platform, which I think is
a boat. I don't know, it could be any number
of boats. Of their speculation relative to Shirley's death is
(29:31):
almost equally as brutal as Russell's cause of death. She
was beaten about the head multiple times. She died of
blunt force trauma. And here's here's the other little bit
to this that's quite striking is that they believe that
she was beaten to death with a hammer Dave.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
And ballpeen hammer or hammer with the claws.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly like you know,
and they haven't.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Sap eighty seven year old woman being to death with
a hammer. That just sounds personal.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Yeah it does. But here's the thing again, I'm thinking,
what could you want from her? What could you want
from her? Well, there been number of people that have
been beaten up with hammers over the years to extract
information for them or to get something from them. It's
not specifically a one and done event. You're going to
have to hit them multiple times? Or are you trying
(30:24):
to draw data out of them? Money, jewels? As you
had stated, Is there something else that's there that she
had knowledge of or had possession of, or that her
husband had had possession of, because the evidence didn't necessarily
rest with him, now did it, because they killed him
and cut his head off. So you know, you think, well,
(30:46):
how exactly do you go about determining what it was
they wanted to do with her? Well, if you get
her out there on the water and just imagine, and
I've thought about this so much, I'm thinking, well, they
don't have his head? Do they have his head with
them as they're going down the river and they're taunting
her with it? But you know, in the head has
(31:08):
never found. The head is not like the torso that's
gonna swell. It could very well have gone just straight
down to the bottom because there's kind of a deep
channel in that river. Not deep deep, I mean, it's
not like ocean going vessels go through there, but you
have a central channel in there or or yeah, and
my gosh, that is the most horrific part to this.
(31:32):
But we're, as said, keeping it as as a trophy.
Is that what's going on? Because yeah, that's that's our assumption.
That would be my assumption at least.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
What if because you mentioned the blood or the lack thereof,
you did mention towels being put around his body in
the grudge, But was there sufficient enough blood found in
that grudge to think he was killed there or was
he killed elsewhere?
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Unknown at this point in time, I think that probably
the blood had been soaked up to the point where
the towels and we don't know exactly what the volume
of blood was, you know, that was contained in that
you know, the towel covered area around there. I think
that that is a fantastic question. You know, My thought was, well,
(32:19):
did they take him, you know, did they take him
or them out in the yard to facilitate you know,
this travesty. But if you if you do that, you
run the risk of drawing attention to the neighbors. Because
of the neighbors and there are houses on it. There's
a great view of this house from the water where
you can see the cove and you can kind of
(32:40):
see homes, and they're all big. I think, you know,
the Germis's home alone is well in excess of four
thousand square feet, all right, and it's got multiple layers
to it or multiple you know, levels to it. And
if the other houses are equally that size, and this
is done in the wee hours, you're not going to
hear if other people are asleep, you're not going to
(33:03):
necessarily hear anything as shocking as that. It's not like
you're living in an apartment in New York where the
walls are very very thin. You got somebody on those
and you hear somebody screaming out, or you hear the
thud of a hammer, or you're not in that kind
of proximity. So even though you're in a residential neighborhood,
a very wealthy one, there's not like you're living on
(33:24):
top of one another. So it could have been muffled.
And you've also got this idea that you've got trees
all around this place. It's a beautiful location, and it's
up in the cove and where you could have heard something.
And this is quite fascinating. I urge anybody to do this.
It's ever near a river or a lake, not the ocean,
but when you're there, it's amazing. You can hear the
(33:46):
slightest conversations across water on the other side, you know,
from you can be in a boat in the middle
and you can hear people talking sometimes because the sound
will travel that way. So you would think, well, they
would have to do this undercovered arkments. Perhaps they don't
want to be seen. And here's something else. Because of
the nature of this location, you would have to be
(34:08):
familiar where you could get your boat in. You'd have
to understand these waters in order to be able to
navigate them at night, and you'd have to know where
the dormans lived because houses from the river, houses from
the lake, from the lake or water view don't look
the same as they do on a street view. You
(34:29):
can go buy a street view and you can see
a house. In matter of fact, some of these places,
you couldn't even tell that they're on the water, But
you get on the water, these things are gigantic and
a lot of them look the same. How do you
specifically know that that's where the dormans were? So whoever
perpetrated this had specific knowledge of this location. They knew
when to strike, when to come in there.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
But I think that's a lot of information for us.
It still has them in saught. No, let me ask you,
do they know how his head was cut off? Do
they know what was used to cut his head off?
Speaker 1 (35:00):
No? Not even that hasn't That hasn't been revealed to
this point.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
And I'm thinking was it an axe? Was it a saw?
Was it any number of things that I'm thinking could
have been used. I'm thinking, did they wrap a cord
around his neck and torture him while the church somebody
give us the info popping her in the head with
a hammer while the strangling him and his you know, holy.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah, And so you're thinking about how how in the
world could this have been perpetrated? They his cause of death,
though it's been speculated that you know, he's still got
a collar shirt on, Dave, And one of the things
that varies from surely. You know, keep in mind, Shirley
(35:42):
was beaten to death Dave with this alleged hammer. That's
not how that's not how Russell died. Russell died they think,
they think as a result of a gunshot went to
the head. And you say, well, Morgan, have you lost
your mind? You just said that the head doesn't exist.
(36:04):
You're right, it doesn't. But you know on Russell's body,
you know, he's wearing a collar shirt. Guess what they
found on the collar gunshot residue. And so you got
somebody that shows up with cinder blocks, with rope, a boat,
a hammer, oh and by the way, a firearm. And
so these people, whoever they are, have come prepared to
(36:27):
do great harm. And that's one of the things I'm
thinking about here. So you take the husband out quickly,
you take his head off, and you leave his wife
bound or she's bound, and you beat her with a hammer.
Are you trying to terrify her again? I'm thinking about
(36:48):
leverage here for whatever reason, or maybe just sheer terror.
Maybe it is somebody that just down to their core
hated them, and this is a lot of hatred being
acted out. What would be your purpose of this, and
you know, I do know that that the share did
(37:09):
consult the FBI. My biggest question is, particularly for idle
listeners and myself as well, I'd be very curious do
they bring in behavioral sciences unit and do a profile
on whoever would have done this? There is so much
data here to be able to understand about the nature
of this case. But my understanding day is that we
(37:29):
actually might have something new that has kind of fallen
into our lap. And that's the reason I wanted to
talk about this today. After a decade, after ten years
have gone by.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
How did they find new evidence after ten years? Joseph
Scott Morgan, Yeah, this is this is the fascinating bit
with this case. You know, with the DNA DNA it
is DNA. How do you find it ten years after
the fact.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
That Well, let me tell you what's cool about this.
This tells me that they're still working the case. They're
still working in the case. You know how I mentioned
that Shirley's body would reveal little or nothing. You can
see you know, you can see hammer attack marks because
that's going to be on the bone. You'll see it
on the skin. If you've never seen anybody hit with
(38:22):
a hammer, it literally does leave like a little ring.
If you're hit with the head of the hammer and
it's about side of the quarter and you'll get little
lacerations around the bone will actually plug. You'll see a
plug shape that will be the size of a quarter
manytimes they're struck on skull. But beyond that, if you're
talking about things microscopically or things that cannot be seen
(38:43):
with the unaided eye, that data is probably going to
be gone off of her body, that bit of information.
Not with Russell, though, because as brutal as his death was,
they apparently have discovered after this period of time, and
I can tell you they have taken Russell's clothing, and
(39:03):
we know that they found gunshot residue, or what they
believe is gunshot residue, on the collar of his shirt.
But they continued with his testing. Dave, they would have
been sampling all over the shirt. And here's the thing.
They were able to actually manifest DNA on this thing.
And it's not Shirley's DNA, it's not Russell's DNA, it's
(39:26):
somebody else's DNA. And now this DNA has been sent
off to we know at least two labs, one in Texas,
which I don't know which lab it is in Texas.
I have my suspicions, but I have no inside knowledge
to that. And if it's who I think it is,
(39:46):
these people are pit bulls. The once they sink their
teeth into a case like this, they're going to exhaust everything.
And it is interesting, after all these years, that bit
of evidence that might finally lead to whoever did this
is going to be contained in a tiny little molecule
(40:07):
that we could never ever see with the unaided eye.
It's just there, and it's been there, and it's been
crying out and it's been all these years, and now
they might actually have answers. I don't know, but I
know this. If the perpetrators out there and they've gotten
wind of this, they might need to pack their bags
(40:30):
because they might find a way to catch this individual
finally after a decade. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
is body bags.
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I truly love bodies
of water. For some reason, something clicked in me a
few years ago. I used to like going to the mountains,
mountains where I would find peace and maybe a respite.
(00:32):
But as I've gotten older, water almost has a healing
effect on me. I think that people can understand that
that go and spend time at the beach, perhaps and
you listen to the waves, you feel the sun on
your skin. Some people like going to the lake, as
they say, and just sit and stare at a lake,
(00:54):
maybe in a lawn chair, and they are pretty. But
I've developed a real affinity. A lot of it has
to do with the boat that I have now that's
an old boat. I've developed a real affinity for rivers.
The thing about a river is that you know it
has a beginning and an end, but what's underneath it
(01:17):
is completely different than what's beneath a lake because it's
always changing. Something is just beneath the surface that you
can't necessarily see. And hey, just because it's beneath the
surface one day and one specific location does not mean
it will be in the same place the next day.
Because rivers change much like a life. I'm not the
(01:40):
first person to make that conclusion. Rivers have been compared
to life for years and years our journey, if you will.
There's something peaceful about them, though. I want to chat
a bit with you today about a river that actually
turns into a lake, and then another lake, and then
(02:02):
becomes a river once again. I want to talk to
you about one of the most interesting and tragic, unsolved
double homicides in recent memory in the state of Georgia,
the Dermotts. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body
(02:24):
Backs today. You know we're we're going to talk about
the Cooney River, but it's actually Lake of Coney there
in eastern central Georgia. And boy, what a tale this is.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
It is a tail. It is one of these stories
you tell around the campfire to scare kids. Today we
are talking about the unsolved, free planned, heinous murder of
eighty eight year old Russell Dermott and his bride, eighty
seven year old Shirley Durmot. Sheriff Howard Zille says, quote,
(03:01):
these people committed a heinous crime, depraved act. They need
to be caught.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
And he's right, dude, it's been going on for a
decade ten years.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, And all I'm thinking is as you plan your life,
you know, and you oftentimes we have that picture when
we're younger of finding that partner that will remain with
us for our life, as we raise children and move
through our careers and things like that, and then we
get to that part of life where maybe we're sitting
on the back porch overlooking a lake like a coney
(03:32):
and you marvel at where the lake can take you.
I always I've always liked being around water because it
gives me the idea that, you know, I could get
on that water and go around the world from here.
You know, this is my entry. And in this particular case,
Russell Dermott and Shirley Dermott were at they they were
they're past the eighteen holes in the clubhouse. They're eighty
(03:55):
eight and eighty seven, respectively, and they've got this beautiful
house on the lake. They have been married for sixty
eight years.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Wow, six and eight years.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Still very active. You know. Russell had gone to a
publix earlier in the week, but it was in twenty fourteen.
May first was the day he was at the publics.
They had plans surely, and Russell Durmot had plans to
watch the Kentucky Derby with some friends on Saturday the third,
(04:28):
May third. When they don't show up, you know, the
friends are concerned, they're curious, they're not overly, you know,
not freaking out over it, but yea that they call them.
And you know, when you get to be eighty eight
eighty seven in that area, you know, when you don't
show up for something at somebody's house, you know they
might call and check on you, but they don't really look.
You've earned the right to not do what you want
(04:49):
to not do kind of thing anyway, So they gave
it a couple of days. You know, they were expected
on the third and when nobody could get them on
the phone. It took a couple of days. But on
May sixth a neighbor said, enough's enough. Haven't heard from him.
I've got to find out what's going on with the Dermans,
you know, and I think most of us would be
(05:09):
kind of like that. So he goes over and he
notices the front door is unlocked. Now that's a big
one here. You're in a gaety community, but you still
lock your doors, especially when you're an older couple, but
they're not. The door's open. He looks around the house,
can't see anything in terms of people, doesn't see Shirley,
doesn't see Russell. He goes around looking and finds Russell.
(05:32):
He finds Russell in the in the in the garage.
He's on the floor and he's not well. Joe, there
wasn't a whole lot missing from the house, but Russell's
head was missing, and Sureley is nowhere to be found.
So this guy's studying did Surely and Russell get into
(05:54):
a fight and she whacked his head off and took off.
Because that's what he's finding. Russell Dermand, eighty eight years
old is dead in the garage, head off. But it's
not a real bloody scene, Joe, No.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
It's not. And the reason it's not a real bloody
scene is that the investigators revealed we did find out
this information that the body in the area approximating the
body had been surrounded by towels, Dave, and their supposition
is that the towels are placed down in order to
soak up any kind of blood that was there and
(06:31):
also prevent it from coming under and out of the
garage door.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Wait a minute, they chopped the guy's head off, and
they were concerned about keeping it hidden so no blood
gets under the garage, so nobody from the outside would
notice it.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
That's not something we usually find for murderers who cut
people's heads off.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Dude, I got to tell you that's why. First off,
let's go back to this shrend. Can you imagine that
you know this this you know equally elderly couple, their
friends that had invited them over. They show up and
people that they had broken bread with, people they had
(07:10):
hung out with. You know, they was a it was
a Kentucky Derby party, and you know what's associated with
Kentucky Derby, julibs. And you get to thinking about the
fact that over the years they'd probably had a few
adult beverages with one another and they were going to
go celebrate. Because I like to watch Kentucky Derby just
as much as the next guy, because it's exciting, it's
(07:31):
a unique event. But you show up because you're concerned
about your friends, and you walk in and you have
the headless corpse of this man that you have spent
time with, you've laughed with. You got a lot in
common because as you said, they're in the Sunset years,
They're in the Golden years.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
I got to ask you something because Joe, you mentioned
to me that you have been covering this story since
it happened. That we mentioned as an unsolved murder from
twenty fourteen. But there's new evidence that we're going to
get into. But you actually have been on this since
it started, since the bodies, since Russell's body was recovered
in that garage. Now do you remember what it was
like in terms of news coverage at that time? Were
(08:10):
people talking about, Hey, where's his wife? Did she chop
his head off and run?
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Yeah? I do remember it, and here's why I remember it.
First off, I got to give you the name, and
you know the name, and I consider him to be
in media. One of my closest friends is Vinnie Politan,
who's ONTV. Now, well, when this occurred, HLN was still
a thing, you know, we're talking about twenty fourteen. Oh yeah,
and it had happened during that period. Vinnie had gone
(08:35):
over to a local Atlanta news station by that time,
and almost immediately when he got there. Because Vinnie is
so good at true crime, he might be one of
the best I've ever encountered. First off, he cares about people,
and he actually started a program on this particular channel
called Georgia Mysteries, and this is one of the first
(08:57):
cases he profiled. We did extensive coverage of this, and
I went over and would travel from Alabama. I was
already teaching teaching in Alabama, and I would drive back
and forth to the studio in Atlanta and we'd have
in depth conversations about this case. And then I think
I covered it on Nancy, I covered on a couple
of national news outlets, and I think as a former
(09:21):
investigator and a forensics guy, David, I just knew. I
just knew in my heart of hearts that Okay, six months' tops,
you're going to be able to find this out. You're
going to be able, And man, I've aged a decade.
I don't want to make this about me, but you know,
when you look back in time, you think I've aged
(09:43):
a decade since this occurred. And everybody that's been watching
this thing, you know, kind of play out, and there's
been all kinds of speculation about this. You know, you
think about you know something that you and I A
theme that runs through body Bag with homicides. We always
talk about intimate circle. Well, if you've got an intimate circle,
(10:05):
how big is it and who's involved in it? And
nothing that they really had in the initial offering seemed
as though that it would point back to anything in
the intimate circle. But I know this that some body
or some bodies felt so passionately about this elderly couple
(10:27):
that they felt like that they needed to be eradicated
from the face of the planet. Sixty plus years of marriage.
(10:53):
During that period of time, you have ups and you
have downs. What would compel a wife, Sureley Dermot to
essentially disappear, vanish into thin air, and in her wake
is left the headless corpse of her husband.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Now, Joe, my question for you on this because I
know you were there covering this, so you've got two
different perspectives as the forensic person looking at the facts
of the body, but you're also a human being who
is familiar with the geography of the area. Was there
a common theme to discussions about what they had found.
(11:38):
Was anybody really thinking that Shirley Drmod had done something
to her husband and she had taken off or was
it pretty much assumed that she was a victim. We
just had to find her body because of the case
of mentioning. You mentioned toals being put around Russell Dermand,
so there had to be preparation to prevent people from
(11:58):
finding what was going on there.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah, and look, I'm not saying that an elderly person
is incapable of committing some kind of act like this.
I've seen it happen. I don't know if it's been
this over the top, but the fact that this act
would be committed, and I'm referring to Russell and then
that person essentially vaporizes, They're gone, their vehicles are there.
(12:25):
You got a gated community. How does this happen? And
I think the curious thing about this is that, just
based upon Russell's remains, there is not a tremendous amount
of physical evidence, right, And that's kind of I know
that sounds odd because you're talking about a decapitated body,
(12:46):
but there was not a lot. And I have to
offer this up too, just to let you know, because
a lot of this falls back over into the share.
He's played this pretty close to the vest for ten years, right,
It's not like he's let it loose, okay, and just
but he has made significant efforts. He's reached out to
(13:08):
people in Europe, He's reached out to the news media
in New York and Los Angeles. He's even reached out
to inside addition, you know, to try to get assistance
with this case. He's had eyes on it. He's been
asking for help. There is an FBI reward for this case,
and still nothing. And I think that a lot of
people that have these ideas. I think many people did
(13:31):
early on that Wow, this looked like something that an
organized crime group would have done to them, because it's
one thing to have a headless corpse. Most of the
time you're going to find the head, but you don't
find the head, and also you don't have the wife.
(13:51):
And there were numerous press conferences that were held in
a ten day period starting on the sixth and moving
forward with this case, and that life changed on May sixteenth,
and it wasn't as a result of anything that the
(14:12):
authorities were doing. It happened to be a couple of
fishermen that were fishing out there and May. Just so
folks understand, in southern waters during May, you're at the
tail end of one of the big southern fishing seasons
and that's crappie fishing, and so you've got guys that
will go out and they will fish, and they'll essentially
(14:33):
just put jigs out in the water and jig because
they're trying to catch crappie. And that day almost five
miles away from the Dermot home, which by the way,
had its own boat dock. It sits right on the water.
This house is beautiful. I urge anybody that's never seen
an image of the house to go and check it
(14:53):
out and see how.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
The Google Earth stuff you can see and the pictures
that are available. It's a beautiful place it is.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
And it sits in a cove dave, so the cove
itself is off of the main channel. You've got to
go back out and get into the main channel and
go down and it's almost shaped like a fish hook
where Shirley Durman's body is eventually found by two fishermen.
And it's not like it's just floating there.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, right, Because Russell is dead, no head in the garage.
There's been towels placed around him so the blood won't
go into the garage door, so nobody will see from
the outside. Sureley is gone. And for ten days, they're
trying to figure out what happened. Her body is found
in the water by fishermen, but it wasn't floating. Why
was the body not floating, Joe, And by the way,
(15:43):
five miles away from their house. So she wasn't just
thrown off into the water. No, from the dock.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
No. No, it's when you think about, Okay, here's the
thing you have to consider, and I know that the
investigators did. And this is how the river plays into this.
As I mentioned early on, on damned rivers and all
these rivers there are controlled by thee it's called George
(16:13):
Power George Power Company because they're generating electricity. And so
you have WHATD refer to as if you've never lived
on a river like this. They have dam releases and
from time to time they'll raise and lower the level.
And buddy, let me tell you, if you've never been
on one side of a dam. When it's released, you
have this incredible just force that just kind of you know,
(16:36):
shoots out from this thing and it flows and it
creates its own its own there's already a natural current,
but it just intensifies that, but intensifies it to the
point where you're going to take the body of a
full grown woman that is weighted down with cinder blocks,
mind you, and drag it across that the bottom of
(17:00):
the channel. And oh, by the way, the body makes
a sharp right hand turn and goes back up in
a cove. It ain't happening. It's just that that defies
every every law of hydrology, if you will, it's there's
not enough current in the world. I guess there could be.
Somebody could catch me on that, But to make it
happen like that and the it would have to be perfect,
(17:22):
so perfect circumstances. So my contention is is that whoever
did this. First off, they didn't. They didn't put Shirley
into a car and drive her down to the cove
and toss her off the bank. Uh, that didn't happen,
because how do you account for not having a record
(17:44):
of a vehicle coming and going out of that security area?
How did they get access to it? My contention from
Jump Street has always been that the boat that transported
her body also transported the killer or killers to the dock.
They got off of the boat, perpetrated the crime, and
(18:04):
they killed him, spirited it off with his head. And
let's just continue on this fantastical journey. Here they're beating
her because they have money. They have money. I mean
Russell Durman. I don't know exactly what his net worth was,
but he had sold like a tremendous number of fast
food restaurants, if I'm not mistaken. They had cash, dude.
(18:28):
And how else you know, if you're trying to get
access to money perhaps or accounts, or you want something
from them, what will you do. You tie a little
old lady up in your boat and you bring her
husband's head with you, and you say, you either give
me what I want or this is going to happen
to you. And the thing about it is, I don't
(18:49):
know that anyone ever got anything, but I do know this.
They transported her person down that river. I don't know
what state the body was in when they finally arrived
in that cove, but they dumped her off the side,
and no one to this day even knows where.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Russell's rust's head is. Yeah, it's gone. Let me ask
you the joe. So you're saying that you believe the
perpetrators brought a boat landed at their dock, went into
the house with a plan to extricate money or jewels
or whatever. They kill Russell Dermond and cut his head off,
leave his body in the garage with towels around it
(19:27):
so the blood won't sleep out into the driveway under
the garage door. They then beat Shirley Dermond to the
point where they take her out onto the lake and
they use cinder blocks to weigh her body down. See
I didn't catch the part. I all along thought they're
going to take her body and just they're going to
(19:47):
kill her and throw her into the water and she's
going to drift. But they actually did not plan on
her coming to the surface by any means. They put
cinder blocks on her body after beating her to death.
I don't know. Is there a way you could find
out if she was dead when she went in the water.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
It's very difficult under these circumstances, given well ten days downrange,
yeah you could, And a lot of it has to
do with what the findings were relative to her lungs.
We're hoping that they did die. Tom testing and in
the lungs where you're looking, well, you're looking for the
(20:23):
little sea creatures. Uh, they're these these little skeletal entities
that kind of float around the water and they're unique
species wise, they're unique and you can actually find them
in the airway if if someone takes in a mouthful
of water and it comes into their lungs, well, that
that aquatic environment that they are in, dwelling it, it
(20:45):
has these little uh, these little structures in there, and
so in order to have them within you, if you're
in the midst of drowning, uh, you would have to
uptake those things into your lungs. And you know your lung,
your lung you're starving for oxygen anyway in a drowning event,
(21:06):
if it was a drowning and you're trying to take
in as much and so the lungs would would have
this in there. And that's one of the you know,
we've I think that we've mentioned this before, but there
are these cases where and it always baffles the mind,
where you have these cases of suspected drowning where you
don't know if it was a drowning or if they
were just placed in the water or dieton testing should
have been done from Jump Street in every single one
(21:28):
of these cases where homicides evolved. How much more so
when you've got a lady whose husband has been decapitated.
She's bound and tied to cinder blocks and dumped into water.
What they didn't count on was the fact that when
bodies begin to swell beneath the waves, they expand like
(21:49):
a gigantic balloon. If you've never seen it, it's something
you'll never forget. And they might not rise all the
way to the top, but there is so much air
that the body generates because as the body is beginning
to break down, you've got it at one level, which
is referred to as autolysis, where the body is consuming
(22:12):
itself well, it creates gas and the body expands. That's
why people talk about the bloated dead. And it happens
in dry environments too. You'll find them, you know, that
are swollen. Heat speeds it up. But even beneath the
surface of the water, you'll have bodies that are swelling
like this, and it gives this buoyancy to the body
that it would not otherwise have, and they begin to
(22:34):
float up, and it's so much so that they'll even
drag cinder blocks up with it. You know, something that's
been tied down. The only way you're going to kind
of defeat that is, if the body has been punctured
prior to where air can escape and that sort of thing.
So they have not released a tremendous amount of information
about her status. We do know that she sustained what
(22:56):
seems to be blunt force trauma. You know about her body.
But here's the thing, other than the center blocks, which
forensically you would hope that there would be some way
to tie those back to something. Did they take those
center blocks? As an investigator, you're thinking, did they find
center blocks? I don't know about you, Dave. Do you
have cinder blocks layer in your house? I got in
the back Maybe you've got one or two.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
I have some in the backyard.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Yet, Okay, I do too. So did the Germans have
center blocks? That'd be a question. I would ask what
style of center block is it? Because who was it
manufactured by? If you can kind of suss that out,
And then I think, probably more importantly is what kind
of bindings are you talking about? What kind of rope?
(23:39):
Because rope has to be cut, Dave, and when you
cut rope you leave a tool mark behind on those
freight ends, was there any kind of what's the point
of origin of the rope, Who was it manufactured by,
who was sold by? And was it rope that was
possessed by the Dermans or did this rope? Was this
rope brought with them? And what does that go to? Well,
(24:02):
that goes premeditation, because if you're showing, if you're if
you can demonstrate that this is in fact a rope
that did not belong to the Dermans, your next logical
step is going to be well, perpetrators may have showed
up with it, they were purposed to do something horrible.
They showed up in a stealthy manner on water because
(24:24):
who expects a killer to arrive by boat?
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Only the people that make the movie the TV.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Let me tell you something, if if you and I
had the story and we walked into a producer's office
in Hollywood, they'd say it out, this is ridiculous, We're
not doing this. And a lot of cases we cover
are like that. You just you can't believe that it's occurred.
What are you going to do at that point in time?
How do you determine the origin of these things? But
I can tell you this, I don't think that the
(24:52):
mystery of the disappearance of Shirley Dermot and her death
and the death and decapitation of her husband Russell necessarily
rest in Shirley's remains, but there might be some indication,
some you hope, in this case that might lead to
answers on the decapitative remains of Russell. Well, for folks
(25:32):
that are new to the German homicides, I think the
most obvious question is, well, who's heading up this investigation?
Who's in charge of this thing? Because you know, as
I'd mentioned, it's we're ten years down range, Dave, We're
ten years down range. And look, I know that I
went on about affluence and that sort of thing. At
this location. You have to understand that not all of
(25:55):
Putnam County, which is where this occurred, is affluent. You know,
it's an agri based environment. You know, you have people,
you have farms there, chicken houses and all that sort
of stuff. It's only a smaller portion of popular population
that lives along the shores of kind you know who
could afford it. But there is one person in that county,
(26:17):
in Putnam County, that is in fact the I don't know,
I guess the head constable, as they might say, the
high Sheriff and He's certainly an interesting character, isn't it day.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Well, it's funny when you start looking into a story
like this, and funny strange because you start looking at
the victims and in this particular case, knowing two things
about it. One, it's an unsolved crime involving some very
senior citizens that there's no reason for them to have
died in a horrible way like this. And the second
part is I knew that you had been intimately involved
(26:49):
in the coverage of this since it happened in twenty fourteen.
The sheriff here has been asked on a number of
occasions about the Georgia Bureau of investmentstigation and why he
hasn't reached out to them, And the sheriff has said,
his name's Howard Sheriff, Howard Sill, and he has said
(27:09):
that he's reached out to everybody one time or another,
but he doesn't have a lot of confidence. And I'm
being nice when I say this in the abilities of
the GBI, and he has a number of reasons for
feeling that way, but I do know this. He talked
about some evidence that caught my attention, and I made
some notes to ask you about it. Because Sheriff Smith
(27:31):
said it was incredibly brutal, and when we think about
somebody's head being lopped off, that's about as brutal as
it gets. But they've got the whoever did this, and
I'm going to assume it was more than one person.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
That's my assumption as well. Yeah, all right, Well.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
You've got a man eighty eight years old who has
had his head chopped off, and we have his wife
found ten days later with cinderblocks tied to her body
in the in the lake, and I'm thinking, why did
the perpetrators go to all that trouble with her body
when they've already got the husband dead. They left him
(28:10):
in the garage, they took his head with him because
he can't find the head still ten years later, having
found Russell Durman's head, But why was there a need
to go to all that trouble with his wife?
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Again? I have to think Dave. For me looking at
the case, I have to think that it's a point
of leverage to try to get it. Because even Sheriff
Sills had stated that he doesn't I don't want to
mistate here, but he essentially paraphrasing he doesn't have evidence
that she was killed there, and so that again goes
to my she was killed in the house. Yeah, that
(28:44):
she was killed at that location there, And that goes
to the spilling of blood, right, because I mean, if
you're going to brutalize someone, you would leave perhaps a
significant amount of their blood that would be in addition
to what you were finding with Russell's and you know,
to be able to hype that blood, do DNA on
it and all this sort of stuff. So is he
(29:05):
saying that she was killed on this vessel in the
middle of the lake or was she killed out near
the water and her body was tied down and she
was essentially placed into the platform, which I think is
a boat. I don't know, it could be any number
of boats. Of their speculation relative to Shirley's death is
(29:31):
almost equally as brutal as Russell's cause of death. She
was beaten about the head multiple times. She died of
blunt force trauma. And here's here's the other little bit
to this that's quite striking is that they believe that
she was beaten to death with a hammer Dave.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
And ballpeen hammer or hammer with the claws.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly like you know,
and they haven't.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Sap eighty seven year old woman being to death with
a hammer. That just sounds personal.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Yeah it does. But here's the thing again, I'm thinking,
what could you want from her? What could you want
from her? Well, there been number of people that have
been beaten up with hammers over the years to extract
information for them or to get something from them. It's
not specifically a one and done event. You're going to
have to hit them multiple times? Or are you trying
(30:24):
to draw data out of them? Money, jewels? As you
had stated, Is there something else that's there that she
had knowledge of or had possession of, or that her
husband had had possession of, because the evidence didn't necessarily
rest with him, now did it, because they killed him
and cut his head off. So you know, you think, well,
(30:46):
how exactly do you go about determining what it was
they wanted to do with her? Well, if you get
her out there on the water and just imagine, and
I've thought about this so much, I'm thinking, well, they
don't have his head? Do they have his head with
them as they're going down the river and they're taunting
her with it? But you know, in the head has
(31:08):
never found. The head is not like the torso that's
gonna swell. It could very well have gone just straight
down to the bottom because there's kind of a deep
channel in that river. Not deep deep, I mean, it's
not like ocean going vessels go through there, but you
have a central channel in there or or yeah, and
my gosh, that is the most horrific part to this.
(31:32):
But we're, as said, keeping it as as a trophy.
Is that what's going on? Because yeah, that's that's our assumption.
That would be my assumption at least.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
What if because you mentioned the blood or the lack thereof,
you did mention towels being put around his body in
the grudge, But was there sufficient enough blood found in
that grudge to think he was killed there or was
he killed elsewhere?
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Unknown at this point in time, I think that probably
the blood had been soaked up to the point where
the towels and we don't know exactly what the volume
of blood was, you know, that was contained in that
you know, the towel covered area around there. I think
that that is a fantastic question. You know, My thought was, well,
(32:19):
did they take him, you know, did they take him
or them out in the yard to facilitate you know,
this travesty. But if you if you do that, you
run the risk of drawing attention to the neighbors. Because
of the neighbors and there are houses on it. There's
a great view of this house from the water where
you can see the cove and you can kind of
(32:40):
see homes, and they're all big. I think, you know,
the Germis's home alone is well in excess of four
thousand square feet, all right, and it's got multiple layers
to it or multiple you know, levels to it. And
if the other houses are equally that size, and this
is done in the wee hours, you're not going to
hear if other people are asleep, you're not going to
(33:03):
necessarily hear anything as shocking as that. It's not like
you're living in an apartment in New York where the
walls are very very thin. You got somebody on those
and you hear somebody screaming out, or you hear the
thud of a hammer, or you're not in that kind
of proximity. So even though you're in a residential neighborhood,
a very wealthy one, there's not like you're living on
(33:24):
top of one another. So it could have been muffled.
And you've also got this idea that you've got trees
all around this place. It's a beautiful location, and it's
up in the cove and where you could have heard something.
And this is quite fascinating. I urge anybody to do this.
It's ever near a river or a lake, not the ocean,
but when you're there, it's amazing. You can hear the
(33:46):
slightest conversations across water on the other side, you know,
from you can be in a boat in the middle
and you can hear people talking sometimes because the sound
will travel that way. So you would think, well, they
would have to do this undercovered arkments. Perhaps they don't
want to be seen. And here's something else. Because of
the nature of this location, you would have to be
(34:08):
familiar where you could get your boat in. You'd have
to understand these waters in order to be able to
navigate them at night, and you'd have to know where
the dormans lived because houses from the river, houses from
the lake, from the lake or water view don't look
the same as they do on a street view. You
(34:29):
can go buy a street view and you can see
a house. In matter of fact, some of these places,
you couldn't even tell that they're on the water, But
you get on the water, these things are gigantic and
a lot of them look the same. How do you
specifically know that that's where the dormans were? So whoever
perpetrated this had specific knowledge of this location. They knew
when to strike, when to come in there.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
But I think that's a lot of information for us.
It still has them in saught. No, let me ask you,
do they know how his head was cut off? Do
they know what was used to cut his head off?
Speaker 1 (35:00):
No? Not even that hasn't That hasn't been revealed to
this point.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
And I'm thinking was it an axe? Was it a saw?
Was it any number of things that I'm thinking could
have been used. I'm thinking, did they wrap a cord
around his neck and torture him while the church somebody
give us the info popping her in the head with
a hammer while the strangling him and his you know, holy.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah, And so you're thinking about how how in the
world could this have been perpetrated? They his cause of death,
though it's been speculated that you know, he's still got
a collar shirt on, Dave, And one of the things
that varies from surely. You know, keep in mind, Shirley
(35:42):
was beaten to death Dave with this alleged hammer. That's
not how that's not how Russell died. Russell died they think,
they think as a result of a gunshot went to
the head. And you say, well, Morgan, have you lost
your mind? You just said that the head doesn't exist.
(36:04):
You're right, it doesn't. But you know on Russell's body,
you know, he's wearing a collar shirt. Guess what they
found on the collar gunshot residue. And so you got
somebody that shows up with cinder blocks, with rope, a boat,
a hammer, oh and by the way, a firearm. And
so these people, whoever they are, have come prepared to
(36:27):
do great harm. And that's one of the things I'm
thinking about here. So you take the husband out quickly,
you take his head off, and you leave his wife
bound or she's bound, and you beat her with a hammer.
Are you trying to terrify her again? I'm thinking about
(36:48):
leverage here for whatever reason, or maybe just sheer terror.
Maybe it is somebody that just down to their core
hated them, and this is a lot of hatred being
acted out. What would be your purpose of this, and
you know, I do know that that the share did
(37:09):
consult the FBI. My biggest question is, particularly for idle
listeners and myself as well, I'd be very curious do
they bring in behavioral sciences unit and do a profile
on whoever would have done this? There is so much
data here to be able to understand about the nature
of this case. But my understanding day is that we
(37:29):
actually might have something new that has kind of fallen
into our lap. And that's the reason I wanted to
talk about this today. After a decade, after ten years
have gone by.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
How did they find new evidence after ten years? Joseph
Scott Morgan, Yeah, this is this is the fascinating bit
with this case. You know, with the DNA DNA it
is DNA. How do you find it ten years after
the fact.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
That Well, let me tell you what's cool about this.
This tells me that they're still working the case. They're
still working in the case. You know how I mentioned
that Shirley's body would reveal little or nothing. You can
see you know, you can see hammer attack marks because
that's going to be on the bone. You'll see it
on the skin. If you've never seen anybody hit with
(38:22):
a hammer, it literally does leave like a little ring.
If you're hit with the head of the hammer and
it's about side of the quarter and you'll get little
lacerations around the bone will actually plug. You'll see a
plug shape that will be the size of a quarter
manytimes they're struck on skull. But beyond that, if you're
talking about things microscopically or things that cannot be seen
(38:43):
with the unaided eye, that data is probably going to
be gone off of her body, that bit of information.
Not with Russell, though, because as brutal as his death was,
they apparently have discovered after this period of time, and
I can tell you they have taken Russell's clothing, and
(39:03):
we know that they found gunshot residue, or what they
believe is gunshot residue, on the collar of his shirt.
But they continued with his testing. Dave, they would have
been sampling all over the shirt. And here's the thing.
They were able to actually manifest DNA on this thing.
And it's not Shirley's DNA, it's not Russell's DNA, it's
(39:26):
somebody else's DNA. And now this DNA has been sent
off to we know at least two labs, one in Texas,
which I don't know which lab it is in Texas.
I have my suspicions, but I have no inside knowledge
to that. And if it's who I think it is,
(39:46):
these people are pit bulls. The once they sink their
teeth into a case like this, they're going to exhaust everything.
And it is interesting, after all these years, that bit
of evidence that might finally lead to whoever did this
is going to be contained in a tiny little molecule
(40:07):
that we could never ever see with the unaided eye.
It's just there, and it's been there, and it's been
crying out and it's been all these years, and now
they might actually have answers. I don't know, but I
know this. If the perpetrators out there and they've gotten
wind of this, they might need to pack their bags
(40:30):
because they might find a way to catch this individual
finally after a decade. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
is body bags.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com