The Lake Oconee Murders : Part 2

Part 2 of the series premiere of Sworn. Host Philip Holloway explores the unsolved murders of Russell and Shirley Dermond.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Place your left hand on the bay Bible and race
your right hand and repeat after me. I solemnly swear
jury trying it defended, not scared this weekend in Ferguson
and around the country. It makes no sense. If it
doesn't fit, you must have quit. Judge, you are the
last line of reason in this case. Every one of

(00:32):
those took out all the topothis and we're sworn to
uphold of the Constitution. From Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, this
is sworn. I'm your host, Philip Holloway. Sworn is brought
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Every humans being on the face of this earth wants

(01:57):
to know why I haven't us. Hey guys, Philip Holloway,
your host of Sworn. You're listening to part two of
the Lake of Coney murders. In the last episode, we
got the chance to talk to a reporter for the
Atlanta Journal and Constitution who has covered this case for

(02:20):
the past three years. We also talked to an expert
in solving cold cases and Putnam County Sheriff Howard Seals,
who is still in charge of this case. Shareff. Seals
offered to open up his case files for the very
first time ever to anyone outside law enforcement, exclusively for
the Sworn podcast. So Payne Lindsay and I took a

(02:40):
drive out to Lake o Coney to meet with Sheriff Seals.
The first thing he did will show us a detailed
power point presentation with never before seen photographs from the
crime scene. And today we're gonna share with you what
we learned from seeing what was in those case files firsthand.

(03:06):
We've used this with other law enforcement agencies, only this
has never been shown to the public. We brought another
law enforcement officers to look at this scene and stuff
like that to get their ideas and things of that nature.
So this is the first time anybody outside of law
enforcement's ever seen that. This is the Derman residence on
Caroline Drive and the Great Waters section of Reynolds Plantation

(03:30):
here in Putnam County, out on Lake o'coney. This is
the mailbox on the entrance to the house. This house really,
as you can see, ken't be seen from the street
very much other than the view of the garage basically
from the end of the cul de sac. It sits
at the back of a cove. It was really secluded.
It was at the end of a cul de sac.

(03:50):
There was a neighbor only on one side. It was
a fairly normal house, and there really wasn't anything about
the residents itself that caused it to stand out. This
is a walkway from the house down to the dock
and the lake itself. When were these pictures taken? These
twictures are taken the day of the day the bodies
were discovered, which was the Tuesday. We think this happened

(04:14):
on about Saturday, made the third or fourth of two
thousand and fourteen. The bodies were discovered the following Tuesday,
and so these photographs were taken the day of the
bodies were discovered. This doormat was originally of interest to us,
and that staying there was obviously of interest to us,
but it turned out not to be looks reddish in color,

(04:36):
but it's not. It's not blood and the people who
found them were on the ports there when we drove up.
Wasn't founder. These are two friends. So there's another couple
of married couple that were contemporaries of theirs. I don't
think they were quite as old as the Dermans. The
Dermans were Mr. Derman was his wife was seven. This

(04:58):
is a Kentucktive derby party that was within the gates
of this community and they didn't show up, and one
of the couples who were friends of them called over
there to you know, see if they were okay. And
then they didn't live right next door, but they only
lived two miles away, I guess at the most. And
they didn't answer the phone, you know, And then they
called back on Monday. A couple of times they didn't

(05:19):
answer the phone, and then on Tuesday morning they decided
they'd ride over there. And so they were on the
porch and they had gone in the kitchen door which
off that screen porch, which was not locked. They walked
into the house. They were familiar with the home, and
they went and opened the door from the kitchen into

(05:40):
the garage. Look saw both cars were there. Mr Durbin
drove a Lincoln town Car, older model Lincoln town car,
and his wife had Alexis suv. Saw both the cars there.
Soon they were there and then went around inside the house,
walked all through the house looking for him, didn't find

(06:00):
and then eventually the man walked down into the garage.
The garage is a little lower about three steps down
from the kitchen. This is literally as it was, and
if you were to have opened the front of the garage.
Would you have been able to see Mr Dermot Absolutely?
Did it look like anybody had been through the rest

(06:20):
of the house. No, it did not. There was no
The house to a great extent looked almost staged. As
you will see we're looking at now a picture or
a closer picture of the dock. Was there anything like
blood on the dock or any trace evidence that you're
able to find. No. Absolutely, canaver dogs brought in or

(06:41):
anything like that. Ever, dogs were brought in. We searched
that cove. We were brought in the most sophisticated equipment
we could get for viewing on the bottom of the lake,
and we searched this cove extensively. This cove, we looked
at every inch of it. We drug it initially. If
you know what I'm talking about with drag hooks. As
a former police officer and prosecutor and criminal lawyer, I've

(07:03):
made a living out of reviewing police workings. SHEF. Sills
really did seem to have covered all of his bases.
He scoured the entire surrounding lake and the cove outside
the Dermans residence. They brought in cadaver dogs. They even
traced Mr Derman's last steps right down to his grocery
list for the day. We know exactly what time he

(07:24):
went into the grocery store. I've got video of him
going into the grocery store. I know exactly what time
he got those prescriptions. I got video of him. But there,
I know exactly what time he went to the bank,
and have video and there. The last time anybody saw
them for sure was on Thursday, Thursday afternoon, he went
to the bank, He went to Public's, got those prescriptions filled,

(07:46):
got a loaf of bread and some cucumbers. They had
alarm system that was functional, but obviously there was no
alarm that went on at the time that the larm
was not activated at this time. That's when you walk
into their kitchen and right for s area, that's exactly
what you see. It looks like really just anybody's garden variety,

(08:07):
living room, kitchen area. It reminds me a lot of
like my house. Would. I see some newspapers out on
the counters, and that's the local eating and paper right there.
Pieces of mail on the other counter. There was some
mail that wasn't to be mailed on Netflix. Those medications
you see on the counter. Mrs Derman was scheduled to
have cataract surgery the next Weekursday was the last time

(08:30):
he was seen, and he was found on a Tuesday.
Tell us what happens to a human body if it's
dead for four days, Well, the decomposition begins immediately. Now,
we were, in some respects we were fortunate in this
situation because that garage is air conditioned and climate controls,
so we didn't have the same level of decomposition we

(08:53):
would have had if it had not been. Did that
help you determine with any degree of accuracy how long
they had been dead before they were discovered. It was
consistent with the time frame we believe they were killed.
I'm pretty sure this happened on Saturday. We have reasons
for that one. There was some email on that laptop

(09:14):
that was sent. We know what time it was sent
on Friday, and Mrs Dermot had completed You'll see it
later in one of the other slides. She had completed
the crossword puzzle in the USA Today newspaper. Now the
Saturday us A newspaper actually comes on Friday, Friday afternoon,
and her family says she normally did it in the morning.

(09:37):
Decomposition the newspaper email on the laptop. All of those things,
narrator winded down pretty much to Friday or Saturday. Despite
the lack of traceable forensic evidence other than the headless
body of Mr Dermott, she Our Sills was able to
determine that the approximate time of his death was Saturday,

(09:59):
May the third. But here's the thing to remember. The
Putnam County Sheriff's office did not receive any nine one
one call about this until Tuesday, May the sixth, that's
three days later. That door, if you go kitchen, that
door there that you see open, that was not open
when the people found them. They left it open when

(10:19):
they discovered the body. So that brings up a point
that I want to talk about. We try to protect
crime scenes from people entering and leaving crime scenes. In
this situation, before you were able to secure the crime scene,
there was at least some degree of contamination in this
particular crime scene. There was so little things disturbed here,

(10:42):
you know what I'm talking about, things like that that
the fact that they had walked out there did not
jeopardize anything much from a forensic standpoint. We put enough
fingerprint potton in that house to fill the back of
a pickup truck and contrary to what people think about,
you know, my forties, replush your career, you know, make cases.
I saw with the finger print one. Trust me, we

(11:05):
pulled a lot of prints, but as far as identifiable print,
our no, it's quality print, no, sir. You know these
people were wealthy but frugal. If your back up one.
They were using two thousand and three calendars for notes.
Since we're narrating this, this is a like a three

(11:27):
ring or two rings sort of flipped calendar. It's it's
two thousand three and it's the data on it's January.
So we're now in and they're using this old calendar
to write themselves notes. This has a person's name and
the phone number on it. We noticed small notes that
they had written to one another as reminders of things

(11:49):
that they were gonna do. One thing stood out, and
that was a man's name and a man's phone number.
As it turned out, that name and number belonged to
a concrete tractor. Mr Dermot had planned on fixing a
crack in their driveway, but he never got the chance
to call the man. Sheriff still said that the concrete
man had been interviewed and subsequently vetted and was ruled out.

(12:13):
As you can see the house, it is just it's
macumaculate in every way. Nothing is disturbed in any manner.
There wasn't a single thing that seemed to be out
of place at all. Just look at I mean, it's
just immaculate. There was money in the credit cards, money
in the person. Any evidence of anything being stolen, not

(12:34):
that we know of. You know, there's a nice watch
laying there, like a Rolex or something. There are rolex
is there. The closets are immaculate. Uh, this is going
down the stairs. Now. This is the den area on
the ground floor. Huge liquor cabinet full of all kinds
of whiskey. If this was simply a burglary gone wrong,

(12:55):
you would think there would be some signs of a
disturbance and of course some stolen property. We saw jewelry,
we saw expensive things just laying around. There were rolex
watches there, but nothing seemed to have been taken. They
led a very simple life, actually a very simple life
all things considered. She played bridge in the local bridge club.

(13:16):
They went to a nondenominational community church. We had yet
to see any signs of a struggle or even a
murder for that matter. But as pictures of the Derman's
garage began to appear on the screen, I could tell
this was getting more ominous, and share Sells prepared us
for what was about to come. The garage was a

(13:40):
little bit of a lower level, and so when the
people who found them, when they first opened that door,
that's what they saw, which is nothing. You see the
two cars, and you see the garage's doors closed. The
cars looked very clean. It's a hell of a lot
cleaner than my garage is in my house. When the
man he found Mr Derman's body, when he saw that,
he walks on down and as you will see, this

(14:04):
is what you'd see. Oh my, this is I just
I'm speechless. When I walked back there and I saw
that body there, and then I didn't see the head.
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So what we're seeing here from from my perspective is
a corpse. I see a a short sleeved shirt, looks

(15:55):
like cotton. Uh, it looks like short pants with a
design on them, barefoot. I see no head. I see
that it is not exactly a a sever wound, as
if you would expect someone to have been executed with

(16:16):
like a guillotine style. It looks more like of uh,
something that was taken off in a much more crude manner.
I see some towels laying to the side of the
left arm, and I see lots of blood and dried
blood what appears to be dried blood. Uh around the body.

(16:39):
It looks like the body maybe laying on top of
a bathrobe. Is that, right, sheriff? And I see off
to the right, is that a pair of shoes or
flip flops, slippers slippers? Looks like the right foot has
been dragged through a pool of blood for maybe a

(17:00):
foot or so foot in a half. And it's very
obvious from looking at this picture that that is not
where he died. And the towels off to the left
looked like they appeared to be there for maybe the
purpose of keeping the blood from flowing out underneath the

(17:20):
garage door. That it was clear to me that's what
it was, because you can see the way the blood
when it came out of the body as it drained
out there. Uh it Uh, they thought that it would
go underneath the door and would be exposed. I think
at some point in time, maybe the body was propped
up against that car, fell back against the dropped against

(17:43):
that car. I see here now we're looking behind the
link in which was his car, and this, this is
a few feet away from the body. It looks like
a um pool of blood there that's, you know, roughly
the size of a head, and it looks like maybe
a head was placed there and blood drained out of it.

(18:06):
It's bigger, it's bigger than a head. But something light
that was put there on the floor. Obviously it was
uh you'll see these other blood spots that don't they
don't have tails. Because of the condition of the blood
surrounding Mr. Dermot's body in the garage, it was apparent

(18:28):
that he was decapitated after he died. And the reason
we know that is because if you sever someone's head,
you're going to sever some major arteries that go to
the brain, and when the heart's beating, it will literally
spurt blood for several feet away from where the arteries
are severed. If he'd have been alive, it would have

(18:49):
been like a garden hose. I mean, I've seen hogs.
I mean I've seen animals flattered, and it's quite quite
dramatic and that's not present. You see. It was a
very neat cut around the neck, almost like they used
the T shirt as a guide. There was no such
arterial spurting evident whatsoever. It was just like blood was

(19:11):
simply draining out, as if water from a bathtub. After
looking at these gruesome and savage pictures of Mr Derman's
headless body, the sheriff showed us Mrs Derman's body. This
is Mrs Derman's body, as I just literally picked that
body up and put it on the front of that
but personally, well sure who else would. Keep in mind,

(19:37):
she had been missing for ten days. Ten days after
Mr Dermant's body was discovered, two fishermen found her floating
in the lake about six miles away. I already had
my patrol boat, was already out there. I got this
boat from the n R because I had a low
free board, if you know, on tomback, because I knew
I had to pull this body up and I needed
something as low as I could get to. Uh. And

(19:59):
there's Ms Derman's body, fully closed, typical attire, shoes on shoes,
tied legatures around the feet right that's where it was tied.
And that miss bag you see to the right contained
two thirty pound concrete blocks. Whoever did this had tied
cement blocks around her legs. They had tied her feet together,

(20:22):
and she sunk to the bottom of the lake in
about sixty ft of water. The body came up, faced
down and lodged up against one of these trees, so
it actually caught on it like this. Up until this
point in time, I was working under the likely assumption
that Mrs Dermott had been abducted. Now, one of two

(20:45):
things happened up until this time Ms Derman had been abducted,
that's what we thought. Or number two, um Miss Derman
was a party to the crime and killing her husband.
Now that was highly unlikely, given their length of marriage
and a age and things like that. I was pretty
confident that eighty seven year old woman didn't cut that
man's head off. But she wasn't anywhere to be found.

(21:09):
But the fact that our purse, their car was there,
and stuff like that, we we were, we were very aggressively.
We had our picture on billboards, electronic billboards all over
the country, UH lookouts and things like that, uh looking
for her, working her working at as at least when
this we stopped that investigation. We stopped what we were doing,

(21:32):
and now we're back to not thinking the perpetrator has her.
Whoever sent her to the bottom of the lake clearly
didn't think she would ever come up, but she did.
And the reason that she did is that when the
human body decomposes, the cells began to release gases, and
the gases build up underneath the skin and the body

(21:52):
becomes bloated. It looks like a large balloon, and eventually,
even with sixty pounds of weight, the body will rise.
I'm fairly confident that her body was disposed of by water.
The location where it was disposed of, where it was recovered,
you couldn't get to it by land, and there was

(22:13):
no bridge or anything. She had had radical masectomy, and
she had a prosthetic breasts. All of that was on.
She was fully clothed, She had dressed for her day.
She had on a shirt, she had pants, her shoes,
Her shoes were tied. She had clearly dressed for her day,
and whatever happened to her was clearly something that she

(22:35):
wasn't expecting. When you put all this together, what it
tells us is that at the time of the murder,
Mrs Derman was likely awake and that this did not
happen in the middle of the night, but it likely
happened during the day. Tell me this, Sheriff. Do we
know if Ms Derman was alive when she was put
in the lake? She was? How do we know that

(22:56):
pathological certainty? There's no She did not die as a
result of drowning. How did she die results of trauma?
Blunt force trauma to the head. One other key thing
to understand about Mrs Derman is that she did not
die from drowning. We saw photographs that are seared in
my brain forever. She suffered multiple deep blows from a

(23:19):
blunt instrument to her head. Two things going on here,
and that's why that's why I've always thought there's certainly
more than one person. We got two different scenes going
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(24:55):
be sure, by the way, to tell them that I
sent you. Philip Holloway from Sworn. There seems to be
at least two different things going on here, two separate

(25:17):
murders and their bodies in different places. The sheriff seemed
very confident that there was more than one person involved
in these murders, and I agree with him. After the
sheriff showed us this PowerPoint presentation, which was a broad overview,
we stepped back into his office for a little while
and he shared some more candid thoughts on what kind
of person or persons was responsible for these murders. The

(25:41):
professional killer will come in your house with a twenty
two or twenty two man and shoots you dead. Leave.
They're not gonna cut your damn head. All. There's more
than one person here. You see what I'm saying. There's more.
There's there's more than one. I think it's more two.
Every humans being on the face of this earth wants

(26:01):
to know why I haven't saw. The Great Waters community,
where the Dermans lived, is a fairly affluent and wealthy neighborhood.
To get inside, you have to go through a gate
where you're greeted by an attendant. Unless you have some
business being there or you're a resident yourself. You can't
simply stroll into this neighborhood. Unfortunately, during the time of

(26:23):
these murders, the security cameras at the front gate were
not working. Apparently a recent lightning storm fried the computers
just a few days before the murders. There had been
a storm eighteen days or twenty eight days earlier, I
can't remember. There had been a storm. When you went
into the guard check it was one of those situations
where you saw it on the wall, you know, but

(26:43):
it had recorded, and it had recorded since the day
of that storm. Next up, Sheriff Sells offered to drive
us out to the derman's property in the Great Waters
community of Lake o'coney. So we piled in his truck
and we headed towards the lake Yea and he knows
a lot of people hello today. During the car ride

(27:11):
share off, Seals opened up a little more with us
and he shared more details about this crime. If the
head was taken to the high evidence share, what kind
of evidence could potentially be ben or on that head.
If you're a fight and you're hitting somebody, your hands,

(27:33):
they're gonna get cut. If that's just a fact, and
so you know, maybe your blood's on that person's head,
you know, or maybe you shot him. Maybe there's a bullet,
Maybe you've got some weird odd gun that not many up.

(27:54):
Talked to Georgia Power, talked to Hydraulo just at the
University of Georgia. Everybody said that that body wouldn't have
moved once you started coming up more than a hundred
yards or so. After having multiple experts throughout the world
weigh in on the conditions of the lake, the water's
current hydrologists, they determined that her body could not have

(28:18):
floated downstream for five and a half or six miles.
So this means that whoever disposed of Mrs Dermant's body,
they did so by way of a boat the Great Waters.
They we're coming up on a man guarden house share Seals,

(28:48):
thank you. This is a very planned community. Even though
Sheriff Seals is left with few leads in this case,
there is one vital piece of information that he had
been holding back from the public for a while, and
I witnessed account. Do you think who they saw is
involved in this? And that was in broad dayline. I do.

(29:14):
A neighbor happened to see a white male walking around
the Derman's property during the day on Saturday, and that
was the day that the Dermans were likely murdered. Give
him the publicity that surrounded this case, anyone who was
there for a legitimate reason would have come forward that's

(29:39):
the guy right there. I mean we we interviewed over
two people simultaneously here one button. I brought in twenty
FBI agents and how many detectives from maybe sixty Sheriff
Sales believes that this person is, without a doubt involved
in these murders. They he said, white pick up. There's

(30:01):
a long back there. You see what I'm saying. And
there's a view back in the woods. You can see
the Derman house from back there. Not clearly now. I
want to stress to you not kind of like looking
here and see this house over here, see that foliage.
If somebody was walking through there right now, you could
see them right the lady, It's like, as I said,

(30:22):
it's not what it's nice. What she couldn't see that
was important, you know. That made me know she was
telling the truth. I need. The key to solving this
is identifying the person to see in that yard. Certainly,
the key to solving this is I need somebody that
knows something to give me a call. I've talked to

(30:46):
anybody anywhere any time about this game. You've got two,
two or more people out here, in my opinion, that
committed a heinous crime, and by God, They need to
be caught, They need to be tone. To this day,

(31:13):
the Lake of Coney murders is by far one of
the most frustrating and perplexing unsolved murder cases in America.
The Sheriff sincerely hopes that by keeping this case alive
in the public and in the media, that someone somewhere
out there may have information and will come forward. If
anyone out there has any information about the murder of

(31:36):
Mr and Mrs Dermott, please contact local law enforcement or
the Putnam County Sheriff's Office at seven oh six four
eight five eight five seven. My d is gonna seek
death penalty. I can tell you that right now this
is what we do, the death penalty and Putnam again,
the Mugi judicial circuit. We know how to do with
death penalty and uh that what will be on the

(31:59):
table and the kicks. Sworn is produced by Tenderfoot TV
in Atlanta. Story production and sound design by Payne Lindsay.

(32:22):
Executive producers Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. And if you
have it yet, please check out our sister podcast, Up
and Vanished that follows the investigation into the disappearance of
Georgia High School teacher and beauty queen Tara Grinstead. Up
and Vantaged is available now on Apple Podcasts. Sworn is
mixed and mastered by Resonate Recordings. If you're in the

(32:42):
market for podcast production, go to Resonate Recordings dot com
to get your first episode produced for free. I'd like
to give a very special thank you to Putnam County
Shriff Howard Sills, and to John Dawes, and to Christian Boone,
and last but not least, I want to thank you
the listeners for making Sworn the number one podcast on

(33:04):
iTunes before it was officially released. If you haven't already,
please head over to iTunes now to subscribe, rate, and
review Sworn, and make sure you check us out online
at sworn podcast dot com and follow us on social
media at Sworn podcast on Twitter and Instagram. And you
can follow me your host, Philip Holloway at phil Holloway

(33:25):
e s Q. On Twitter shot