They were married over 60 years. Then, over one quiet weekend in May 2014, Russell and Shirley Dermond were killed inside the gated Georgia lake community they’d called home for over a decade. His body was found decapitated in his own garage. Hers was found ten days later, weighted down at the bottom of the lake they woke up to every morning. More than a decade later, despite a sheriff who has never let the case go cold, nobody has ever been arrested — and Russell Dermond’s head has never been found.
A Couple No One Had a Reason to Hurt
Russell and Shirley Dermond were both New Jersey natives, born within about a year of each other, who married on December 15, 1950. By the time they were killed in 2014, they had been married for 64 years — long enough that neighbors described them as the couple everyone assumed would simply outlive everyone else out of sheer stubborn niceness.
Russell served in the Navy during World War Two and went on to graduate from Fairleigh Dickinson University in three years instead of four. He built a decades-long corporate career as an executive with General Time Corporation, the company behind the Westclox and Seth Thomas clock brands, traveling extensively for the company. In his fifties, he pivoted entirely — building and running a chain of Hardee’s restaurants around metro Atlanta that, at its peak, numbered as many as sixteen locations.
Shirley was educated at Barnard College in New York City, at a time when a college education was far less common for women of her generation. She became a homemaker while raising their four children, but by every account remained sharp and socially engaged well into her eighties — a genuinely competitive, tournament-level bridge player, and someone who worked the daily crossword without fail. Those who knew her described her as someone who never gossiped, a detail her son later pointed to as evidence of just how well-liked she was.
The couple raised four children and had nine grandchildren. For much of the 1990s they lived along the Chattahoochee River near Roswell before Russell fully stepped back from the restaurant business. Around 2000, they settled into Great Waters, a gated golf and lake community within the larger Reynolds Plantation development on Lake Oconee — complete with a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course and a guarded entrance. They became regulars at Lake Oconee Community Church and were, by every account, the kind of couple who never missed a neighborhood gathering.
They had already survived one unthinkable loss before any of this. In 2000, their eldest son, Mark, was murdered during a drug deal gone wrong in Atlanta. He struggled with addiction and was killed by someone he encountered through that struggle. His killer was caught, convicted, and remains in prison to this day. Investigators have repeatedly and explicitly ruled out any connection between Mark’s death and what would happen to his parents fourteen years later — leaving this family to carry two entirely separate, unrelated tragedies.
The Weekend They Went Missing
The Dermonds’ home sat on a wooded cul-de-sac on Carolyn Drive, a lakefront property with an attached two-car garage and a private boat dock, overlooking a secluded cove. It was valued at roughly $1 million at the time of the murders. Great Waters was gated, with a guard house at the entrance — the kind of community people move to specifically because it feels safe. Notably, the guard house’s security cameras were not functioning the night of the killings, though investigators have never determined whether the killer knew this or simply got lucky.
Russell was last confirmed alive on May 1, 2014, seen running errands at a nearby Publix. That evening, he and Shirley spoke by phone with one of their sons — by every account, a completely unremarkable call. Investigators would later narrow the killing window to a 24-hour stretch between the afternoon of Friday, May 2, and Saturday, May 3 — the same weekend as the Kentucky Derby party the Dermonds never missed, and never showed up to.
In the days that followed, the warning signs accumulated quietly. Shirley had finished that Friday morning’s newspaper crossword, but the next day’s paper was never touched. Mail piled up, uncollected, in their mailbox. Phone calls went unanswered. It wasn’t until the following Tuesday, May 6, that concerned friends decided to check on the couple in person. They found the front door unlocked.
Inside the attached garage, they found Russell Dermond’s body on the floor, behind one of the couple’s cars, lying in a small pool of blood. He had been decapitated. His head has never been recovered — not that week, not that year, and not in the twelve-plus years since.
There was no forced entry anywhere on the property. No broken locks, no signs of a struggle, nothing overturned. As far as investigators could initially tell, nothing had been stolen. Shirley was nowhere on the property. Her cellphone, keys, and pocketbook were all left behind inside the house, exactly where she would have set them down.
Ten Days on the Water
What followed was a full-scale search operation, built around the hope that Shirley might still be alive. Sheriff Howard Sills told the public directly: “We have no idea where Mrs. Dermond is, and we hope that she’s still alive.” The FBI’s behavioral science unit was brought in to build a profile of a possible suspect. Within about a week, Shirley’s photo and physical description were displayed on digital billboards across the entire state of Georgia.
Investigators quietly pulled the Dermonds’ financial and phone records during this stretch — thousands of pages of documents, by later reporting — and found nothing. No debts, no threats, no indication whatsoever that this was a couple anyone had a motive to hurt. Tips poured in during the search, some more credible than others; at least one came from a self-described psychic who offered investigators a sketch of the possible killer.
Ten days after Russell’s body was discovered, on May 16, 2014, fishermen found Shirley in Lake Oconee, roughly five miles from the couple’s home, near Wallace Dam. She had been weighted down with two 30-pound concrete blocks tied to her legs and was tangled in submerged trees, fifty to ninety feet down. The contrast with how Russell had been left was immediate and telling: he had been left exposed, easily found by anyone who walked into the garage. Shirley had been deliberately hidden — and if not for a couple of fishermen in exactly the right spot, might never have surfaced at all.
An autopsy the next day confirmed blunt-force trauma, two to three deep blows to the head, and established that she was already dead before her body ever entered the water. The discovery also gave investigators their first real piece of insight into how the killer or killers operated: reaching the Dermonds’ home, and disposing of Shirley’s body five miles out on open water, meant the killer had come and gone by boat — likely using the Dermonds’ own private dock, or navigating the lake with real familiarity in the dark.
A Case Built on Contradictions
Leading the investigation from day one has been Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills, a “hometown boy” with, by 2014, roughly 40 years in law enforcement and 18 years as sheriff already behind him. Sills was no stranger to major cases — years earlier, he had led the investigation that dismantled the armed Nuwaubian Nation compound operating in the same county, a case that resulted in cult leader Dwight “Malachi” York being sentenced to 135 years in prison on child molestation charges. Early in the Dermond investigation, Sills also brought in cold-case detectives from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office to help process the scene — reaching out personally to Jacksonville Sheriff John Rutherford, a friend from their time together at the FBI Academy.
Despite that experience, the Dermond case would go on to outlast every other investigation of Sills’s career. “I’ve never had a case go this long,” he said. Early on, he described the pace of the investigation like “plowing hard ground at Rockville with a dull point and a slow mule.”
What has made the case so difficult isn’t just the absence of a suspect — it’s the absence of any coherent motive, built on top of a genuine contradiction in the evidence itself. The manner of Russell’s killing — later understood to involve a gunshot to the head, with the decapitation performed afterward, likely to remove the bullet as evidence — suggested, to Sills, someone experienced and controlled. But the disposal of Shirley’s body undercut that read entirely. “A professional assassin shoots you in the head with a .22 magnum,” Sills said. “They don’t beat a woman with a bat… then tie her feet with inadequate anchoring.” The concrete weights used on Shirley’s body weren’t even sufficient to keep her fully submerged — part of why she was findable at all.
Even outside expertise offered little traction. FBI behavioral profilers advised Sills to look for a “gun and knife enthusiast” — a description Sills himself noted “eliminates just about no one” in rural Georgia. The Dermonds’ own pastor, David Key, offered a different kind of insight into how the community was processing it all: “This kind of evil seems very un-American,” he said, adding that people in the area were less afraid, day to day, than they were simply haunted by what had happened.
Every Theory, On the Record
In the absence of a clear motive, the public filled the silence with theories — some plausible, many not. Over the years, investigators have publicly addressed and ruled out: a home invasion or burglary gone wrong (nothing was stolen); a professional hit (undercut by the disposal of Shirley’s body); organized crime, fueled partly by speculation tying the case to the 2000 murder of the Dermonds’ son Mark (explicitly and repeatedly ruled out); a religious cult, a theory floated by the Dermonds’ own son Keith in an early interview; a decades-old extortion plot involving international extremists; and, according to Sills himself, the single strangest tip his office ever received — that a female alligator, hunting for food for her young, was somehow responsible.
Sills has said he personally investigated the Dermonds’ entire lives for any indication of illegal activity or dangerous associations, and found none: “They worked hard, paid their taxes, went to church.”
One theory Sills invested real time in came in 2021, when a college professor in another state contacted him convinced that Shirley had a secret online romantic relationship that had turned violent. She emailed hundreds of pages of supporting notes. It was investigated and ultimately debunked. Keith Dermond, separately, has floated the idea that the killer or killers might be a serial offender — a theory Sills has quietly ruled out using much the same logic applied to the organized-crime theory: a killer capable of this kind of violence would likely have struck again somewhere, and in over a decade, no comparable case has ever surfaced.
In an unrelated footnote that has nothing evidentially to do with the case, a June 2014 newspaper piece quotes an Atlanta attorney commenting on the reward fund — a man who mentions he spends weekends on a farm near the Dermonds’ community and belongs to the same country club. That attorney was Tex McIver, who two years later would shoot and kill his own wife, Diane, and be convicted of felony murder in 2018. There is no evidence connecting McIver to the Dermond case in any way — it remains simply one of true crime’s stranger coincidences, two unrelated tragedies sharing a name in the paper, years apart.
The closest thing to an actual witness in this entire case is a neighbor who reported seeing a man in the Dermonds’ yard on May 3 — the same weekend of the killings — but couldn’t say for certain whether it was Russell himself or someone else. Sills, at the time, called it “the closest thing we’ve got to a witness.”
The Night Great Waters Panicked
In September 2015, roughly a year and a half after the murders, the same gated community was shaken by an unrelated incident. A man with a history of knife-related run-ins — recently released from prison after a terroristic-threats conviction in another county, and already failing to check in with his probation officer — was spotted outside a Great Waters home at 3 a.m., wearing only red shorts and holding a large knife. He had already slashed the tires of roughly 20 vehicles throughout the neighborhood before deputies tracked him down by the sound of tires popping and tackled him on a nearby golf course.
Sills addressed the community’s obvious fear directly: “There appears to be no connection with the Dermond murders at this time… I doubt it. I really do.” The incident went nowhere as far as the Dermond case was concerned — but it captured something real about what life in that community had become: every strange noise, every unfamiliar face, filtered instinctively through the question of whether it might finally be connected.
A Decade of Waiting
The Dermonds’ three surviving children — Keith, Brad, and their sister — have spent over a decade seeking not vengeance, but understanding. Keith, who has spoken publicly at nearly every anniversary of the murders, has described his own first reaction to learning what happened as disbelief rather than grief: “My first thought was, oh, somebody’s pranking her. This didn’t really happen.”
Over the years, he’s pushed back repeatedly against online speculation tying his father to organized crime — “There’s not a hint of that or any kind of stuff” — reasoning that anyone capable of this level of violence would likely have struck again by now, and no comparable case has ever surfaced. By the ten-year mark, in 2024, he put the family’s exhaustion plainly: “It’s almost to the point now after ten years, it’s almost not even justice you want, like, why? That’s what drives us nuts.” He has also pointed out something that’s easy to lose in the horror of the case — that his parents weren’t near the natural end of their lives. “They were in their late 80s, but they were healthy. My mom was winning bridge tournaments and doing crossword puzzles… They could still be alive right now.”
Brad Dermond, the younger son, gave an interview in 2026 alongside his wife Erin, still visibly emotional twelve years on: “From the moment that we were notified of this, we were in total horror.” All three surviving children were polygraphed during the investigation — at least two of those tests administered directly by the FBI — and all three passed, ruling out the family itself at every step.
The Case Is Moving Again
For most of the past decade, “the investigation continues” functioned as little more than a formality. That’s changed in recent years. In 2021, seven years into the case, Sills told reporters investigators were analyzing highly technical data — later clarified to be cellphone location data — attempting to identify anyone who had been near both the Dermond home and the location where Shirley’s body was recovered at the time of the murders.
In February 2024, Sills personally delivered several pieces of evidence to a forensics lab for touch DNA testing — a technique capable of detecting skin cells left behind through casual contact with an object. At least one item, a piece of Russell’s own clothing, tested positive for DNA belonging to an unidentified individual. “It’s the best evidence we have developed in 10 years,” Sills said. That same week, the FBI reaffirmed its $20,000 reward for information in the case, with investigators hoping to run the DNA sample through both a national felon database and broader forensic genealogical matching.
By 2026, an FBI agent working the case indicated that the DNA lead and the earlier cellphone data were finally converging. When asked directly whether someone connected to this case should be nervous, his answer was a single word: “Yes.”
The Case Remains Open
Twelve years on, Russell Dermond’s head has never been found. No suspect has ever been publicly named. But for the first time in this case’s history, there is a real, physical trace of the person responsible — and a sheriff who has never stopped chasing it. As Sills put it in 2019, “It’s an embarrassment to me really, if you want to know the truth about it… whoever did this is still out there. And whoever did this will do anything.”
If you have any information about this case, contact the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office at 706-485-8557 or the FBI at 404-679-9000. A reward is still active.
This case is covered in a two-part episode of Crime Clueless. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Start with part one on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts!
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Resources:
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