Russell and Shirley Dermond were an elderly couple, living in a gated community near Lake Oconee, northeast of Eatonton, Georgia. The pair had married in 1950 and had four children and nine grandchildren. Russell had owned several Hardee’s restaurants in Atlanta before retiring in 1994.
On May 1st of 2014, Russell was spotted in Eatonton running errands, and later in the day, both he and his wife spoke with their son Brad on the phone. It was the last time anyone would see or interact with the couple while they were alive.
The Dermonds were supposed to attend a Kentucky Derby party with their friends on Saturday, May 3rd, but failed to show up. Concerned, the friends attempted to contact the couple, but got no reply, and eventually went to the Dermond home on Tuesday, May 6th, to make sure they were all right. They found the house unlocked, and went inside.
To their horror, the friends discovered an unbelievably gruesome scene. Eighty-eight-year-old Russell Dermond was lying dead and headless in a small pool of blood in the garage behind one of the family cars. Police arrived and conducted a thorough search of the rest of the house, but could find no trace of Russell’s head.
Even more alarmingly, eighty-seven-year-old Shirley Dermond was also nowhere to be seen, and detectives feared that she may have been abducted.
For ten days, extensive searches of the area yielded nothing, but finally, on May 16th, Shirley’s body was found by a fisherman, floating in Lake Oconee. Her killer had attempted to weigh her corpse down with concrete blocks, but had not been entirely successful. An autopsy concluded that Shirley had died from several savage blows to the head, administered by a blunt object.
Authorities were completely baffled as to the motive behind such a bizarre and grisly killing. Although it was later discovered that their eldest son Mark had himself been murdered in Atlanta fourteen years before while attempting to purchase crack, there was no evidence whatsoever linking that long-ago crime to the slaying of Russell and Shirley Dermond.
Because there was gunpowder residue found on the collar of Russell’s shirt, investigators theorized that the killer or killers had likely murdered Russell by shooting him in the head, then decapitated him to prevent the bullet being found. Although this seems a solid hypothesis, police also admit they have no idea why anyone would have targeted the octogenarian couple at all, and made clear that robbery was clearly not the reason for the slaying, as nothing was taken from the home.
In May of 2023, authorities announced that they were looking into new DNA evidence that had been obtained from the scene, but didn’t elaborate any further. The horrific killing of Russell and Shirley Dermond, therefore, remains an open investigation.
Crime Immemorial 