Keith Dermond has never forgotten the frantic phone call from his sister. Their father had been murdered, and their mother was missing.
In his sister’s distraught state, he could barely make out what she was saying.
“My first thought,” he recalls, “was, ‘Oh, somebody’s pranking her. This didn’t really happen.’”
VIDEO: Son says he has ‘sliver of hope’ after best evidence in 10 years revealed in Lake Oconee killing
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Ten years have passed since their octogenarian parents, Shirley and Russell Dermond, were slain at Lake Oconee in what has become one of the region’s most baffling and talked-about cases.
Grim details of their father’s beheading, their mother’s violent death — her body, dumped in the lake, but later found — and whatever else may have unfolded at the Dermonds’ $1 million waterfront home has confounded investigators. No arrests have been made. Russell Dermond’s head never turned up.
Shirley Dermond was 87, a skilled bridge player. Russell Dermond, 88, had been a clock company executive in the New York City area. In the late 1980s, he was transferred to Georgia, where he took an early retirement and then, living near Roswell, ran a chain of Hardee’s restaurants.
Sometime around the year 2000, the Dermonds, who had nine grandchildren, moved to the country club community at the lake, about 10 miles south of I-20 in Putnam County.
“My dad loved golf, and they kind of wanted to get out of the city,” Keith Dermond, 65, says.
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The death of Russell Dermond, 88, and the disappearance of his wife Shirley, 87, baffled Putnam County investigators.
The probe into the Dermonds’ deaths, which happened sometime during the first weekend in May 2014, has developed few clues and no known viable suspects.
“For my brother and sister and I,” Keith Dermond says, “it’s almost to the point now after 10 years, it’s almost not even justice (we seek). It’s that closure that you want, like, ‘Why?’ That’s what drives us nuts, that something so horrible can happen and you don’t even know why it occurred. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
On Friday, after revelations first reported this week by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that possible DNA evidence has been detected, the FBI officially announced a $20,000 reward for information in the case. Investigators hope the trace of DNA can be entered into a national database of convicted felons and also sent for wider genealogical matching.
“The investigative team did an amazing job in processing the scene, and of course we were part of that,” Andy Smith, an FBI agent based in Macon, says.
“They did a great job with interviews. We’ve polygraphed everyone. We’ve gone down all these different roads. But from the incident itself, Eatonton and Putnam County and the Lake Oconee area is just a wonderful community. … You hate for a community to deal with something like this. And that’s part of the thing that drives us.”
Christian Boone
Christian Boone
Meanwhile, Keith Dermond holds on to hope that someday he’ll know why the killings happened.
He laughs off far-fetched theories, mostly from online commenters and amateur sleuths, suggesting his father was involved in organized crime. “There’s not a hint of that or any of that kind of stuff,” he says.
He figures that whoever went to such lengths to kill his parents would seemingly have, by now, struck again.
“It’s just very weird,” he says, “that there’s no other crime that even comes close to fit that pattern whatsoever.”
Dermond, who lives in Florida, senses that some day the culprit, if not here then in the afterlife, will receive “the deserved punishment.”
“It’s not for me to exact revenge or whatever, but I’d just sure love to know what the heck (happened) to two people that just didn’t deserve that at all,” he says. “Just to take them. Yeah, they were in their late 80s, but they were healthy. My mom was winning bridge tournaments and doing crossword puzzles. And they were avid readers and socially active. They could still be alive right now.”
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