The Lake Oconee Murders : Part 2

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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 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. 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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,

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 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, 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 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 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

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. 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 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, 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.

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 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 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. I was scared that I was gonna be sitting there

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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 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. 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 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

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 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. 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

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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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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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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,

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. 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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

table and the kicks. Sworn is produced by Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta. Story production and sound design by Payne Lindsay. 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 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

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 e s Q. On Twitter shot