Hell and Gone Murder Line: The Dermonds

0:46Speaker 1:School of Humans. Helen Gone Murder Line actively investigates cold case murders in an effort to raise public awareness, invite witnesses to come forward, and present evidence that could potentially be further investigated by law enforcement. While we value insights from family and community members, their statements should not be considered evidence and point to the challenges of verifying facts inherent in cold cases. We remind listeners that everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

1:18Speaker 1:Nothing in the podcast is intended to state or imply that anyone who has not been convicted of a crime is guilty of any wrongdoing. Thanks for listening.

1:30Speaker 2:On Tuesday, May 6, 2014, neighbors of 88-year-old Russell Dermond and his 87-year-old wife Shirley drove down the manicured streets of Great Waters. an upscale, highly secure gated community in the town of Eatonton on Lake Oconee in central Georgia. Russell had been a successful executive, and after a lifetime of working hard, he and Shirley had retired to the area 20 years earlier. Russell and Shirley lived at the end of Carolyn Drive, on a cul-de-sac overlooking a peninsula.

2:03Speaker 2:The neighbors were checking on Russell and Shirley because three days earlier, the couple had been expected at a Kentucky Derby party. but they never showed up. The Dermons were retired, socially active, and spent most of their free time playing golf and bridge. They weren't the type of people to just disappear. But by Tuesday, with no one able to reach them, their friends were growing deeply concerned. The neighbors, a couple, walked up to the house to take a look around. According to the Macon Telegraph, they noticed that some newspapers were piled up in the driveway. At some point, they stepped into the garage. That's where they found Russell's dead body, sandwiched between a Lexus SUV and a Lincoln Town Car, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The neighbors called 911 at 9.56 a.m. Shirley was nowhere to be seen.

2:56Speaker 2:But Russell's body wasn't the only horrific thing their friends discovered. Russell had been decapitated, and his severed head was gone. I'm Katherine Townsend. Over the past eight years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I've received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone murder line. at 678-744-6145. That's 678-744-6145.

3:33Speaker 2:Or you can send us a message on Instagram at hellandgonepod. This is Hell and Gone Murder Lines. This was a shockingly brutal crime for a peaceful lakeside community. The first homicide reported there in eight years. Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills led the investigation. He was sworn in in 1996, and by the way, Ann is still leading it to this day. In May of 2014, Sheriff Sills was facing a grisly murder scene and a missing wife. Shirley's phone, wallet, and car keys were still at the scene. Russell and Shirley had been together forever. They met and started dating when she was around 13 and he was 12. They were married for over 60 years. Russell was a World War II Navy veteran from Hackensack, New Jersey, who went into business after the war. He worked as an executive for a clock company, but ended up owning several successful fast food franchises, including Wendy's and Hardee's restaurants. Shirley also grew up in New Jersey, but eventually the couple retired and moved south to the affluent development at Lake Oconee, roughly 70 miles southeast of Atlanta. They had been living in the 3,255 square foot home on the lake for

5:34Speaker 2:almost 20 years. and they had been good neighbors and were well-liked by everyone. Sheriff Sills has spoken to the press several times since May of 2014. He said police found zero evidence of anyone who would have had a reason to harm either Russell or Shirley. The Dermons had four children. Their eldest son, Mark, had died in 2000. In 2014, they had two sons who lived in Jacksonville, Florida, and a daughter based in Asheville, North Carolina. So Shirley and Russell had picked that neighborhood in Georgia because it was in the middle of where their kids lived. There were all kinds of rumors about who could have done this, and it made national headlines, mainly because of the brutal method of murder. Local whispers mentioned everyone from the mob to a cult, but police said there was no indication that either organized crime or some kind of organized religious group had any part in what happened to Russell and Shirley.

6:31Speaker 2:Russell was an avid golfer and took daily walks. The couple were members of the local country club. Shirley was also a member of the Bridge Club in Eatonton, where she was active. Great Waters is a planned development built entirely around golf and the lake. It's marketed as an exclusive domain with a 24-hour guard station. It's the kind of place that's designed to be difficult to access, with initial membership fees ranging from around $ 45, 000 to $ 135, 000. It is not the kind of place where strangers wander around unnoticed.

7:04Speaker 2:The Dermons' routines were pretty predictable. Shirley attended a bridge game on Thursday, May 1st. Russell was seen around the same time at a local Publix grocery store, and there were reports placing him near the golf course. Police later estimated that Russell had been dead for days. So what happened and when? Investigators eventually found activity on the Dermons' home computer on Friday afternoon, May 2nd. Now, someone else could have been inside their home using their machines, But from what has been released publicly about the investigation, it seems as though police believed that they were at home and that they were the ones using their computer. So everything seemed pretty normal that weekend. Until Saturday, when they missed the derby party, which leaves a somewhat narrow window of time between Friday afternoon and Saturday, when the killer struck.

7:57Speaker 2:One of the biggest pieces of evidence that law enforcement had was obviously Russell's headless body. Russell's body was found in the garage, positioned behind the vehicles. The decapitation was so clean and so extreme that investigators initially thought it was the cause of death, but the autopsy revealed something different. Investigators found gunshot residue on Russell's collar, and Sheriff Sills has said he believes that Russell was shot in the head before he was decapitated. So removing the head was not how Russell was killed. It was done for a completely separate reason. perhaps to send a macabre message, or perhaps to obscure the forensics so investigators couldn't retrieve the bullet for ballistics testing. Which led me to wonder, how do death investigators figure out that someone was shot in the head if they don't have the head? And how do you prove it was a gunshot wound? Pathologists had to look closely at Russell's cervical vertebra, the neck bones.

8:56Speaker 2:If a person is decapitated after death, the bone cuts show no signs of hemorrhaging or bleeding. because the heart has stopped pumping. But there can be clues, even if they can't make definitive conclusions about someone being shot. For example, experts can look for shattered bone structures at the base of the neck that occurred while the victim was still alive. We're still not sure exactly what they found, but it was enough for the sheriff to state publicly at the time that police believed that Russell was shot in the head.

9:28Speaker 2:But the official coroner's report stopped short of listing that as a cause of death. The official report listed the cause of death as cerebral trauma. And there was one more vital piece of physical evidence left behind. A few strands of Shirley's hair were found intertwined in a wound on Russell's hand. Analysts believe that this was a defensive wound and that Russell had been actively trying to fight back or to shield his wife from a violent assault before he was overpowered. Yet despite the savagery, this didn't look like a standard robbery. The house wasn't turned upside down.

10:06Speaker 2:None of their vehicles had been stolen or showed evidence of being rifled through. And most crucially, there were no signs of anyone ransacking the rooms looking for hidden valuables. In fact, according to media reports, there was no sign of any valuables being missing at all. They didn't know it at the time, but investigators would spend years combing through the Dermons' finances, without really finding a single anomaly, anything that could help explain what happened. But I need to back up. We have to go back to those first agonizing days, because then solving Russell's murder was only half the battle. Police desperately needed to find Shirley. They didn't know if she'd been taken alive or if she was being held captive somewhere. Her disappearance injected a frantic urgency into the case. Shirley's face was plastered across electronic billboards and the FBI poured resources into the search. If it was a kidnapping... investigators and her family would have expected the phone to ring. But there was no ransom call, and no one knew. Was she dead or alive? Ten days later, on May 16th, everyone got their answer. Two

11:17Speaker 2:fishermen were out on Lake Oconee, several miles from the Derman home, and they spotted something floating in the water. It was Shirley's body. Shirley Derman's body had been found in Lake Oconee, five or six miles from the Derman home. Sheriff Sills told the local Fox News station that the possibility that a boat was used to transport her body added a new element to the investigation. Shirley was fully closed and there was no evidence of sexual assault. But forensic testing was later able to determine that her death had been incredibly violent. Shirley had been struck repeatedly in the head with what was described in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or AJC, as a hammer-like object, and eventually she died from blunt force trauma. Her killer had tried to ensure she would never be found. Whoever took her to the lake attached heavy concrete blocks to her body, wrapping a cord around her ankles and binding them to the blocks to weigh her down. But they made a few mistakes.

12:25Speaker 2:like the fact that the blocks that they attached only weighed 60 pounds total. Shirley was 5 feet 2 inches tall, according to her missing persons poster, and weighed 148 pounds. So this weight was enough to drag her under initially, but as decomposition progressed, the water depth and gases caused her body to rise to the surface anyway. And this discovery changed everything, because the killers seemed to have dealt with the two victims completely differently. Russell was shot and left in his own garage after being decapitated in what Putnam County investigators say was a clinical fashion. As reported by the AJC in 2015, Shirley was beaten, taken far away, and haphazardly dumped in the depths of the lake. Had someone come into the house to rob them and then things got out of hand? Police didn't think it was that simple. They believed this was a highly coordinated, methodical, and complicated attack. And it was only going to get more complicated... For years, the public assumed both murders happened inside the home. But over time, Sheriff Howard Sills became convinced of a different, more chilling sequence of events. Because

13:38Speaker 2:the evidence did not seem to support that theory. Remember, Shirley suffered multiple severe blows to the head. An assault of that magnitude produces significant blood, including cast-off and impact staining that stains walls, floors, and ceilings. But the Derman house was cleaned. It did not contain the crime scene you would expect if Shirley had been beaten to death there. There was no mess in the home at all. Other than an unmade bed, the house was tiny, and everything was in place. Shirley and Russell reportedly always had a very clean house, though they did not hire outside help to clean. So that single anomaly could have been important.

14:19Speaker 2:Sheriff Sills did several interviews with the AJC and had some memorable quotes in that newspaper. In one interview, he said, quote, drug-crazed random killers, whether it's the Manson family or bebop down the street that's done gone crazy on meth, they leave a mess. There's no mess here, end quote. The sheriff told the newspaper that police had sprayed basically the entire house with luminol, the chemical that reacts with blood traces to cause a glow, and nothing lit up, which led the sheriff to believe that the murders had happened somewhere else, that the house was not the primary crime scene for Shirley's murder. Sheriff Sills has said publicly that he believes that Shirley was taken from the home alive. So, you have Russell shot and decapitated. Shirley is abducted and driven or boated away. Somewhere else, she is beaten to death, weighed down with cinder blocks, and dumped into the dark waters of the lake. And that brings us to the lake itself. Police believe that the killer or killers probably approached the house by boat. the Derman property had direct access to the water and a dock. The lake created

15:29Speaker 2:a perfect backdoor, a route in and out of the estate that bypassed the neighborhood security gate and all of its cameras entirely. If the killer or killers arrived and left by boat, this could explain why no neighbors saw an unfamiliar vehicle and why no one witnessed an elderly woman being forced into a car or a boat. When a crime this horrific occurs, investigators have to look everywhere for a motive. They have to dig into the past. And the Dermons had a deep, painful tragedy in their family history. 14 years before their murders, in the year 2000, Russell and Shirley's oldest son, Mark Derman, was shot and killed.

16:14Speaker 2:It happened in Atlanta on his 47th birthday during a street-level drug deal involving crack cocaine. Naturally, when the news of Russell's decapitation broke, the media immediately jumped on this connection, probably because this seemed more like an ordered cartel hit and not the type of crime that happens to a couple in their 80s that have nine grandchildren. Sheriff Howard Sills ordered the old homicide files from the Atlanta Police Department, the ones related to Mark Dermott's murder. He also reportedly looked at every name, arrest, and line of testimony from that 2000 case. The Atlanta investigation found... Mark Derman's murder to be a localized, spontaneous robbery during a drug purchase gone wrong. The man who pulled the trigger was caught, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison, where he remained long after Russell and Shirley were killed. Investigators found absolutely zero financial crossover, zero communication logs, and zero evidence linking the street-level violence of Mark's death to the hyper-calculated execution of his elderly parents over a It was a dead end.

17:22Speaker 2:So if these killings weren't revenge for the past, what were they? Sheriff Sills told the AJC that the Derman investigation had been a, quote, torturous affair. But he did believe that even if straight robbery wasn't the reason they were killed, that finances were part of the motive. Sheriff Sills has publicly stated his main theory. He suspects the Dermans were targeted by two or more individuals involved driven entirely by financial extortion. The killers likely believed that a retired franchise executive living in a lake house kept a vast fortune hidden inside the residence. So when the killer or killers arrived there, probably in the dead of night, they may have been expecting high-end valuables like hidden wall safes or offshore bank codes. But Russell and Shirley didn't keep gold bars under the floorboards. When the thieves realized they weren't going to get the massive payday they envisioned, the situation turned lethal. The execution and decapitation may have been a brutal tactic to force compliance that went too far.

18:28Speaker 2:Or maybe something went wrong and they realized they had to dispose of witnesses. Which brings me to another question that doesn't seem to be answered in any of the sheriff's public quotes. What were Russell and Shirley wearing at the time they were found? Were they in street clothes or pajamas? Remember that it was very unlike them to have any kind of mess in the house. And there was just one bed, their bed, unmade when investigators got there. So were they just getting up in the morning or were they forced out of bed in the middle of the night? And if so, did their killers intend to take Russell or both of them somewhere else? Maybe to force them to an ATM. And then something went wrong in that garage. That's just one of the scenarios that I've considered, but we just don't know enough about the evidence at the scene to make a definite determination on what happened that night. The FBI Atlanta field office also tried to track down data from local cell towers, including reportedly looking back at the raw digital signatures captured during that tight window between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning on

19:33Speaker 2:the first weekend of May 2014. By filtering out the digital footprints of the local community, law enforcement was searching for any transient cell phones that suddenly popped up near the unmonitored waters in the larger Reynolds Plantation area and then vanished right as the crime was completed. So far, though, the route the killer or killers took has been undetermined, at least from what's been stated publicly. Sheriff Sills has repeated over the years that he's thought about that route a lot. The Dermond house had direct access to the lake.

20:09Speaker 2:This created a route out of the property that could bypass the gate leading into the neighborhood. The couple's son, Keith, told the AJC in 2014 that he believed the location of the crime provided a big clue. He said that he believes his parents were targeted because of the home's location, at the end of a cul-de-sac, without neighbors nearby. And he said something else in that interview. He said, that his parents did not have a next-door neighbor at the time of their murders. If Shirley was removed by boat, that could explain why no one remembered seeing an elderly woman being forced into an unfamiliar car or other vehicle.

20:47Speaker 2:It could also explain why her body ended up miles away in the lake. But there has never been a confirmed suspect boat. No witness came forward and identified one vessel as the boat used in the murders. There is no known video evidence showing Shirley being transported. And the lake itself is big, nearly 20,000 acres, with almost 350 miles of shoreline. It's busy and it's used constantly, not just by residents, but by fishermen and visitors from all over.

21:17Speaker 2:If the killer or killers drove into the Great Waters... Investigators now had to sort through everyone who belonged there at that time, including everyone who was visiting, everyone working there, and a lot of people who may have had legitimate access. The fact that this was a gated community, in my opinion, made the case sound simpler than it was because it actually produced a huge pool of people to eliminate. So police wanted to know who actually had access. And investigators looked closely at anyone with a reason to be around the Dermons or inside the neighborhood. This included neighbors, workers, maintenance people, handymen, and people connected to the local golf community.

21:57Speaker 2:Police wondered, was it someone from outside Russell and Shirley's neighborhood or inside the neighborhood who targeted them? Whoever killed them appeared to know their routine. The killer came to them. Russell was attacked inside his own home, and Shirley was taken from there. That raises the possibility that whoever did it knew where they lived and had some confidence about approaching the property. But investigators never publicly established whether the Dermans actually knew their killer. They did reportedly go through Russell and Shirley's bank accounts, financial records, wills, and everything else that left a financial trail. But they couldn't find any evidence of them having conflict with anyone and no obvious financial reason why anyone would want them dead. Russell was successful, but so were a lot of people living in that neighborhood. There were a lot of retirees living comfortably, and Russell and Shirley were not flashy. Again, we go back to why was their house targeted in particular? Yes, they were at the end of the cul-de-sac, but the sheriff pointed out that if somebody entered the community looking

23:05Speaker 2:for an easy, rich target, there were a lot of houses to choose from. And if they were chosen at random just because their house was more remote with no physically close neighbors at the time, why did the killer go through so much effort to dispose of Shirley's body and to decapitate Russell? That behavior does seem to suggest that the offender was trying to accomplish something, something beyond immediate financial gain. We've already talked about the Derman son, Mark.

23:32Speaker 2:What about the rest of Russell and Shirley's extended family? Investigators did take a hard look at the three surviving children as well. But according to available media reports, the Dermen children all drove to the area immediately and talked to police. They took polygraphs, which they passed, and they cooperated fully with the investigation. It's important to note, none of them have ever been identified as suspects. And from what Sheriff Sills has said publicly, it appeared as though moving Shirley's body would have made the road to inheritance longer, not shorter. In an interview quoted in an Unsolved Mysteries transcript, Sheriff Sills specifically said, that if Shirley's body had not been found, it would have been a long time before the estate was settled. I've read the will. The probate records are online. Shirley was named as the primary executor of Russell's estate and the sole beneficiary, as long as she survived him by at least 30 days. But when Russell's body was found, Shirley was still missing. And under Georgia law at the time, a missing person was not automatically presumed dead right away. After four years of continuous absence,

24:39Speaker 2:the law created a presumption that the person had died. But after 12 months, a court could find that the missing person was dead based on a preponderance of the evidence. And in cases where someone has been exposed to a specific peril or tragedy likely to cause death, a court could make that finding earlier if there was clear and convincing evidence. Georgia law also contained specific rules governing what happened when a missing person stood to inherit from someone who died while they were missing. If Shirley's body had never been found, settling the estates would have involved Georgia-specific probate rules for missing people, including rules governing whether a missing person could inherit from someone who died while they were missing. So if Shirley's body had never been found, that would not have necessarily meant that the children had to wait one to four years before anything could happen with the estate. But it does support the point Sheriff Sills himself has made publicly. If someone in the family had killed Russell and Shirley hoping to get a payout quickly, Making Shirley disappear would have been a very strange way

25:41Speaker 2:to try to accomplish that. Once Shirley's body was found, investigators and the probate court knew that both Russell and Shirley were dead, and the children were able to distribute the estate according to their parents' wishes. Police were trying to figure out the motive. If it wasn't simple robbery, and it wasn't someone very close to the family with something to inherit, and there was another financial motive, what was it? For a relatively small sheriff's office, the Derman murders became a huge case almost immediately. The FBI assisted, along with other Georgia agencies. And by early June of 2014, Sheriff Sills said that his investigators had been working almost exclusively on the Derman case for nearly a month. Sheriff Sills did multiple media interviews about this case. He seemed to care deeply about it. He's been pretty outspoken about some of his theories over the years to journalists. he has publicly stated that contrary to a lot of early rumors, that he did not believe that Shirley and Russell were killed as part of a professional hit. In 2015, Sheriff Sills and a profiler from the FBI spoke to the AJC.

26:56Speaker 2:In an article dated May 9, 2015, Sheriff Sills described Shirley's injuries as, quote, two, maybe three blows to the head with a blunt force object, end quote. Sheriff Sills said professionals would have shot Russell in the head and left, and also said that in addition to his belief that the killer had familiarity with the lake, that he also believed they probably traveled across the water at night, in the dark. The former FBI profiler told the AJC that he believed two or maybe even three killers could have been involved, and it was reported at the time that Sheriff Sills shared that conviction. Decapitations, by the way, are very rare. And they happen for a variety of reasons.

27:43Speaker 2:Some of them are personal. Some of them are meant to send a message. Normally, you connect them to things like cartel purges or intimidation tactics. Not two grandparents who play bridge and golf. There's another interesting question that we tried to answer in the 2004 interview where he mentioned suspecting that his parents were targeted because of their home's location. Keith Derman, Shirley and Russell's son, also told the AJC that his parents were very security conscious and that they had an alarm system. So why didn't it trigger that night?

28:16Speaker 2:There were reports in local papers that there had been a big storm a few weeks before Russell and Shirley were killed and that a lot of the alarm systems had been knocked out around the area. So their alarm systems might not have been working that night. So were they working? And if not, who would have known at the time that they weren't? Also, we know that the sheriff had said Shirley may have been killed elsewhere due to the lack of blood found in the home. But are police even sure that Russell was killed in the garage?

28:47Speaker 2:Because the sheriff also said in the same interview that there was no spatter or bullet hole in the wall. So if Russell was killed there, could it be possible that he was killed elsewhere and then moved back there? If so, why don't the forensics tell us for sure? The details of the case make us question everything we think we know and seem to get stranger, not more clear over time. In 2015, Sheriff Sills acknowledged that law enforcement had talked to someone twice, someone who they did not feel was truthful in answering some of their questions.

29:22Speaker 2:We don't know any details on who it was, and Sheriff Sills has said that person was not a suspect. He repeated his belief that there was more than one killer and that they were driven by some sort of personal animus against the Dermons, either on their part or on behalf of someone else. The Derman home was sold in 2015 for $ 760, 000. In May of 2024, FBI Special Agent Andy Smith and the Putnam County Sheriff's Office confirmed that additional DNA had been found in connection with the murders.

29:54Speaker 2:One of those items was a piece of clothing belonging to Russell, the shirt he had been wearing when his body was found. Sheriff Sills sent several pieces of evidence from the Derman case to a private forensic laboratory for additional testing, and investigators got a result. The test concluded that there was DNA found on Russell's shirt that did not belong to him. Sheriff Sills described the DNA as touch DNA, the kind of microscopic biological material that can be left behind when someone touches an object or another person.

30:26Speaker 2:The sheriff said at the time that it was the best evidence investigators had developed in 10 years. But there was an important limitation because the sample was very small and further testing determined that there was not enough DNA to develop the fuller profile that investigators would need to search it through CODIS, the FBI's national DNA database. So investigators had DNA from somebody other than Russell. And Sheriff Sills believed that it could potentially have come from his killer.

30:56Speaker 2:But they still didn't know whose DNA it was. And then, in 2026, investigators tested another item. Sheriff Sills told the AJC that he had found an unidentified article on a countertop in the Dermans' kitchen and submitted it for DNA testing. That item also contained DNA from someone other than Russell or Shirley. But once again, the sample did not contain enough markers to be entered into CODIS. At least one of the unidentified DNA samples has been determined to have come from a male, but investigators have not publicly identified that person. So, 12 years after the murders, police have something they did not have at the beginning of the investigation.

31:38Speaker 2:Biological evidence from at least one unidentified person. Sheriff Sills has said that even though the profiles are not strong enough to identify someone through CODIS, they could still potentially be compared directly against a suspect if investigators ever develop one. So far, they have not. The most visually shocking fact in the case is also one of the hardest to interpret. Why take Russell's head? The practical answer is that the head probably contained evidence, the bullet that he had been shot with. But there is no proof that evidence destruction was the only reason. Decapitation after death is a pretty unusual act. It requires time and effort and risk. Also, why would the killer take the time to get rid of Shirley's body and remove it and cut off Russell's head and take it away as well, but not take the rest of the body with them? If Russell was already dead or dying from the gunshot... Why would the killer stay long enough to remove his head and take it with them? At this point, I was questioning everything that I thought I knew about this case, including are we even sure this was a gunshot? Early reporting and

32:50Speaker 2:quotes by the sheriff seemed to lean in that direction. But in 2026, the AJC reported that being shot in the head was one possibility and that Russell, quote, could have suffered a fate similar to his wife's or among the possibilities been shot in the head, end quote. The other big question in this case is, where was Shirley's crime scene? Where was she physically killed? If Sheriff Sales is right that she was not beaten to death in the home, then it probably is somewhere between Great Waters and the point where her body entered Lake Oconee. That is the second crime scene. It could be a car or a boat or another house somewhere secluded near the lake.

33:33Speaker 2:That missing scene could contain the explanation for the whole case. Law enforcement has shared some suspicions, but they have never publicly established whether one person or multiple people committed the murders. It is possible that there was only one killer, but that would require that person to completely control the scene, shoot Russell, remove his head, kill Shirley, transport her, and dispose of her body. That is a lot of activity. The crime also contained a weird mix of planning, Coming to the scene by boat, leaving no blood behind, somehow dismantling the security system or at least knowing it was an operative, and amateur stuff like leaving a decapitated body in the garage and failing to weigh Shirley down properly.

34:19Speaker 2:Twelve years later, this case is still active. The FBI continues to publicize it. There is a reward of up to $ 25, 000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever killed Russell and Shirley. 30 years into his career as sheriff, Sheriff Sills has continued to work the case personally. He continues to send in new items for forensic testing as DNA technology advances. By now, the killer is 12 years older, so someone may remember an unexplained trip to the lake or a boat taken out at an unusual time, a gun that vanished, or a person who suddenly had a very weird story about where they were during the first weekend of May 2014. Someone knows why Russell and Shirley were chosen, where Russell's head went, and where Shirley was killed. And somewhere in the evidence already collected may be the biological trace that finally puts a name to that person. Anyone with any information can contact the FBI's Atlanta field office at 770-216-3000 or the Putnam County Sheriff's Office at 706-485-8557. So far, the water has kept its secrets. To this day, no suspect boat has ever been identified. No witnesses have come forward. Investigators

35:39Speaker 2:did drag the lake. They found a lawn chair and a Christmas tree, but still no sign of Russell's missing head. The sheriff has also made some more slightly cryptic statements over the years, saying that he believes there may be people out there who may know what the killer or killers have done, but believe that they have reformed somehow. Sheriff Sills told the AJC, that anyone who believes that the killer could be their friend should beware. Michael and Shirley were caught totally off guard, and they could be too.

36:11Speaker 2:The killer could be smiling at them one minute and cut their heads off the next. I'm Katherine Townsend. This is Hell and Gone Murder Line. Hell and Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me, Katherine Townsend. Today's episode was produced by Jade Krizlock. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance and James Wheaton for legal review. Jesse Neiswanger mixed and scored this episode. Our theme song is by Ben Salit. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and L.C. Crowley. Listen to Helen Gone Ad-Free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel on Apple Podcasts.

36:57Speaker 2:If you're interested in seeing documents and materials from the case... You can follow the show on Instagram at HelenGonePod and my Patreon at Katherine Townsend Investigates. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. That's 678-744-6145.

37:36Speaker 1:School of Humans.