Old article with plenty of SS deeds but the details of the crime are sprinkled in throughout. I brought over some of the info to review and highlighted a few words. but did not include the section on SD's recovery.
In the driveway was that day’s edition of USA Today. The previous day’s as well. (MONDAY AND TUESDAY)
Then he headed for an open door that led to a
cramped two-car garage. The garage was dimly lit, but the white walls helped Sills see. On the floor
between a Lincoln Town Car and a Lexus SUV was a man’s body on its back. The man’s age was hard to guess—because the body had no head. It had been cut off.
Sills and two deputies swept the rest of the 3,200-square-foot home. The north-facing windows afforded a spectacular view of the lake.
The wooded backyard sloped down toward a covered dock.( Much of he back yard was open with grass according to pics)
Sills was struck by the pristine condition of the house. A horror scene it was not. Aside from the headless body in the garage, and save for an unmade bed and an off-kilter lampshade in the living room, it was showroom-perfect. The lampshade caught Sills’s eye only because everything else was so neat. What blood there was—
a considerable amount—had pooled and dried near the body.
Someone reported seeing him strolling the golf course near his house on
Friday, May 2, four days before his body was discovered. It may have been the last time anyone but his wife and his killer saw him alive.
(THAT COULD BE KEY)
He and Shirley had RSVP’d that they’d be at a neighbor’s Kentucky Derby party on Saturday. They never showed. Shirley, who played bridge and was a crossword whiz, had worked a puzzle in
that Friday’s USA Today. It was still on the kitchen table. The couple’s Saturday mail was in the mailbox out front. (THEN MONDAY AND TUES USA hadn[t been retrieved)
What he did not divulge was that the cut was remarkably clean. “It was
not the skill of a surgeon,” he would say months later, but “whoever did it took time doing it.” It was as if the collar of Russ Dermond’s T-shirt had been used as a guide for a very sharp knife, the likes of which had not turned up. After an autopsy revealed no fatal wounds on his body, the cause of death was, by the process of elimination, declared an as-yet-unknown head wound. Dermond’s decapitation appeared to be postmortem.
Her house sitter hadn’t seen anything unusual.
Nor had residents in another cul-de-sac across the cove. (WHO"S? housesitter , MAPLES, and that OTHER culdesac is across the cove, have been saying this, TJ reitterated, also may have been lawn maintenance next door heard loud voices....could have been housesitter I guess but reported lawn maintenance, no longer online)
Relentless: Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills chases a killer
