At approximately 2:30 p.m. on Friday, two fishermen contacted the Putnam County Sheriff's Office (PCSO) to report that they had spotted what they thought was a body floating in Lake Oconee. PCSO Deputies, along with Sheriff Sills and an FBI agent and Department of Natural Resource (DNR) rangers responded to the scene, which was "a good five or six miles away from" the back entrance of the Dermond home, according to the Sheriff.
Sheriff Sills believes the body was transported from the home to the dump site located near the dam, which he believes the GPS coordinates they took at the body retrieval site will support to be the jurisdiction of Greene County. But although Greene County Sheriff's Office and their county's coroner also responded to the body scene, along with Sheriff Sills and his men, this Georgia "Sheriff of the Year" enjoys such a good working relationship with his fellow sheriff peers, that authority over the body was given to him, aiding his investigation by limiting chain-of-custody issues and more.
In addition, due to Greene County ceding authority over the body find to Putnam County, it served to impede any effort by Shirley Dermond's murderer(s) to benefit from perceived jurisdictional warfare between law enforcement agencies within the state, or to complicate any forensic evidence obtained through chain-of-custody records and processing.
When asked about the possibility that Mrs. Dermond's body was placed in the water at her waterfront home at the time of death, Putnam's leading lawman clearly stated to one reporter that he does not believe the elderly woman's body would have floated that far on its own from the residential location.
That gives this National Criminal Profiles Examiner the impression that due to known water currents and weather conditions ascertained by investigators since her disappearance, that Shirley Wilcox Dermond was transported from her home to the 50-foot water dump site where she came to be found on Friday. And CBS News reported that the sheriff said, "That body was transported there, or at least to that vicinity."
Additionally, the Southern lawman said that "the condition of the body would have been consistent with a body being underwater until the gasses that develop within it bring it up, and consistent with the time period that we, uh, believe, that Mr. Dermond was murdered."
Another reporter wanted to know if there were signs of trauma to the body, which prompted Sills to say, "I'll be honest with you, I couldn't tell," before adding that "I didn't disturb the body, because we want the lab and the pathologist at the state crime lab to 'do their thing'," but all-in-all, "there was no 'glaring' sign of trauma," he said.
The sheriff understood that the reporter wanted to know if Shirley Dermond had been decapitated, like her husband Russell, so he provided a little more information, trying to help the reporters in attendance understand what is involved when finding a corpse in the water after a two-week disappearance.
I stress to you the body is decomposed. The effects of decomposition has some effect in keeping you from telling [if the body has suffered trauma], but, no, her head was not removed or anything glaring like that," Sheriff Howard Sills said.
