Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Terrible Deaths of Russell and Shirley Dermond

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

After seven years, the murders of Russell Dermond, 88,  and his 87-year-old wife Shirley, remain unsolved. Friends go to check on the couple days after the Dermonds do not show up for a planned Kentucky Derby party. The headless body of Russell Dermond is found in the garage. Police say there is no forced entry to the home, nor is the house ransacked. Shirley Dermond's body is found 5 miles away, murdered, and floating in a lake. Her body has been weighted down by cement blocks. Today on Body Bags, forensics expert and professor Joseph Scott Morgan explains what possible evidence may have been left behind. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeartSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. You work your entire life trying to build something out of nothing. You even survived World War II as a decorated veteran of the Navy. Come home, marry your sweetheart in 1950 and stay married for decades. And from the ground up, you build restaurant franchises. And you become quite successful. And after all that time, you've built something that you can look back on with pride.

You've got a family, too, four kids, and then you decide to retire. And boy, where you retire to is a beautiful place. But that location, where Russell and Shirley Derman retire to, has become a benchmark for absolute horror. And it ends up in one of the most notorious unsolved double homicides in the history of the state of Georgia. Today, we're going to talk about the Derman murders. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Well, Jackie Howard's back here with me today. She's the executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

Jackie, why don't you tell us about the Dermons? 88-year-old Russell Dermond and his wife, 87-year-old Shirley Dermond, had been married for decades, as you said, Joe, 68 years. They lived in Reynolds Plantation in a 3,000-square-foot house. That's a gated community on the banks of Lake Oconee in Georgia. It's about 80 miles southeast of Atlanta. As you said, Russell Derman was in the restaurant business for years. This couple was very socially active in their community. In fact, they were supposed to attend a Kentucky Derby party and didn't show up. After several more days passed and neighbors and friends had not heard from the Dermans, they decided to conduct their own welfare check.

They went to the home and entered through a screen porch where Russell Derman typically watched television. Everything seemed fine. Russell was not there. They decided to check out the garage to look for cars, and there they found a gruesome sight. They discovered Russell Derman's body slumped down behind one of the couple's cars. Surely Derman was nowhere to be found. Cases like this have always just absolutely sent a chill up my spine. And the reason why is that as death investigators, we're always observing the abnormal in context of the normal. Can you imagine being a neighbor in this beautiful bucolic setting?

I mean, these homes are worth just an astronomical amount of money. And you walk in and you find some kind of horror show like this. And that's what happened to this fellow that discovered Russell Derman's remains. And, you know, when you kind of set the stage, when you see the Derman's home, it kind of sits up on a bluff or a knoll overlooking beautiful Lake Oconee, which is very deep. It's actually a river that's been dammed up. And a lot of people fish there, ski, big recreation area.

And you have all these multimillion-dollar homes that kind of surround this place. And the interesting thing about it, you know, when wealthy people live in areas like this, they're getting something for their money. They don't just want maybe opulence. They want security. And there's only one way by road you can get into this place, and that's a central point of access, a guard shack, if you will. When the police were called, the first thing that they had to look at in trying to discover what happened to this family is point of entry. This murder did not seem to be a robbery gone wrong. There was no forced entry

into the house. The house had not been ransacked. Nothing had been stolen. So what's the first thing that you do? Well, you're going to walk around the perimeter of the place. You want to see if anybody has knocked out windows. If there's windows that are raised, for instance, you want to see if the doors, the points of entry, standard know, standard entry, not windows, but, you know, any kind of door. If there's a ground level basement door that has access to the exterior and an upper main door, maybe a side door where the garage is. You want to account for those and see if the door locks have been jimmied in any way or someone has actually kicked the door in, you know, lots of times in forensics, we'd look for things like tool marks on the door, on the door facings and that sort of thing,

or compromises of the, of the doorknob, or maybe even footprints on the door where someone has pounded away with their foot. We look to see if the frame of the door is intact or is it splintered? And that happens with great frequency. But there was no indication of that at the scene. And, you know, that kind of heightens the mystery here. Joe, you mentioned that there's only one way in to this gated community.

Actually, there's two. They could have come by water. So if no one was noted, a stranger, someone that was out of place coming in the gated community, does that mean then that they came by water? And how does that impact an investigation? Yeah, I think it's quite possible. Matter of fact, I think there's a high probability that that's how this home was accessed. Because there's no indication.

There's no investigative marks along the way where they say that there is a specific vehicle that drove up to this house. And the thing about coming in by boat, you can do it kind of stealthily. Maybe you're running your engine, for instance, out in the open water, but then you cut it and you begin to paddle in. If you've got a couple of people manning the boat, that's certainly easy to accomplish. So you're not going to necessarily leave as much evidence behind. There's obviously not going to be tire tracks left behind. You can get access to the dock. If it's dark outside, you can move with great stealth to gain access. And listen, if you're inside the house and you don't hear a

car pull up, you're completely taken unawares. You know, a boat's not going to make a lot of noise if the engine is killed before you arrive at the dock. You just kind of glide in there. You secure the boat, you step off the boat, and you've got this evil intent in mind. But you know, it's like the old adage, why do bank robbers rob the bank? Well, it's because that's where the money is. And when you see a home like this, that you can easily see when you're driving down the main channel of this lake, you can actually look up there and see it. And wouldn't it be a plum prize? You know, you think, hey, I bet those people have money there or whatever the motivation was behind it. But I can tell you this, just like we said, there was no signs of forced entry.

Nothing's missing out of the home. And for me, that's a huge red flag. So unless there is evidence left at the dock, the dock was rammed, somebody was hurt and there was blood because there is water and dirt. You know, you're going to have mud. Somebody may have stepped into the shoreline. So in absence of all of those things, Joe, it would seem that you are reliant then on either eyewitnesses or video witnesses. Yeah. And then even more peripheral to that, you know, you you would be relying upon your witnesses as well.

And that's something that people don't think about a lot. You know, what did you hear, you know, at that particular point in time? You know, because I mean, how many how many times have we heard stories about people that are killed and someone that didn't actually see it? They'll say, hey, I heard gunshots. All right. Or I heard somebody screaming, you know, or I heard a car pull up. So many times that's a point that we can return to. But the most essential factor involved in this is that even if it's something that you see or if it's something that you hear, at what point in time did you hear it? Because as you know, the most valuable commodity that we have in forensic investigations is in fact minutes, seconds, hours, days, weeks, months.

That time element is what we deal in. That's our currency, if you will. So you have to be able to match it up. And to this point, you don't have either one of these things. You know, the first time that there's an indication that something is up, other than the fact that they didn't attend this Kentucky Derby party, is the fact that this gentleman walked in the house and he found Russell Nerman there lying on the floor in his garage. Other than the fact that earwitnesses, as you call them, set the timeline, does it really give you anything else? Because if they did not hear anyone screaming, they can say, oh, I heard a boat, but you're on a lake. What does that really tell you? Yeah, it's like living next to the highway.

You know, oh, I heard a car. Really? Wow. That's really going to be useful. You know, I'm not trying to be snarky, but it's just the fact that, you know, you got, as you put, you know, you got boats running around all the time. People night fish. You know, if this is when this event occurred, you know,

it wouldn't be anything to hear, you know, some guy in a bass boat running up and down the lake, you know, and those engines are quite loud. But if it was something smaller, say like a tiny skiff with a bass boat running up and down the lake, and those engines are quite loud. But if it was something smaller, say like a tiny skiff with a smaller boat motor, or they had an electric motor that you're not going to hear at all, that goes back to this issue of stealth. So you're really left with this case. You're really left as an investigator scratching your head saying,

I don't have any kind of witness at all to these events. The only thing that is really left behind are these forensics. You know, what are the bodies telling us? What is the scene telling us? And we've already, you know, kind of talked about the scene, how there's no signs of forced entry or struggle. You know, we say that all the time on the news and whatnot, and we say it in our reports as well, you know, because it's one of the things that we look for. If we have some kind of horrific crime that has taken place, we want to know, well, was there a fight that ensued? You got toppled furniture? Do you have anything here that really gives us an indication that there was some kind of problem that had happened?

Were they taken unawares, for instance? Were they compliant inawares, for instance? Were they compliant in this particular case? And, you know, so the investigators don't really have a lot to work on. And I think that that's the reason this case is still unsolved to this day, Jackie. And the things that we're talking about right now, Joe, the entry from the water, the lack of evidence, the ear witnesses, the video witnesses are so significant because Russell Derman is dead, but Shirley Derman is missing. Yeah, that's the case. And, of course, if you're an investigator and look, they were able to size up pretty quickly from the neighbors and witnesses.

You know, these two are a pair. You know, you generally don't see one without the other. They go around. You said they're very social. They have friends that live in this community. I think that Shirley was involved in Bridge. Russell used to play golf, but he had stopped doing that and he didn't really fish. They got rid of their boat. He's in that home. She's in that home. When they go out, they're generally together. They are a couple.

So that's indicative of the lifestyle, you know, that they had led. And it gives you an idea from a behavior standpoint of what you would expect in this kind of dynamic in this environment. That they were probably there together whenever this horrific thing took place. But when the investigator showed up, their working assumption at that moment in time is, yeah, we have Mr. Derman deceased here in the garage, but surely he's nowhere to be found. And we go back to this theme, you know, what I had mentioned.

This house is big. It's a 3,000-square-foot home that's occupied by two people in a very, very wealthy area. Your default position all of a sudden is, well, maybe somebody snatched her. Maybe they've kidnapped her and taken off with her. But if that's the case, there's nobody calling us. There's no letters. There's no note left behind to say that these are our ransom demands. That's not happening. All they know is that she has seemingly just vanished into thin air. When you have no witnesses, sometimes the dead have to be relied upon to bear witness and give testimony to all that remains. And in this case, all we had was Russell Dern's body.

We've talked about the complexities of this investigation already with no sign of struggle. But Joe, what we do have is a body in the garage. Russell Derman. Joe, Russell was decapitated. His head has never been found. How do we do this investigation? It begs so many questions, Jackie. You know, when you begin to think about a body absent a head, you know, first off, what's the rationale? And I think that for many people, investigators included, when you look at a case like this, you think that you've got some type of psychopathic madman that's running around the countryside. And that's kind of our default position because it's such a horrific act however that's that's not always the case when it comes to the dismemberment of remains or partial dismemberment in this case remember his head is the only part of his body that is missing everything else is intact

and with russell's remains there was evidence at least in my mind, after reading and reviewing the autopsy reports, that his head was taken. I think that we need to check this box first. His head was taken post-mortem. Of course, we have anti-mortem and post-mortem. Post-mortem means after death. And the reason I think that is that per the information that was relayed from the forensic pathologist, there are no what we refer to as focal areas of hemorrhage in the tissue of the neck.

And also, it's interesting to note that when the investigators got to the scene and they saw his body, that at the scene it has been consistently described that there was only a tiny bit of blood that was immediately adjacent to what was remaining of his neck. Now, if this had been, say, an event where they had taken a knife or some sharp object and cut Russell Derman's throat on the way to a decapitation, we do know this, that there would have been blood everywhere. You say, why? The reason is, is that we've discussed before on Body Bags how vascular the head is. It requires a tremendous amount of blood and you would have

to go through, you'd have to go through the jugular veins. You'd have to go through the carotid arteries. All all the while the heart is pumping until of course life ceases but all the while you're just you will have an uh an area that's literally flooded with blood that's not the case so whoever did this whoever did this took time with his remains and took his head off and if folks at home will kind of consider their spine, their neck in particular, the vertebral bodies that support our neck. If you will go from the base of your skull,

that's C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, count down. And his head was removed at the C5 level. And the doctors described that they went all the way through all of the tissue,

the soft tissue, again, with no hemorrhage. And they have apparently, and this is important, transected the C5 vertebra. And when they say transected, that means that they didn't go through the disc they actually cut through bone and from an evidentiary standpoint that's very very important jackie why so at autopsy one of the things that's done uh when you have any kind of dismemberment case is that as horrible as it is to be part of an investigation like this, you as a forensic scientist, you have a particular skill set that you can bring to bear that can actually identify what the instrument was that brought about this decapitation. And it's important because they

said that the C5 was actually transected. So that means that you're going to have marks on the bone. So anybody that's listening to this, if you have a saw in your home, I want you to think about the way the teeth look on a saw or even a serrated knife. They have a very specific pattern. And even if a saw or serrated knife is made by the same manufacturer, that pattern is going to change over the course of the use of that instrument. It will slightly change and it will make the signature, the tool mark signature left behind unique to that particular instrument.

So at autopsy, I can almost guarantee what they had done is where that bone was transected, that C5, keep that in mind, C5, the fifth cervical vertebra, they would have completely dissected out the remainder of that C5 vertebra. And then they took it and they placed it into a container with what we call formalin. Formalin is kind of like formaldehyde. It's a preservative. And they're going to hang on to that. Jackie, let me tell you why.

Because at some point in time, if they're able to find out who perpetrated this crime, get wind of it. If they can put their hands on that tool that they took his head off with, they can have a tool mark examiner look at that remaining bone and compare that to the instrument that was used by these perpetrators to decapitate Russell Derman. Okay, I got two very specific questions for you, Joe. First, what is transected? When you hear this term transected, trans means going across. So they're actually cutting across the bone. Almost if you think about sawing a piece of wood, okay, you're not going to cut it lengthwise. You're going to cut it across the grain essentially. And if you'll just imagine that whoever was doing this, whoever was doing this

was essentially sawing more than likely on the back of the neck because you get quicker access to those bony prominences back there that support and literally hold the head in place. So you want to be able to take the head off at that point because you can remove it and then do whatever it is that you plan on doing with it. Okay, my second question is, as you were talking about the C1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, I'm reaching back to the back of my head in my neck, trying to feel and figure out what you're talking about. What should I be feeling? How am I going to identify and know what you're talking about here? Walk me through knowing where that is.

So, our head is actually supported, and I think we've mentioned this before on other episodes, but our head is actually supported by C1, otherwise known as the Atlas. And people that don't know what the Atlas is, it refers back to Greek mythology. I think one of the earliest entities within Greek mythology who was Atlas. And you see these images of this gigantic man holding up the earth on his back. And he's the Atlas. He's the supporter. So C1 actually works as a support body. Okay, wait a minute. It supports our head.

I'm not going to be able to feel C1, correct? Well, if you go up and you press tightly enough, you can go up to the base of your skull, the very base where your skull connects onto the spine. And if you press hard enough, you can actually feel it right there. But you need to count down essentially approximately every two inches, you're going to come to a new vertebral body. So, and that's kind of a, you know, I'm kind of a big guy. So I'm kind of moving down the back of my neck right now. And I'm counting down one and a half to two inches every moment. And you can feel because there's a little depression.

That's where your disc actually sits. So you get down from one to two, two to three, three to four, four to five. You're right on top of it. So what the doctor is saying is that instead of going through that kind of depressed, soft area where our disc is, people hear about getting a slipped disc. It's kind of cartilaginous. It's softer than the bone. This individual that cut through Russell Derman's neck actually went through a bony prominence, actually transected or cut into the bone. And they made a big mistake when they did that because every time they would drag that saw

across that specific area, the teeth of whatever this instrument is, and they've never been very specific about it, is leaving behind definitive markings on the surface of that bone. So microscopically, if you can get your hands on whatever blade it was that generated this and compare it microscopically to those marks that are left on the bone, you can have a tie back. The question is, can they put that instrument into the hands of an individual?

And it's not just the specific instrument, but it's also a class or family of instruments. Say, for instance, they can look at it and say, well, this wasn't a limb saw. This was a carpenter saw or this was a hack saw. Or for all I know, it could be a circular saw. But with that, it's another question that's asked because even when you're sawing, even when you're doing this, this would have left behind quite a bit of blood just in this action. And not just that, but bone dust, tissue, that sort of thing. So I really wonder if they hadn't placed him on something in order to facilitate this, like a piece of cloth or shirts or something like that, and then gathered things up and took that with them as well. Because remember, his head's missing, Jackie.

So is bone, bone, Joe, regardless of where it is in the body, the bones in the neck, the C1, C2, are smaller just in general from the size. And we've talked about it, Link, dismemberment, about how really difficult it is to do that. Is it any different when you're trying to do it at the neck? You know, I would opine that it's probably a bit more simple because if you're doing it posteriorly, which we all know now because we've talked about this on body bags, anatomically posterior means from the rear, the backside. And so, as I stated earlier, when you begin to kind of feel your cervical spine, it's very close to the surface. It's not like, say, for instance, if we went to the leg, to the upper leg where the femur is, our big thigh bone.

You got to go through a lot of soft tissue to get down to the femur. I mean, a lot. And it's a mess when you do that. But in the cervical region, those bony prominences or those bony structures in there are very, very close. Now, I can tell you this, you were talking about differences in bone. There will be bone density issues because every bone has a structure in and of itself. But if you were to take and look at bone microscopically, bone is bone. You know, you're going to see it. You can't necessarily pick a point of origin. I'm sure that there are some pathology types and anatomy types that would

probably argue with me on that. But for our purposes here, bone is in fact bone. It's just, can you get access to it? And this is more important. Do you have the tools and the knowledge to be able to pull this off, to facilitate it. What's your level of nerve here? Think about that. You know, I mean, how many people do we know that are wandering around the general population that have actually decapitated somebody? Just let that sink in just for a second. Now, we get so numb to all the violence in our world, but just for a moment, pause and

think about who out there would have the nerves of steel to take someone's life and then not flee but stay around long enough to acquire instruments or have instruments to take a head off with and i got one more interesting little aside that i don't know how many other people have really addressed in russell dermon's. And that is, they don't really have a lot of injuries to his body, but there's one that really stands out to me that is actually not post-mortem, not post-mortem, it's anti-mortem. And the doctor makes note of it. And if everybody will take their right hand and extend it out and consider your hand just for a moment and look at your index finger. That's the finger that's right adjacent to your thumb right there.

Russell Derman sustained a crushing injury, a crushing injury, Jackie, to his right index finger. The doctor says specifically that it is a hemorrhagic injury. And that means that this is an antemortem injury. This can only occur in life. So that means that his heart was still pumping and it literally crushed his finger. Now, to me, you begin to talk about things like this. And why would his finger be crushed? Why would it?

And I really wonder if people were not trying to exact information from him. Maybe it was information relative to money. Do you have money here? You're going to pay the price with pain here if you don't give us the information. And they crushed his finger in life. Imagine how painful that was. And maybe he told them something that they didn't want to hear. And it's at that moment that they took his life.

Joe, there's one other fascinating piece of evidence that came out in the police investigation into Russell Derman's death. Even though he was decapitated, they found gunshot residue on his collar. Yeah, they did. And how in the world are you going to have gunshot residue deposition arising on your collar? And to say that it's on the collar, I guess you could say that it is, it could be any area in the collar.

It could be posterior, anterior. It could be lateral. They just simply say on the surface of the collar. And that has led many people to think that the rationale behind decapitating Russell Derman was that he had been executed, possibly with a single gunshot wound to the head. Now, this raises another problem. was that he had been executed, possibly with a single gunshot wound to the head. Now, this raises another problem. You know that you have taken this guy's life, potentially, with gunfire. You have enough smarts about you to know if that bullet is recovered,

that they could, in fact, pair that up with a weapon out there. So what do you do? Well, your default position is, well, simplest thing I can do is I can't, I certainly can't do some type of post-mortem surgery on him and remove this bullet. I'm going to have to take his head because in taking his head, I know that I've covered this case, I've often wondered what was going on with Shirley Derman.

When the police first arrived there, she was nowhere to be found. And it has often really bothered me. I think about my own wife, you know, what state of mind would she have been in? What was going on with her? Where did they find her? Joe, investigators trolled the lake, but to no avail. They did not find Shirley's body. They also searched the wooded area surrounding the home. No body. But on the 16th of May, which was approximately a little over two weeks later, Shirley Derman's bloated body was discovered floating on Lake Oconee by two fishermen. It was about five miles away from the

couple's home. There are several important points in the discovery of Shirley's body, Joe, so let's take them one by one. First is the fact that when Shirley Derman's body was found, it was obvious that the intention was for her body to not be found. Two large cinder blocks had been tied to her body that weighed 30 pounds each. Wouldn't 60 pounds be enough to keep a body submerged? No, no, it would not, particularly as bodies begin to bloat, which always happens. I mean, it happens. People talk about this all the time.

I can confirm for you. As decomposition develops, the body begins to swell with gas. And when you have bodies that are found in water, the body essentially becomes almost like a buoy. It will float to the top. The air, you know, forces it up until the body in some way is punctured and the air is released. And it can sometimes, um, resubmerge at that point in time. But, you know, you mentioned an important part here, uh, Jackie is the fact that these blocks were with her body. And they weren't just with her body. And this is ghastly.

It's absolutely ghastly. These blocks were actually secure to her ankles. So if you think of the way a balloon looks, where we hold a balloon by its string in our hand, and then the balloon floats high above us. That's similar to this configuration. These blocks were actually secured to Shirley Derman's ankles with what's referred to as paracord. And paracord, you see it in the military a lot. You also see people that do camping securing things.

It's a woven nylon rope that has very specific pattern to it. And it's a multicolored rope that they used. And they all have different strengths, you know, the kind of weight that they can support and this sort of thing. But with her, it was bound or wrapped around her several times at her ankles. I mean, somebody really took the time to make sure that body wasn't going anywhere. That in itself is very significant, Joe, because we know that the body was found about five miles from the couple's home. The current in this lake, even though you talked about there's a channel in this lake that's deep, the current in this lake, given that it is a lake, there's not going to be a current really.

So we're not talking about the body drifting five miles from the home. So it's very obvious that they moved her body, intending it at this distance to never be found. Yeah, you're right. And there's been several people that have talked about this from the perspective of dam releases. Now, for anybody that's never been on a lake where there's been a dam release, it's something powerful. When the water's released out of the dam into the lower lake,

which in this case is Lake Sinclair, it sits below Lake Oconee, it's a tremendous amount of force. But it's still not enough to drag her body with this amount of weight on it through this channel and then deposit it where it was. Because that's even more interesting here, Jackie. That's why I believe that whoever did this had a great familiarity with this area. Because not only was she literally five miles downstream, but her body, you had to, in order to get to the location where she was found, and she was found by fishermen, you had to make a sharp right-hand turn off the main channel and go back up into a cove, Jackie. It's almost if people at home will just kind of envision what

a fish hook looks like, and the long stem of the fish hook is the long axis pretend that's the channel and then it goes down curves back up to the point that point on the fish hook is where the body would have been found so it would it in my opinion at least the people would have had to have transported her body to that location and pushed her off into this area i think one of the things they didn't count on maybe they weren't so familiar with the depth in this area because when you combine the depth of the water, maybe a dam release, lack of rain,

this is, you know, it's in the warm months, maybe the water levels down just a wee bit. And then you think about decomposition, the body rising. That's how these fishermen noticed her in the water at that amount of time can you imagine can you actually imagine going out and you're just going fishing for the day you're just going fishing and suddenly you look down in the

water and here is this poor woman's body it's been sitting there for a protracted period of time. It's an absolute horror show. So then we get to the autopsy, Joe. Shirley Dermond was killed by blunt force trauma. And the pathologists suspect that it was caused by a hammer. What gave them those indications? That's a very significant finding that the pathologist came up with. I want to back up just a little bit just so that folks understand. Many times when we're talking about homicides involving females,

we always wonder if there's a sexual component. And one of the things we look for is to see the status of the clothing. That's actually how we refer to it. I want you to know that Ms. Dermans remains, she was completely clothed. I mean, she had on everything from a floral pattern shirt. She still had a bra on, bright green pants. She had underpants on, even had her socks on with her shoes with orthopedic inserts. And this is kind of significant. She actually had two breast pads in place. Did you know that she had undergone a radical double mastectomy?

And so all of that was intact. There was nothing to indicate that this was anything of some kind of sexual nature, at least based upon the clothing status. So when the doctor received the body at the medical examiner's office, he did a very, very thorough job of examining her, looked at the knots. Actually, the rigging that came along with her body being submerged actually entered the morgue with her. And it's very interesting that when you begin to look at the knots, this is what we refer to in forensics as complex knot tying, which means that somebody probably had experienced tying knots, working with rope, and that sort of thing. And to secure because these blocks were still secure to her body.

And one little aside, I don't think that people may be aware of, did you know that these blocks had actually been painted red? These weren't just like standard blocks that you would see at a construction site. These things were red. And I found that absolutely fascinating. So that's another big piece of evidence. And then talking about the fatal injuries that she had sustained. The way the doctor actually describes these, there is her death is actually related to what's referred to specifically as blunt force trauma. But she was struck, they think at least twice, maybe three times with something that had a rounded, flat leading edge.

And we talked about this just previously in one of our other cases on body bags referring to a claw hammer. You think about the end of a hammer. A hammer has essentially the dimensions on the business end of the hammer, where it can be the size of, say, the face of a quarter if a quarter is laying flat. And so what happens is when a skull is struck with a hammer, did you know that you can sustain what's referred to as a pattern injury there that is actually a circular fracture underlying the pattern on the skin? And it mirrors the oncoming hammers it strikes. This is referred to as a depressed skull fracture, where the external table of the skull actually collapses, and it drives in to the brain. Of course, this leads to huge hemorrhage within the brain, and of course, the person winds up dying as a result of this.

Particularly, you begin to think about how many times she was struck. But this is a real act of violence. This is not like, you know, even with Mr. Derman, we think about him being shot. If that is, in fact, what had happened. Remember, we still don't have his head at this point. That's kind of a quick way to die when you think about it. But no, not this, Jackie.

She was beaten multiple times with a hammer. Her skull actually collapsed in on her brain. And then she was tied up post-mortem. How do I know that it was post-mortem? Because where those bindings were placed over her ankles and she was essentially anchored with this structure that they had created, there was no underlying hemorrhage in those areas surrounding her ankles. So it's not like she had been tied up before death and been questioned or anything like that. Her hands weren't bound. It's just her ankles.

So that was done after death. They took their time in planning this. And then you begin to think about, well, they got in a boat and drove five miles with this poor woman's body. You know, where did all of this take place? Did they kill her in the yard? Because there was no blood in the house. They didn't find any blood that I know of out in the yard. I wonder if they brought in dogs to sniff for it. And if you put her on a boat and you kill her on the boat, then dogs are not necessarily going to be able to track that area. You're not going to have any evidence of it. Did they take her out in the middle of the lake and beat her to death with a hammer and then drive the rest of the distance and deposit

her body way downstream in this little cove where they thought that no one would ever find her of course they did and to this day we still don't have any further answers as to who did this so joe it's been seven years since the dermans were murdered 2014 we are still no closer to finding out who did this will we ever be i think as time goes by by, there's always a possibility. I have to always hold out hope in any case involving death. I mean, death is what I've always dealt in as an investigator. But, you know, at this point, to this point, at least, the forensics are done.

What's going to have to happen here is that the public and the police are going to have to come together on this case, this unsolved case. This is going to be heavily reliant upon shoe leather, as they say, still pressing every lead that you possibly can. And this is one other thing that's kind of troubling to me, is that many of the people that lived near the Dermans were aged. And it's not like, you know, you're around a bunch of mid-20-somethings that are going to be around for a few years that can still offer up information. My fear, I think, is that anybody that might have some kind of recollection as to what they remember back all these years looking in the rearview mirror, they still will be around to give us further information or to highlight something or to come up with a new nugget of data that's going to push this case forward.

And that's the one troubling aspect with this. I'm just hoping that at some point in time, somebody is going to say something that they probably wish that they wouldn't have said in retrospect, but it winds up unlocking the answers in this case. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.