So after a year since the Dermond murders, the abduction of Shirley, and the decapitation of Russel, what do we know? What do we not know?
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Dr. Edmond Locard's exchange principle holds that the perpetrator of a crime will bring something into the crime scene and leave with something from it, and that both can be used as forensic evidence. Dr. Edmond Locard was a pioneer in forensic science who became known as the Sherlock Holmes of France. He formulated the basic principle of forensic science as: "Every contact leaves a trace".
"Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locard's_exchange_principle
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* Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills thinks that he may never solve this horrific crime
* The Dermond's home in RP/GW has decreased by more than 50%, from $1,000,000.00+ to less than $479,000.00
* The GBI elite special agents have not been requested by SS
* The FBI & FBI BAU2 is assisting in the investigation - Psychological Profile of Unknown Suspect/s prepared by the BAU2
* The COD of SD & RD was blunt force trauma with different weapons
* Nothing taken by the perp/s, no forensic evidence reported from CSI
* Boat was used and possibly a vehicle/s
* $55,000 in reward money - yet the flow of tips has all but dried up <First case SS has utilized a reward in an investigation/4 decades>
* Utilization of Social Media by the Putnam County Sheriffs' Department is nonexistent
* Security cameras were not functioning at Great Waters community Guard house entrance
* Suspicious Home alarm system activity 2 weeks prior to murders
* No forced entry
* Mr D's decapitation, although not the work of a skilled surgeon, the cut was remarkably clean
* No suspicious red flags identified from the investigation of the D's phone or financial records
* Unidentified man witnessed in the D's yard on the likely date of deaths - no description available
* Cinder blocks utilized to anchor Mrs D in the lake
* Ain't local talent
Son of slain couple in grisly Putnam case: Mystery ‘just eats at you’
BY JOE KOVAC JR.
jkovac@macon.comAugust 6, 2014
Read more here:
http://www.macon.com/2014/08/06/3236608_son-of-slain-couple-in-grisly.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy
In the days and weeks since early May when his elderly parents were killed, Keith Dermond has been as puzzled as anyone else.
Russell and Shirley Dermond had been married 62 years. Both in their late 80s, they fell prey to unspeakable violence -- savagery as the Putnam County sheriff has called it -- and whoever inflicted it seems to have left nary a trace.
“It just eats at you that somebody could do this and possibly get away with it. ... We don’t even know the motive at this point,” Keith Dermond said by phone Wednesday. “It’s very hard to catch somebody when you don’t even know their motive, and you don’t know whether they would do it again.”
“Myself and one detective continue to work on this every day,” the sheriff said.
The 3,200-square-foot, $1 million home sits in a tree-shrouded cul-de-sac in the Great Waters subdivision, a dozen or so miles northeast of Eatonton.
Autopsies showed that she and her husband died of head wounds, but exactly how they were killed is anyone’s guess.
The FBI and some Georgia sheriff’s investigators have helped in the probe, poring over the case file.
“The techniques they have of uncovering evidence and stuff like that,” Keith Dermond said, “it’s almost hard to believe that somebody could be that good a criminal that they didn’t leave behind anything.”
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<snipped & BBM for Focus>
On a recent afternoon, Putnam sheriff’s Detective Dave Henry was in Sills’ office.
Aside from Sills, Henry knows more about the Dermond case than anyone.
“Seems like every free minute I’ve got, my mind is rehashing stuff, trying to think of things we may have missed or overlooked,” Henry said.
“I try to keep an open mind. I try to keep the blinders off, because I don’t want to get tunnel vision on any one person or any one theory. ...
Everybody’s got their own theory on what happened -- and a lot of them are possible.” Tips, meanwhile, have run the gamut. None, of course, has panned out.
“Anything that is halfway sane is a very plausible theory,” Henry said, “at this point.”
He recalls one tipster, though, who was convinced that the killer is an al-Qaida or Islamic State operative.
Some have suggested professional hit men as the culprits. Others figure the Dermonds fell prey to a cult.
Still others wonder if the slayings were a plot by religious zealots to embarrass the sheriff for sending Nuwaubian leader Dwight York to federal prison for life in a heralded case from a decade ago.
Read more here:
http://www.macon.com/2015/05/02/3726718/new-details-as-mystery-reigns.html#storylink=cpy________
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A text message chimed in from a cop buddy in Atlanta who’d seen Sills on the news: “You look tired.”
Then came an email, encouragement, from his friend Bright, the district attorney: “I know you’re going to solve it. You always do.”
Sills, reclining in his chair at the end of an 18-hour day, said, “I don’t know that I am.”
- See more at:
http://www.atlantamagazine.com/grea...d-sills-chases-a-killer/#sthash.euzJGepn.dpuf
Read more here:
http://www.macon.com/2015/05/02/3726718/new-details-as-mystery-reigns.html#storylink=cpy
<my comment - jmho - to be edited - feel free to add to the list of knowns & unknowns.>