EATONTON — A man seen near the home of Russell and Shirley Dermond around the time of their murders three years ago is just as much a mystery today as the unsolved case itself.

He is considered a person of interest in the case, according to Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills.

“I’d like to know who that man was,” Sills told The Union-Recorder during an in-depth interview at the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office earlier this week. “We don’t know much more about the man except that a witness reported seeing the man near the Dermond’s home around the time we believe the murders may have occurred.”

As mysteriously as the man appeared, he was gone a few minutes later, the witness told local and federal law enforcement officers looking into the double-murder case.

“Quite naturally, we’d like to find this man and talk with him about what he saw, if anything,” Sills said.

Three years later, authorities still don’t know the man’s name or anything else about him, Sills admitted.

“We still believe him that man to be a person of interest, but whether we ever find him to talk with him about this case is anybody’s guess,” Sills said.

During Sill’s law enforcement career, which spans four decades, he has been directly responsible for having solved dozens of murder cases.

But this one is different — much different, Sills contends.

For one thing, a motive for the slayings has never been established, nor have authorities ever substantiated that the Dermonds were actually killed in their gated community home that provided the couple with a wonderful view of Lake Oconee. The couple’s backyard led to a dock on the water.

“We don’t have a motive and we still can’t say for absolute certain that they were killed in their home because of the lack of evidence we found there,” Sills said. “We could never determine the actual crime scenes in this case.”

When authorities received a telephone call from a neighbor informing them that he had discovered a man’s corpse lying on the floor inside a double-garage at the home, deputies and detectives immediately went to the residence.

What was even more disturbing about the phone call made by the neighbor was the fact that the caller said the corpse had no head.

And the neighbor was unable to say for sure whether it was Russell Dermond. Authorities later confirmed it was the body of the 88-year-old Dermond, who was known to family and friends as Russ, a World War II veteran.

Sills said Russell Dermond was killed with some sort of sharp instrument. Neither the weapon used to kill him nor his head have ever been found.

At the time, Sills said they believed the murder of Russell Dermond had happened two or three days later and that Russ’s wife, Shirley, was missing

Immediately, Sills said he and his detectives theorized that Shirley Dermond, 87, had been kidnapped and was possibly being held for ransom.

Digital billboards seeking the public’s help in finding the missing woman sprang up in various places, including along Oconee Parkway near the Putnam-Greene County line. Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) office in Macon were called by Sills to assist in what was then thought to be a murder-abduction case. They requested the large signs and offered a reward of $20,000 for information.

Meanwhile, rangers with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Division from the Thomson field office combed many square miles of Lake Oconee with sophisticated sonar equipment in an effort to locate any evidence, including the possibility of finding Shirley Dermond’s body.

Several days later, the body of a woman appeared near where two men had been fishing. Authorities later confirmed that the body was that of Shirley Dermond.

Sills said when he and an FBI agent arrived at the scene where the body had surfaced, they discovered that Shirley Dermond’s body had been tied to cinder blocks before it was placed into the water.

He said Shirley Dermond was struck and killed by a blunt force object, possibly a hammer, which has never been found.

The sheriff pointed to a map that is propped upon a chair with some boxes surrounding the area — all part of the case file of the unsolved double-murder of the couple, who once lived in New Jersey before they decided to move south to Georgia.

“[The map is] the first thing I look at every morning when I walk into this office,” Sills said. “The red dot on the map is the location of where they lived, and some other identifying areas related to the case.”

The boxes scattered throughout Sills’ office contain literally hundreds of interviews with various individuals, media containing thousands of phone records, media containing an unknown number of pages of financial records, including bank statements, credit cards, tax records, etc.

“All of it is related to this murder case,” Sills said, noting that the case remains as much his top priority today as it was when he first learned of what had happened to the couple. “We’ve done what we knew to do. We’ve consulted with others and things like that, and we’ve offered reward money.”

Today, the reward money, which had reached nearly $50,000 at one time, has been dramatically reduced because some of the individuals who had donated money to build the reward fund later asked for their money back.

“I told the people that after a year if we hadn’t solved the case, I’d give them their money back if they wanted it back,” the sheriff said.

The reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible is now listed at a little more than $5,000.

More than likely at this point, Sills believes it’s going to take somebody making a telephone call to authorities to say they know who killed the Dermonds in order to solve the case.

“We’re constantly going back over things, and looking back into the files of this case, but I don’t think there’s a likelihood of us developing a suspect at this juncture, based on something we already have, you know what I’m talking about, that we have not thoroughly examined,” Sills said. “I think it’s going to require somebody coming forward — somebody making a call.”