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Sheriff McDermish

Sheriff McDermish is the heavyset, part-time sheriff of Ballard, Utah, a veteran who files the exhumation paperwork for the task force and later flees the state with his young son.
Type NPC
Aliases the sheriff; Sheriff of Ballard; Ballard sheriff
Affiliation Ballard's one-man sheriff's department
Status Alive; left Utah (Walkers 06)
First appearance Walkers 03
Played by Andre

Description

McDermish is very heavyset, folksy and eager to help ("consider me a resource"). He has lived in Ballard his whole life and describes the sheriff's job as "more of, like, a part-time thing." He works out of a double-wide station, where a Monopoly game is always underway on a folding card table. He is not Mormon, though his father was. Over a bar scene with Kurt Larson, he trades war stories and explains that a quarter of one buttock was shot off, leaving him with ingrown hairs and periodic abscesses (Walkers 03).

History

When the party visits the station in Walkers 03, a boy of about seven answers the door: "My daddy's on the shitter. Can I help you?" The boy, Bud, is told to amuse himself with the Aladdin VHS while his father talks with the visitors. McDermish serves sweet tea and agrees to take the exhumation request to the court, warning that the judge is a cantankerous man who stalled a custody-related exhumation fifteen years earlier. He asks, "Y'all check for twins?" At the bar he drinks red wine over ice, and Kurt and Huell warn him not to drink the tap water or let his son drink it. See Exhumation of Shelly Wilmarth and Ballard water contamination.

By Walkers 06 he is a nervous chain-smoker with a "haunted look." At his trailer he tells Kurt that a county spot check found more than 50 percent of the high school's students absent, that parents are not answering, that houses have stood empty for days and that the diner is nearly empty; he gives Kurt a Post-it note of names and addresses. He asks whether Kurt needs a shotgun and hands over a Remington Model 870, saying he keeps a Colt he got in the service. While Kurt phones Big Bill to request the Utah National Guard, the sheriff overhears and relaxes. He drives off with his son, vowing, "I am not gonna stop driving until we are across state lines" (Walkers 06). See Disappearances in Ballard.

Later episodes mention him only as the sheriff who left. In Walkers 07 Kurt tells Robert Bigelow that the sheriff left town, and in Walkers 08 Rita remarks that Ballard had only one sheriff and he left because the party told him to.

Quote

"I figured, you know, present the smallest possible horizontal target. And then they shot me in the ass. Communism is a terrible ideology." (Andre as Sheriff McDermish, Walkers 03)

Quote

"I am so goddamn glad the professionals are on it. Give 'em hell, son." (Andre as the sheriff, Walkers 06)

Appearances