A cracked sidewalk leads up to the muted yellow house, situated unsuspectingly behind overgrown shrubberies that separate the corner lot from heavily trafficked Oglethorpe Avenue. White lace curtains drape from the dirty second story windows, giving the impression a passerby could still glimpse an occupant peering down from between the fabric. Above the off-white front door, a seemingly hand-painted tile mosaic of a three-masted ship sails to an unknown location behind two commanding columns.

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Aside from the feigned motion of the nautical decoration, neighbors have rarely observed any disturbance permeating the stillness at the Sutton home.

Even in death, Glenn and Rachel Sutton are private. And the family they left behind keeps up that legacy.

“I’d just as soon not get involved in that again. There’s nothing to be gained from it,” said William Sutton, the son of the two University professors who were murdered in 1987. “It was a shock when I came to Athens and I saw what was our house, our home, on the front page of not only the Athens Banner Herald but also the Atlanta Journal Constitution.”

The murder of the Oglethorpe Avenue residents was jarring to their son as well as the quiet community where the Suttons resided.

“That’s the only thing I ever remember happening in the neighborhood, so it was a real shock,” said Dorothy Duncan, a hairstylist at Element Salon, who grew up in the Suttons’ neighborhood. “It was a quiet, all-American neighborhood. It was a neighborhood full of kids. It was one of those neighborhoods where you rode your bike everywhere.”

Everywhere except the Sutton plot of land. That area was off-limits, as both Suttons preferred to keep to themselves.

“It was really strange. You didn’t go around their house or their yard or that whole vacant lot that they owned,” Duncan said. “My mother told us don’t go near the house or that block.”

Kids who did venture that way were turned away.

In a close-knit community of long-time residents where neighbors today still know one anothers’ names, the isolation of the Sutton family was somewhat of an anomaly.

“It’s like they weren’t even part of the neighborhood,” Duncan said.

There was one day, though, when the Suttons brought the neighborhood together.

Dark Discoveries

On an early Saturday morning in late April, police responded to the calls of concerned neighbors who felt something might be wrong at the Sutton house, according to a Red & Black report. Glenn and Rachel Sutton were found with aggravated stab wounds, wrapped together in a roll of carpet.

“It [seemed] like a lot of blood in the house … it was just an ugly, horrific crime the way he killed them,” Duncan said. “But he killed more people.”

It would be months before a suspect was apprehended. The turn in the case came on another Saturday in mid-August, when police discovered the hacked bodies of three women outside the Carrs Hill home of Sally and Helen Nathanson. One victim’s nightshirt was pulled around her waist.

When police found Sally Nathanson’s car outside of a Moreland Avenue address, Clinton Bankston, 16, opened the door.

“I remember the little boy who did it,” Duncan said. “It seemed like he was related to someone who did [the Sutton’s] yard work, maybe. I’m not sure.”

It was a murder case complicated by the eccentricities of the murderer. Bankston, who later plead insanity during his trial, originally told police that Chris Ward, a person eventually proven not to exist, was primarily responsible for the murders. Bankston’s “Chris” was blamed not only for the murders, but for the sexual assault of two of the victims.

Later in the police investigation, as Bankston shifted between mental extremes — sometimes admitting guilt and other times denying blame — he would talk about the murders of the “old people” and give police the information necessary to find a hatchet, bloody shirt and diploma bearing Rachel Sutton’s name behind a Salvation Army building.

Chris Ward “existed for [Bankston] to tell his mother what he had been doing or where he had received something,” Everett Kuglar, a member of the state Forensics Services Team, told The Red & Black in a May 13, 1988 article.

Bankston spent his 17th birthday in court. He was sentenced to five consecutive life terms for the murders of five people, his trial and verdict punctuated by his own unsettling laughter.

The Sutton house has lain relatively quiet ever since.

Lasting Impressions

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In life, Glenn and Rachel Sutton led quiet, active lives dedicated to academics. They were more connected to their careers than to their immediate community.

“They were very, very private people,” Duncan said. “I lived there for like 16 years right behind them and I never met them personally.”

Glenn Sutton joined the finance department at the University’s College of Business Administration in 1938. He left temporarily when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the U.S. Tariff Commission, and came back to the University after serving as a Naval commander in World War II.

Rachel Sutton served as a professor in the College of Education’s elementary education department for 39 years before retiring with an emeritus title. Her long service is still remembered with the Rachel Sibley Sutton Scholarship, honoring her “distinguished career and leadership in elementary education,” according to The College of Education website.

The couple was survived by their son William, an only child.

“When he was living there we never saw him,” said Jim Cleveland, a salesman for Motion Industries.

And though Sutton has kept his parents’ home in relative repair ever since he returned to Athens at the time of their murder, he has turned down any recognition that might bring back up the history of that location.

Preserved as a relic of its time, the house and its history has become a source of questions the family wants to be done with.

“I really didn’t want to get involved again,” Sutton said, declining further interview. “I don’t want any more.”

That history, however, has not died with age, but instead lingers over the neighborhood as a legend in its own right.

Stories about the murders in Oglethorpe Avenue’s yellow brick house have been passed down from house owner to house owner over the years, in keeping with the communal nature of the neighborhood.

“I was living in Forest Heights [at the time of the murders],” said Jeff Peacock, an employee of Peacock Electric. “But the Ross’, the people who lived here before, told us about it. And they had it in the papers years ago. They said [Bankston] looked like Michael Jackson. Had the clothes, dressed like him and everything.”

As the tale is passed down orally from family member to family member, threads of fact are woven in with fiction, and the Sutton murders become the stuff of suburban legend.

“I heard about it from my parents,” said Justin Duncan, owner of Southern floor Covering Company and Dorothy Duncan’s son. “I think the brother owns it now.”

Justin Duncan, like many others in the neighborhood, not only believe a brother, rather than the Suttons’ son, to be the owner of the unoccupied house, but mix details of the Sutton murders with tales of other murders. Most neighbors said Bankston was living secretly in the Sutton’s basement prior to the murder.

“You hear so many stories, you don’t know what is true,” Duncan said.

But stories that are used to fuel ghost stories now have roots in a neighborhood terrified by true events.

“Everybody was nervous about it for a while,” Cleveland said. “I wasn’t living here at the time but I was worried about my parents.”

That sense of unease still pervades the neighborhood.

“We don’t go out there. Every once in a while we will see a light, but we try to avoid it,” he said. Athens Clarke County court records specific to Bankston’s trial fail to provide insight. When ampersand reporters requested the documents, court officials were unable to find them in the archives.

And so, the house, with an overgrown and dying lawn and abandoned front, is left mostly to speculation and silence.

“I still don’t really know to this day what happened to the house after the murder,” Dorothy Duncan said.

Silence Still

Neighbors say they have seen individuals keeping up the yard or house, but for the most part the house stays empty.

“It looks like a house just sitting there … but it hasn’t grown older, so somebody has to be taking care of it,” Duncan said.

“About two or three months ago I saw yellow tape up, I think they might be working in the house,” Duncan said, though the sight of familiar yellow tape at first made her fearful another crime had been committed. “But it said ‘Warning,’ so [it] might be warning tape for lead paint and asbestos.”

According to Athens-Clarke County Tax Assessors and Appraisal Office records, a permit was issued for exterior repairs in 2010.

Aside from that unusual occurrence, the house has been largely frozen in time. But though the house may have been quiet, talk in the neighborhood about the Suttons and the events surrounding them has not been.

“We always wondered who was living in the house, what they were going to do in the house,” Duncan said.

And in the midst of all of these questions, nearly 25 years after their murders, silence still pervades at the Sutton home.