In April 1987 Dr. Glenn Sutton, an 82-year-old retired University of Georgia finance professor, and his wife Rachel, also a longtime UGA professor, were found fatally stabbed in their Oglethorpe Avenue home in Athens, Georgia. Their bodies were discovered wrapped together in a carpet after their son became concerned and contacted police.

Four months later, in August 1987, three more Athens residents were found murdered in a crime investigators linked to the Sutton killings. Police located a vehicle belonging to one of the August victims and found 16-year-old Clinton Bankston Jr. inside with the car keys on him. Bankston confessed to the three August slayings and to the April murders of Glenn and Rachel Sutton and was arrested and charged with five counts of murder.

On his seventeenth birthday in May 1988 Bankston pleaded guilty but mentally ill to the five murders and received five consecutive life terms; the state law then barred execution for offenders who were 16 or younger at the time of the crimes. The Georgia Supreme Court later upheld the conviction. Did anyone in Athens at the time recall unusual activity around Oglethorpe Avenue in spring 1987?