Welcome to 1879 Georgia to the Bolton
district just outside Atlanta. This was
a small community built on routine early
mornings and a river crossing that kept
people and goods moving. At the center
of it were Martin and Suzanne Deour,
longtime fairy keepers whose names were
woven into the place they served. We'll
walk through the morning their routine
broke, how family made the first
discovery, and why the scene inside the
house raised more questions than
answers. We'll look at the attic space
no one in the family used, the single
point of entry that didn't match the
others, and the items found nearby that
shaped the first theories. We'll trace
the investigation as it unfolded, the
rush of headlines, the focus on
transients, a confession that fell
apart, and the leads that stalled within
weeks. We'll also talk about what
followed, how the property changed, what
the family did next, and why local lore
still attaches the Defor name to these
hallowed grounds. To unravel Atlanta's
first axe murder, let's go behind the
headlines.
[music]
Martin Defor was born on September 17th,
1805. A native of Franklin County,
Suzanne Taber arrived a few years
earlier. Born December 2nd, 1798. They
married in 1830, a union that would
carry them through decades of routine
work and small town recognition. By the
time the middle of the century
approached, they were ready for a new
start. In 1853, they moved to Dicab
County and settled in the Bolton
district, then known as Iceville, about
6 milesi outside of Atlanta, where the
Chattahuchi cut a reliable line through
the landscape, and the roads in and out
pulled traffic from both directions. The
couple chose a life built around the
river and the people who needed it. Not
long after the move, Martin and Suzanne
bought Montgomery Ferry, a working
crossing on the Chattahuchi. They
renamed it Deour Ferry, and amidst the
Civil War, it harbored a lot of
crossings. The work was constant and
practical, moving people, animals, and
goods across the water, keeping the
craft and repair, and providing a
dependable point of passage in a county
still defining itself. Their home grew
into a landmark alongside the business.
It was one of the oldest in the county,
a plain but serviceable house organized
for family and for work. The downstairs
held four rooms. Two were bedrooms. A
third was a parlor where company could
be received and family could fan
themselves through hot afternoons. The
fourth was the cook room, what we would
now call a kitchen. The Civil War
rearranged the river's importance. The
Deor Ferry became a key path, linking
Georgia and Tennessee along routes that
matter to soldiers needing to move
quickly. Confederate troops used the
crossing for a time, and the steady
barge turned into a part of the war's
run of logistics. In the course of those
rough years, the ferry was destroyed. A
makeshift crossing followed, proof that
the river still demanded respect and the
stray passer by could not wait for order
to return. When the fighting ended and
the county tried to pull itself back
together, Martin and Suzanne rebuilt.
They brought the ferry back into service
and resumed the work that had defined
their place in Bolton. The river carried
on and so did they, meeting demand day
after day until the end of their lives.
By all public accounts, they kept to a
quiet, community oriented existence.
[music] They weren't grand, but they
were seen. Neighbors knew them as a kind
elderly couple. Steady presences in the
Bolton neighborhood. Their home and
ferry recognized points on the local
map. Their presence was modest but
respected. The sort of reputation earned
from years of being where you said you
would be and doing the [music] thing you
said you would do. It was said they had
not a known enemy in the world. A simple
sentence that meant a great deal in a
place small enough to carry a grudge for
years if one took root. In their case,
none appears to have taken hold. Family
anchored them. Martin and Suzanne raised
five daughters, Elizabeth, Martha Anne,
Louise, Sarah, Alyssa, and Fanny. Only
Louise and Fanny would survive them, a
fact that reads as both a genealogical
note and a measure of the losses any
19th century family could absorb before
a single headline ever formed. One of
the daughters, identified in records
only as Miss Walker, lived directly
across the street, close enough to come
by quickly as may be needed, close
enough to be seen from a window. She was
the mother of Martin Walker, a grandson
whose presence added another rung to the
De'ource household. In a community like
Bolton, proximity and kinship were forms
of protection and companionship. Here
they were part of the routine view from
the parlor and the cook room alike.
Through the 1870s, the couple kept
working even in their old ages. The
ferry continued to run after the war,
rebuilt and reliable, and the home
remained one of the county's old
fixtures. Bolton itself carried a pace
dictated by farms, the river, and the
slow expansion drifting outward from
Atlanta's center. The Devour property
sat within all of that, not isolated,
but not overwhelmed. A place where the
day's rhythms were set by first light on
the water, and the last chores in the
cook room. The downstairs bedroom spoke
to a life arranged for ease and age, the
parlor to a willingness to receive, and
the kitchen to the labor that sustained
the rest. In 1879, the year would close
on them. Martin was 73 at the time of
his death and Susan was 81. Those
numbers outlined the long span of their
lives from early Georgia statehood
through the shock of war and into a
reconstruction that tried to look
forward. They had made it through to the
other side with a business restored, a
family nearby and a reputation that
rested on dependability rather than
spectacle. Their story to that point was
a ledger of river crossings and
household hours, of daughters raised and
rooms maintained, of neighbors greeted
and needs met. It is important to
understand that steadiness before
anything else is said because it sets
the terms for what their community
believed about them and for how their
final chapter lands against the lives
they lived.
Morning broke with a small irregularity
that mattered to someone who knew their
habits. Their grandson [music] Martin
Walker passed the house on July 26th,
1879 and noticed something he did not
normally see. His grandparents were not
up. They were usually stirring by about
4:00 in the morning, a routine so
consistent it marked the start of his
day as well. By 6:00, the house was
still quiet. He went inside to check,
expecting to nudge them into their usual
rhythm. What he found instead ended any
thought of any ordinary morning. Martin
Defor and Susan lay in their beds with
their necks [music] hacked so brutally
that they were near decapitated. The
violence precise and devastating, the
result of repeated blows from an axe.
The scene gave no hint of a fight. There
were no signs of struggle in the rooms.
Nothing to suggest either of them had
time to rise or reach for help. It was
likely over before they even knew what
was happening. The kind of attack that
unfolds in a few seconds [music] between
sleep and awareness. Both victims were
still in their beds, lying side by side.
The quiet that had drawn their
grandson's attention was the same quiet
that followed the [music] assault. The
weapon surfaced close by in a place that
showed both immediiacy and an attempt to
tuck it out of sight. An axe was later
found inside the fireplace, covered in
blood and ashes. It was not a strange
tool from elsewhere. It was young
Martin's axe, familiar to the property,
left there by him the day before.
[music] That detail tied the instrument
directly to the household and set the
boundary lines of what belonged in that
space and what did not. The presence of
blood and ash on the head made it clear
that it had been used and then placed
where it was found. As he moved around
the property, the grandson noted a
single point of access that did not
match the rest. When Martin walked
around to the back of the house, he
found the back door open and the lock
lying on the ground. Every other door to
the house was locked. Only this one
stood unfassened. That contrast between
one forced opening and otherwise [music]
secured doors narrowed the path in and
out to a single route. It offered the
only visible break in a home that, at
least by its hardware, had been closed
up for the night. Taken together, the
morning's facts formed a tight sequence.
A household that should have been awake
by 4:00 remained silent until 6:00 when
a family member entered and discovered
both Martin and Susan slain in their
beds. There was [music] nothing
extraneous to sort through. No pile of
conflicting details. The pieces that
were there aligned cleanly. Each one
reinforced by the others and fixing the
contours of the crime within the borders
of that small house on that specific
morning.
Word spread with a velocity of shock. By
the time the first encounters reached
the papers, the story had already
hardened into a headline. An aged couple
murdered, found dead in bed with their
throats cut. The phrasing captured the
brutality and the stillness of what had
been found, but did not answer the next
obvious question of motive. Inside the
house, investigators noted a small but
telling inventory. $18 and silver, worth
the equivalent of $581 today, remained
untouched. There was no ransack parlor,
no chest forced open, no scatter of
valuables. An oil lamp had been left
burning on a bed in one of the rooms, an
act that could have turned the scene
into a fire. Yet, it failed to ignite.
From the first pass, the room read as a
place where someone had moved
deliberately and left quickly and not as
a place torn apart for money. A few
missing pieces suggested a path away
from simple theft. Martin's [music]
boots were gone at first, then located
in the woods a couple hundred yards from
the house. Nearby set the rind of a
mostly in watermelon and discarded corn
husks. The sort of remnants that tell
you a person paused long enough to eat,
perhaps even camped. Martin's wallet was
missing, but there was little to gain
from it. It held only a promisatory
note. These details nudged the
investigators toward a picture that did
not prioritize cash or goods. Whoever
moved through that house had other
concerns, [music] and they took what
served them in that moment. Attention
turned upward to a part of the house the
family never used. There was an attic
space that functioned as a makeshift
bedroom accessible only by a ladder
through a window. It carried the
unmistakable signs of occupation. In a
small adjoining lumber room, someone had
defecated, and in a basket of cotton
nearby, there was fresh urine. The bed
up there had been slept in. The pillow
showed a clear imprint of a head. Crumbs
dotted the floor. Muddy [music]
footprints marked the window seal,
showing someone's clumsy entry or exit.
Two sets of footprints could be traced
in the evidence, and one of them was
barefoot. That barefoot track led toward
the wood pile where the household axe
usually sat. [music] Downstairs, the
kitchen told a parallel story. The
culprit had helped himself to food and
milk. A practical raid on what was close
at hand. In the feces left behind in the
attic, watermelon seeds appeared,
linking the upstairs hideout to the rind
later found outside. From these pieces,
the sequence grew more defined. It was
believed the killer slipped into the
home the previous evening during the
window when Martin and Susan went to
milk their cow, a tour they kept on a
dependable schedule. The intruder
climbed into the attic by way of the
window and waited through the night.
When the house had gone fully quiet,
they moved. After the killings, the
departure line was just as clear. It was
concluded that the culprit left by the
back door. The same door later found
open with its lock on the ground and
stepped out toward the wood pile and the
trees beyond. Suspicion landed quickly
on transients. Bolton sat on a line of
travel and the De'our ferry brought all
kinds of people through. Martin had
dealt with tramps before. He did not
care for them, though he appreciated the
business their crossings brought.
[music] Fear of these travelers ran
ahead of any single case. One newspaper
sharpened the mood of the time with a
sentence that doubled as a warning. They
sculpt through the country like wolves,
only harmless when gutted, gathering in
gangs whenever there is crime to be
committed or whenever there is a taint
of blood in the air. Two men had
reportedly been denied board at the
De'our home. home the night before the
murders which gave a local face to the
broader anxiety. Even so, another line
of reasoning pressed against the vagrant
theory. No money had been taken, and the
person who moved through that house
seemed to know their way around. Those
facts did not fit the common narrative
of tramps. The longer the search ran,
the less it found. Many people were
questioned, transients were pulled in,
black residents were targeted. Within a
month, every lead bent back on itself,
and the investigation sat at a
standstill. In August, one article
briefly announced certainty where none
had held. It claimed the arrest of a
black man named George Williams had
solved the case. The article said he
disappeared the day after the murders
and that some of Martin and Susan's
clothes were found in his house. It also
said the couple's necks had been sliced
with a knife. That claim clashed with
all other reporting, which centered on
the bloodied ax. There were no further
mentions of Williams in any record that
mattered, and the knife detail appeared
nowhere else. The burst of resolution
faded as quickly as it arrived. Four
years later, a new headline tried to
close the circle. The perpetrators of
the dastardly deed caught. A man named
Joe Johnson had allegedly confessed,
saying he and two other men committed
the murders. Speculation about a hanging
followed. Under police scrutiny, the
confession fatally collapsed. There was
no hanging and no conviction. The case
slipped back into the silence that had
defined it since the first month.
Alongside official deadends, private
theories circulated. One held that
another grandson, another Martin, Martin
Smith, might have been responsible
because he wanted the inheritance. It
remained a theory, not an indictment,
and it never rose to the level of proof.
By the close of that cycle of hopes and
reversals, nothing concrete remained but
the physical trail that the killer left
behind and the knowledge that had been
followed to its edge. The attic showed a
hidden arrival and a long wait. The
kitchen showed that food and milk had
been taken. The back door showed the
exit. The wood showed a pause to eat and
to remove boots. The newspaper showed
the fear of strangers and the eagerness
to fill a void with a name. In the end,
the murder of Martin and Susan Defor was
never solved and it still hasn't been
solved 146 years later. The river kept
moving after the case went cold and the
county moved with it. The Chattahuchi
remained the same line of water that
carried Martin and Susan through years
of work. Even as their story ended
without a name attached to the violence,
neighbors grew older, families shifted,
and the details of that July morning
settled into local memory. The ferry was
long gone. The old rooms emptied or
paved. And yet, the couple stayed close
in the way that certain stories do when
the answers never arrive. Their presence
lingered most where they had lived and
labored along that stretch near Bolton,
[music] where the routine of a lifetime
had once set the pace for a household.
They were buried together in a single
grave marked by words that read like a
family's last attempt to fix their place
beyond dispute. The stone reads,
"Father, mother are sleeping here lovely
and pleasant near Fair George's lovely
sky. In their lives and in their death,
they were not divided. While their own
love chattyuchi near their grave is
gliding in a boat veiled in deep
silence, they have crossed death's
darksome tide and freed from every
sorrow saints forever abide." The
inscription names the river, notes their
unity, and tries to place the end of
their lives inside a gentler frame than
the one the axe left behind. It is the
kind of marker that asks those who
passed to slow down and consider the
[music] distance between the home they
kept and the headline that followed.
What happened to the house says as much
about grief as it does about the
county's forward motion. Their
son-in-law, Thomas Moore, tore the
original home down and used the wood to
build a barn. It had been one of the
oldest homes in the county. Its value
was estimated at $4,500,
a sum roughly equal to the purchasing
power of $145,000 today, and it was
divided among their heirs only months
after the murders. The pace of those
decisions showed a family moving through
shock toward the practical steps that
estates require, even when the cause of
death remains unsolved. Walls that had
contained a life of early mornings and
riverwork became lumber for another
purpose. And the rooms described in
careful inventory were reduced to
material measured by length and weight.
Still, some say the place did not go
entirely quiet. In the area where the
original home once stood near Deor
Avenue, an event venue stands within
reach of the old ground. There, people
speak of a presence named Mrs. Susan
Defor, a ghost by name and by habit.
It's a small piece of modern lore
attached to a space that carries the
couple's surname. Whether it is a story
told to give shape to unease or genuine
report of something felt. It fits the
pattern of a case that refuses to
disappear. The name returns to the
surface attached to laughter and music
and to the gathered company of strangers
and friends who likely do not know the
full weight of what once happened
nearby. A few years after the murders,
Henry W. Grady wrote words that gave the
county a way to speak about the couple
without repeating the facts of the
crime. He wrote, "Side by side, they had
walked down the checkered path which
leads from youth to old age. Side by
side, they had sunk into that sweet
slumber which none but the guiltless can
know. Side by side they had passed down
the dark valley. And side by side on
this peaceful Sabbath morning their
spirits are walking in that bright and
better land where God hath said the red
hand of murder shall never come. It's
not an answer and it doesn't pretend to
be. It's a way to hold two truths at
once. That an elderly pair known for
steadiness were taken in a way that
defies the logic of their lives and that
the community needed a language that
kept them together. The river glides on.
The grave holds fast and the last words
belong to a silence that even an open
case could not fully explain.
This has been Joshua John with Behind
the Headlines and until next time,
stay safe. [music]
[music]