George Banks, who killed 13 people, five of whom were his own children, in a 1982 shooting rampage in Pennsylvania that was one of the nation’s worst mass murders at the time, died on Sunday in prison in Collegeville, Pa. He was 83.
His death in State Correctional Institution Phoenix, a state prison, was confirmed by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The cause was kidney cancer, Dr. Janine Darby, the Montgomery County coroner, said.
In the early morning hours of Sept. 25, 1982, Mr. Banks, a former prison guard and an Army veteran, shot and killed three women and five children, four of whom were his, at his home in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He shot at bystanders as he was leaving, killing one and injuring another, The Times reported.
Mr. Banks, wearing Army fatigues, stole a car and went to Heather Highlands, a trailer park in Jenkins Township, Pa., where he killed one of his sons and the boy’s mother, and two of her relatives, one of whom was a 7-year-old boy.
Mr. Banks eventually surrendered to the police after an hourslong standoff. He was armed with an AR-15 rifle, according to The Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre.
After the rampage was over, Mr. Banks had killed five of his own children, ages 1 to 6, according to The Associated Press. Two other children and a teenager were also among the victims, as were four women Mr. Banks had been in relationships with, their relatives and a passer-by.
“It’s like something out of a horror movie,” Robert Gillespie, the Luzerne County district attorney at the time, said after visiting one of the crime scenes, according to an account of the shooting that appeared on the front page of The New York Times.
Mr. Banks had previously served time for armed robbery, a conviction that was later commuted. He was working as a prison guard outside Harrisburg, Pa., until he was placed on leave shortly before the shootings and advised to see a psychiatrist, his mother, Mary Yelland, told The Times in 1982.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Mr. Banks’s lawyers argued during his trial that he was mentally ill and haunted by delusions of race wars and racial abuse against his children. Mr. Banks, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, testified at his trial that the shootings were “the culmination of 40 years of racist hatred,” The Times reported in 1987.
Two 10-year-old stepbrothers who testified during Mr. Banks’s trial described hiding after Mr. Banks broke into their trailer Jenkins Township. They peeked out from their hiding spots to see Mr. Banks kill four people: their mother; their sister; a 5-year-old boy who was the product of their mother’s relationship with Mr. Banks; and their mother’s 7-year-old nephew.
Mr. Banks was found guilty of 12 counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder and was sentenced to death.
George Emil Banks was born on June 22, 1942. He committed his first violent crime after being discharged from the Army, shooting an unarmed tavern keeper during a robbery in 1961, The Times Leader reported. He was sentenced to six to 15 years in prison and faced additional time after he briefly escaped in 1964.
Mr. Banks was granted parole in 1969, and Gov. Milton Shapp, a Democrat, commuted his sentence in 1974.
In the years since his conviction, Mr. Banks had threatened to commit suicide, gone on hunger strikes and refused medical and psychiatric treatment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Mr. Banks’s death sentence was overturned on appeal in 2001 and reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004, according to The Times Leader. Later that year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court delayed Mr. Banks’s execution and ordered a mental health competency hearing.
In 2006, a judge ruled that Mr. Banks was incompetent to face the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
A yearslong appeals process ended in 2011 when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, citing evidence from Mr. Banks’s competency hearings, unanimously decided that he would not be put to death, according to The Times Leader.
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