George Banks, one of the most notorious mass murderers in the United States, has died in prison at the age of 83. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections confirmed that Banks died on Sunday afternoon at Phoenix state prison. The Montgomery County coroner attributed his death to complications from renal neoplasm, a form of kidney cancer.
Banks had been incarcerated since 1982 after a shooting spree in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in which he killed 13 people, including five of his own children, and wounded one other. At the time, it was considered one of the worst mass murders in American history. He was convicted of 12 counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder.
The rampage began late at night after Banks had been drinking at a party. He used an AR-15 rifle to open fire at his home, killing three women and five children, including his own offspring aged one to six. Dressed in green army fatigues with an ammunition bandolier, he then shot at four teenagers, killing one and wounding another. He proceeded to a trailer park, where he killed his son and the child's mother, along with her mother and nephew. Afterwards, he went to his mother's house and told her, 'I killed them. I killed them all,' according to court records.
After a four-hour standoff at a friend's house, Banks surrendered when police convinced him that his victims had survived. Despite being sentenced to death, state courts later ruled him mentally incompetent to be executed, leaving him with a life sentence. The teenager who survived being shot, Jim Olson, expressed frustration in 2012 that Banks had not been executed, questioning the point of the death penalty if it was not enforced.
Defence lawyers argued that Banks was insane at the time of the shootings. After his arrest, Banks, who was biracial, claimed he had killed his children to save them from the pain of growing up in a racist society. During his trial, he overruled his lawyer on strategic decisions and argued that prosecutors, the judge and the mayor were conspiring against him. He even showed the jury graphic pictures of his victims despite his lawyer's efforts to have them barred as prejudicial.
