Bill O’Boyle
George Banks, Inmate No. AY6066.
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WILKES-BARRE — While driving to Mundy Street this week to check on the status of the new Panera Bread project, I was detoured.
Mundy Street at Scott Street was closed for construction work.
So I drove past and took the next right.
That’s when I realized I was on Schoolhouse Lane.
Immediately, my mind went back to Sept. 25, 1982 — the night George Banks gunned down five of his own children and eight other people on Schoolhouse Lane and in Heather Highlands, a Jenkins Township trailer park. At the time, it was the largest killing spree by a single mass murderer in Pennsylvania history.
And most of the victims were shot at close range.
It’s been nearly 38 years. Banks remains incarcerated on Death Row.
On June 22, 1983, a jury from Allegheny County found Banks guilty of 13 counts of first-degree murder. The next day, the same panel returned 12 death sentences and one life sentence for the murders.
Banks, now 78, is inmate No. AY6066 at the State Correctional Institute Phoenix.
According to a Times Leader story in 2017, the night before the killings, Banks was at a birthday party in Wilkes-Barre where he drank beer, played darts and fawned over a woman’s T-shirt that read “Kill Them All and Let God Sort It Out.”
The story went on to say:
“Banks and the woman switched shirts, and he donned it underneath military-style fatigues the next morning when he methodically began walking through his home firing an AR-15 rifle.
“When the rampage ended hours later, Banks had killed 13 people at two homes — seven children, his three live-in girlfriends, an ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s mother, and a bystander in the street. Five of the seven children were his own; he has fathered at least seven.”
The story brought national attention to Wilkes-Barre.
Banks was found holed up at 24 Monroe St. in Wilkes-Barre, where swarms of police tried to convince him he should give himself up because his five children were alive and in need of blood. A phony radio broadcast was played to support the ruse. Banks finally surrendered after a four-hour standoff.
This was as sensational and horrific a story that could ever be. To this day, questions linger as to why Banks would ever do what he did to his own children and family.
So when I found myself driving past the empty lot where Banks’ house once stood, I got a bit unnerved. I began to think about what those victims were faced with on that September night. What could they be thinking as they watched their father walk up to them with that rifle and start firing?
Same for the victims at Heather Highlands.
How could anybody ever expect something like this to happen?
It shows that we really never know what evil — what real evil — lurks in our neighborhoods.
There was a time that I wanted to speak to Banks to ask him all the questions that went through my mind this week and for years prior. I have spoken to his brother, John, a real gentleman, who has politely rejected my request that he act on my behalf and ask George if he would be willing to talk to me.
I am told George has had serious heath issues. I really don’t feel sorry for him. My intent was to just ask him my questions and let him answer. I’m not sure that good, if any, such an interview would do, but I have since stopped trying.
I was a young reporter back then. What hit me hard was that Banks did these heinous crimes on my mother’s birthday — Sept. 25. She had been deceased for 14 years, but it just angered me that this mass murderer did it on that date. Not that any date would have been acceptable, but it meant that I would always remember that it happened on my mom’s birthday.
I couldn’t wait to get off of Schoolhouse Lane. I didn’t want to remember what happened there 38 years ago.
I don’t want to think about all those victims. I don’t want to think about the screams, or the blood. I don’t want to think about the cold stare Banks must have had on his face as he killed his family one by one.
I don’t want to think that there may be people like George Banks out there in our world.
I just don’t want to remember all that.
But the sad fact is I do and probably always will.
Reach Bill O’Boyle at 570-991-6118 or on Twitter @TLBillOBoyle, or email at [email protected]
"bad" - Google News
August 01, 2020 at 02:00PM
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Beyond the Byline: A bad memory that won’t go away - Wilkes Barre Times-Leader
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