SPREE KILLER GEORGE BANKS

Wilkes-Barre, Pa., may be known as "The Diamond City," but the name is one of the few things about the 200-year-old metropolis that shines. Boarded up, abandoned rowhouses scream "I believe..." in shaky, spray-painted letters, belittling the city's spirit-boosting slogan. Official posters with that motto and the city’s official seal gather dust and fade in the sun in poorly maintained, unloved downtown businesses. Heroin dealers pull off of Interstate 81 between Philadelphia and New York to meet at Sheetz gas station parking lots, engaging in transactions more lucrative than local real estate sales. The rusting water towers and strip-mine-scarred mountains stand in mock vigil to the once thriving industries that left the area a very, very long time ago.

Crumbling silk and denim factories sit as easy targets for the tags of sub-par graffiti artists and the badly rendered swastikas of teenage neo-Nazis. Inside the buildings empty bottles of Hurricane Malt Liquor and Miller Lite tall-boy cans are scattered like shipwreck artifacts among decades-old layers of dust, debris and grime. Since the early 1960s presidential candidates have stopped by every four-to-eight years with unrealized plans of getting the poverty-stricken, shrinking city of 43,000 back on the road to economic recovery.

Described as one of America's more historic cities, Wilkes-Barre was once the home of the Jesse Fell House, where anthracite coal was first burned. The city was also the site of the original Planter's Peanuts factory. Both buildings have been torn down within the past decade to make room for derelict vacant lots. Pennsylvania state historical markers give several paragraph descriptions of what happened at both plots, but passing traffic goes too fast to get past the first few lines on the signs.

At nearby Schoolhouse Lane, another vacant lot holds historic value, but this one doesn’t have a state marker in front of it. Neither does Lot 188 in the nearby Heather Highlands trailer park. The two-story white house that used to stand here was burned to the ground by arsonists shortly after its owner's arrest in 1982. Lightning bolts of black tar stretch up and down the narrow street; temporary solutions to the massive cracks in the pavement that form every year from water freezing and expanding.

Luzerne County Transit Authority buses stop 500 feet due north of the lot at the intersection of Schoolhouse and Spring, across the street from a car wash and a Jiffy-Lube. Apathetic teenagers decked out in the latest Hot Topic fashions, and people too poor to afford cars, are whisked away to the Wyoming Valley Mall or the Arena Hub shopping plaza for an evening of business or pleasure.

Stubborn weeds, dried to a dead yellow in color, struggle for whatever water can be dredged from the untended property about a mile from the city's Town Square. Crabgrass slowly transforms from a parched summer brown to a decaying bronze as the first days of autumn set in. Within two months, the skeletal remains of the weeds will sit dark as coal in contrast to the inches of filth-colored snow that most likely won't recede until early April of the next year. The lot at 28 Schoolhouse Lane was purchased by the Russian Orthodox Church from John Banks in 1987, with the plans of building a new church on the tragic site. Like most development plans in Wilkes-Barre, the new place of worship has yet to come to fruition.

At this location, in the early morning of Sept. 25, 1982, George Banks, drunk and drug addled, clutched his semi-automatic rifle and several 30-round clips. He walked through the house and methodically shot to death three of his girlfriends -- Dorothy Lyons, Susan Yuhas and Regina Clemens -- his children, Montanzuma, Bowendy, Mauritania and Fararoude; and Nancy Lyons, Dorothy Lyons' daughter. His spree would continue at a mobile home park in nearby Plains Township, before he surrendered after a several hour standoff with police at a friend's recently vacated rental property. The crimes of George Banks shocked Northeastern Pennsylvania and the rest of the country; it was one of the most bizarre familial mass murders in human history.

George Emil Banks was born in a more industrious Wilkes-Barre on June 22, 1942. The son of a black father and a white mother, George was persecuted and ostracized by peers both white and black throughout his youth. Tested to have an IQ of 121, George failed to live up to his potential at St. Mary's Catholic School, where classmates would address him with racial slurs. The animosity for his biracial status, both in and out of the classroom, was nearly continuous. As he grew into his teens, the confrontations would become much more threatening. In 1959, George was nearly lynched by a gang of local racists for the crime of eating a doughnut and drinking a soda on the street corner.

Seeking a way out of the bigoted Northeastern Pennsylvania city, George joined the U.S. Army in 1959. For almost two years Pfc. George Banks left the city that had caused him so much anxiety throughout his youth. During his time with the military, he trained with the M-1 carbine rifle. A year after he left the armed forces, the Army would change it’s standard issue rifle to the fully-automatic M-1. The civilian version of this gun is the semi-automatic AR-15. Two decades later George would use it to drunkenly slaughter 13 people.

In 1961, after nearly two years as a soldier, George was forced out of the Armed Forces. A commanding officer gave Banks a general discharge following his refusal to cooperate with higher-ranking officers. Dejected, George would return to the Diamond City, where the chances of wealth, or even a secure economic future, seemed less likely than ever.
By the early 1960s, Wilkes-Barre wasn't the industrial hub that it had been in decades past. Dwindling use of anthracite coal for home-heating led to many mine closures, and cheap labor prices drove the garment factories overseas, leaving behind an economy based mostly on franchise stores and strip malls. No longer receiving a paycheck for his military service, and desperate for money in the poverty-stricken city, 19-year-old George took to theft.

In the late summer of 1961, George and two cohorts attempted a poorly planned, and even more poorly executed, robbery of a bar in nearby Scranton. Long before daybreak on Sept. 9, the three took I-81 north 20 miles and pulled into a parking lot. Their target was the Brazil and Roche bar on Pittston Avenue. After breaking in, the criminals unexpectedly encountered the bar's co-owner Thomas Roche, who was finishing some paperwork. Despite their threats of violence, Roche refused to aid the criminals. Seeing the entire plan falling apart, George angrily revealed his pistol and shot the saloon keeper in the chest. The three would-be thieves were apprehended within hours by Wilkes-Barre and Kingston police officers, no richer than they were the previous day. For his part in the botched crime, George would receive six-to-15 years at the State Correctional Institution in Graterford, Pa.

Despite an extended sentence for escaping from authorities for several hours while on farm detail several years earlier, on March 28, 1969, George was paroled from SCI Graterford. Free from prison for the first time in seven years, George tried to live a status-quo existence. He married a long-time friend, Doris Jones, with whom he had two daughters. George worked a number of low-paying jobs around the city before being hired as a technician at the Bureau of Water Quality's regional Wilkes-Barre office in 1972. The job with the State Department of Environmental Resources carried with it mediocre prestige, and better-than-mediocre pay. With a new immediate family and his life turning around, George requested commutation of the maximum terms of his sentence. Governor Milton Shapp signed off on George's commutation ending his days on parole in 1974.

While things seemed to be looking up for Banks on the outside, his relationship with Doris was falling apart. George had consistently cheated on his spouse throughout their marriage, a subject of constant arguments between the husband and wife. Most likely after Doris found out about the pregnancy of one of George's extra-marital lovers, the two separated in 1976. Doris took the children and left for Ohio. George moved across town into the house he bought at 28 Schoolhouse Lane. Here he began living a very bizarre lifestyle.

At the two-story house in the lower-class, mostly white area of the city, George was the head of what some would call a cult-like family. After finalizing the divorce with Doris, he took on a growing collection of live-in girlfriends; Regina Clemens, Susan Yuhas (the two of whom were sisters), and Sharon Mazzillo. Dorothy Lyons would join the household years later with her nine-year-old daughter. All of the women were white, young, and would quickly have at least one child with him. Some of the women were previously homeless and saw Banks as a quick way back into a warm house. Others were easily manipulated by the handsome, charismatic man who was over a decade older than they were. The women tended not to associate with those outside of the household, focusing their collective energies on raising the children and keeping George happy. Weissman Park just around the corner provided the children with a close playground. Between 1976 and 1978, George’s girls would provide him with three more children; Montanzima, Kissamayu, and Bowendy.

The familiar pains of racism plagued Banks more than ever in his strange new living arrangement. The women who resided at 28 Schoolhouse Lane were intimidated by some of the neighbors, who openly referred to their children as "African niggers." One night, George was assaulted with flying beer bottles then chased down the sidewalk by a group of angry whites before fending them off with a length of metal pipe. On another evening the family was awakened by the crashing of a Molotov cocktail sailing through their front window.

Sickened and strained by the harassment that had continued unabated since childhood, George became obsessed with the idea of an imminent international racial war. In his diary, a collection of ideas about race and society as well as pseudo-religious and philosophical aphorisms, George would list his role-models as Charles Manson, Jim Jones and John Wayne Gacy. George considered Wilkes-Barre to be on the front line of the upcoming black revolution, and saw himself as a possible leader in the movement. He intended to raise from his harem of girlfriends the first battalion of soldiers to fight against the prejudice that he had faced throughout his life.

In 1979, while styling himself as the next generation's Che Guevara or Huey P. Newton, a more practical impediment would prevent Commandante George Banks from starting up his guerrilla army; money. As the sole breadwinner for a growing urban commune, George's once fat Department of Environmental Resources check was stretched thin. Possibly due to the effects of an undiagnosed delusional disorder, Banks focused his thoughts and energies even more on the subjects of racial cruelty, the upcoming insurrection, and the more down-to-earth problem of raising so many children. A severely distracted George had trouble living up to his job standards at the Bureau of Water Quality. His personal issues were brought up by DER Regional Director James Chester when he invited Banks into his office to fire him. George's list of failures and frustrations in Wilkes-Barre grew a little bit longer.

In February, 1980, despite having a violent criminal record with a jail break on top of it, George became employed as a prison guard at the State Correctional Institute in Camp Hill, Pa. Every workday, George would take I-81 on the 220-mile round trip to stand guard at the state prison. Inside the watchtower George would sit and stare blankly, alone with his gun for hours, seemingly scanning the remote prison walls for escape attempts. In actuality, he was ruminating on his regular topics; the violence to come, and the fear of raising his biracial children in a hate-filled world.

In 1980, Dorothy Lyons and her nine-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Nancy, moved in with the family at 28 Schoolhouse Lane. Within months, Dorothy would be pregnant with another one of George’s Generals, a boy, whom would be named Forarounde. Susan Yuhas would shortly thereafter give birth to Bank’s seventh child, a daughter named Mauritania.

Shortly after Mauritania’s delivery, Sharon Mazzillo had had enough. After years of living a communal lifestyle with George and his lovers, Sharon wanted something a little more run-of-the-mill than Banks’ growing polygamous compound populated by five-year-old G.I. Georges. In early 1981, Sharon would take her son Kissamayu, and move in with her mother and two younger brothers at the Heather Highlands trailer park in nearby Pittston Township. A year-and-a-half later the Mazzillo family trailer on Lot 188 would be host to dozens of stunned reporters and spectators as yellow police tape wafted in the wind on the perimeter of the toy-littered front yard.

Throughout the next two years, George’s thoughts and behavior would become more erratic. Fantasies of racial war became all-consuming. George would start writing short stories about what he expected to come, casting his sons Kissamayu, Bowendy and Fararounde as generals leading the battle against the systematic extermination of blacks. He started collecting paramilitary magazines like Soldier of Fortune, as well as newspaper and magazine articles dealing with murder or racism. He would read every book about survivalist techniques, guns and bomb making that he could get his hands on. Neighbors would hear him frequently talk about starting a war. George began stockpiling ammunition and supplies in the mountains surrounding the Wyoming Valley. To further prepare for the guerrilla campaigns to come, George purchased an AR-15 assault rifle at a local gun store.

At around the time of his 40th birthday, George was locked in a custody battle with Sharon Mazzillo over their six-year-old son Kissamayu. Banks wanted full control and guardianship, intending to raise his son as a mini Zapatista. Judge Chester B. Muroski ruled that Banks would be Kissamayu’s primary caregiver, but his mother would have liberal partial custody. Sharon would disobey the court’s decision, keeping the child solely to herself. George was infuriated by his former girlfriend’s actions, and considered the loss of his child as yet another form of persecution against him.

In August, George would mention the ongoing suit with fellow prison guards, stating that if he didn’t win custody of his son, he would murder his family, and then kill himself. Throughout the month, he also made scattered comments about his depression, thoughts of committing mass murder, raising his children as commandos, and potentially heading off to the guard tower to blow his brains out. When prison officials heard about the comments, George was placed on extended sick leave for making a suicide threat. He would have to go through rounds of mental testing and be reevaluated by the prison psychologist before he could return to his career.

On Sept. 6, George was relieved of his post and taken to a mental health facility for an examination. A clinic worker at the Luzerne County Mental Health-Mental Retardation agency would report from one of the tests that Banks was “filled with hate and anger at the world in general.” Over the next two-and-one-half weeks, George would have to go through three extremely long rounds of psychological testing with a fourth scheduled for Sept. 28. The fourth meeting was called off because, by then, George would be in prison. At the last round of questioning before his shooting spree, one of his evaluators would state that George seemed more preoccupied with racial politics than with any ongoing relationship or family problems.

The evening of Friday, Sept. 24, 1982, started off cheerfully enough. George headed to a party with Dorothy and Regina, leaving Susan at home to care for the kids. At the party Banks seemed sociable to most, but inside he was seething. He felt his son was unlawfully separated from him by a manipulative ex-girlfriend. He’d confided to fellow prison guards whom he considered his friends about his depression, only to be stabbed in the back and forced through degrading tests for weeks before he could return to work. He’d prepared for years to fight against neo-fascist hordes bent on racial purity, but other than neighbors and local bigots, the white oppressors had failed to materialize.

Much like his role model, Jim Jones, George made the decision to kill off his family instead of letting them fall victim to the racism that both had focused their philosophies on. Left without a tower to “blow his brains out in,” the assault-rifle that George intended to use against racist mobs would be used instead to frag what would have been the future officers of his own revolutionary group. He went home early, leaving the girls to enjoy the social gathering.

Back at the house, George downed several cocktails of straight gin and prescription pills. Afterward he called up Dorothy, still at the party, and told her that he was planning to go on a trip to the mountains. He asked if she and Regina would pick up his rifle for him at Dorothy’s sister’s house on the way home. The girls returned to Schoolhouse Lane with the AR-15 at around 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 25. They found George passed out drunk on the first floor dressed in olive-green military fatigues. The T-shirt beneath read “Kill'em all and let God sort'em out.”

George, his head swimming in pills and breath reeking of gin, came back to a state of very inebriated consciousness. The girlfriends that had remained faithful to him sat around the downstairs room in chairs, Susan holding the couple’s daughter Mauritania. George’s son Bowendy laid asleep to his one side. His rifle sat on the other side.

Without any sort of provocation or words of explanation to his lovers and children, George stumbled to his feet. He clutched his gun, locked and loaded it with a thirty round clip, then took aim at Regina Clemens. After years of obsessing over the thought of building his own army, George Banks pulled the trigger of his military-style assault rifle, starting the war against his family. The bullet exploded out of the chamber and into Regina’s right cheek, cutting downward, going directly through her heart. Her death would have been nearly instantaneous.

As Regina’s body came crashing from the chair to the living room floor, George focused his sights on Susan Yuhas' chest, more specifically on one-year-old Mauritania still cradled in her arms. Susan let out a scream as her lover pumped one bullet through Mauritania’s left ear, that exploded out of her right eye. Susan’s cries over the murder of her daughter would be quickly silenced by five more bullets fired point-blank at her chest.

Having just witnessed the fate of Regina, Susan and Mauritania, Dorothy Lyons barely had time to respond. She futilely raised her right hand to shield her face from the projectiles she knew were coming. The first of two bullets went through her arm and penetrated her chest. The second passed through her neck as she hit the floor with the rest of the family around her. Dorothy’s eyes, still suspended wide open in a look of horror, would stare blankly across the floor and the growing pools of blood.

Four-year-old Bowendy continued to recline in his spot, the spot still warm where his father was laying moments before. George fired a single .223 Remington round through his left cheek leaving his child’s head an unrecognizable pulp upon the pillow. In their bedrooms, the children upstairs had their slumber broken by the sound of the bullets that killed their mothers and step-siblings. His grisly work nowhere near done, George ascended the stairway to “save” the rest of his family in the house.

The room of six-year-old Montanzima was the first at the top of the stairs. As his daughter drowsily tried to make sense of all the excitement so late in the evening, George opened the door, aimed the weapon at her chest, and fired one round. He put a second bullet into his daughter’s skull as she fell lifeless to the bed. The next room down the hall was that of 11-year-old Nancy Lyons, and her half-brother, one-year-old Forarounde. Hearing death approaching closer with each volley of gunshots, Nancy cradled her younger sibling hoping to shield him from his father’s rage. With the speed and precision intended for downing escaped convicts, George entered the room, and unleashed three bullets at the two children, striking Nancy in the left forearm and face shattering her skull, and Forarounde in the back of the head. For a fraction of a second, the children's darkened bedroom was illuminated by the explosion of bullets.

Across the street, the sound of the gunshots were heard by two friends in their early twenties, and the implications of the sounds were well understood. Not wanting to be the next victims, Jimmy Olsen and his friend Ray Hall decided to leave the area until things had calmed down. Their timing couldn’t have been worse. While Jimmy and Ray were heading to their car, George stepped onto the front porch of his commune turned war-zone and unleashed his fury on the bystanders. After shouting that they would never live to tell anyone what they had witnessed, George shot the two in the chest at point-blank range.

George still had his ex-girlfriend Sharon and his son Kissamayu left to kill, as well as anyone he would find at the trailer. After leaving Olsen and Hall for dead, he hot-wired a nearby car and drove five miles north to 109 South Main Street in Pittston, his rifle sitting shotgun. At the entrance to the Heather Highlands Mobile Home Village he took a left proceeding to lot 188. Sharon and Kissamayu shared the double-wide trailer that they now called home with Sharon’s mother Alice, and her brothers Keith and Angelo. The boys’ cousin Scott was visiting that night for a sleepover.

When neighbors in nearby mobile homes heard a car turning off well past midnight and the gruff screaming of “Give me my son!”, they considered the situation to be nothing worse than a drunken dispute. When they heard the blasts moments later, the magnitude of the situation quickly sank in.

Sharon heard the yelling as well, and went to meet George at the front door. She opened it momentarily to see her estranged lover carrying an assault rifle, then quickly made an effort to slam the door shut. George shot Sharon once in the chest slicing through a major blood vessel leading directly to her heart. The 24-year-old’s body fell like a rag doll along the painted wooden steps attached to the trailer as George stepped over her still hemorrhaging body to get inside. Kissamayu laid on the couch in the living room, resting with a sheet over his head. George walked up to his last living son, then, as casually as with everybody else, pulled the trigger sending a round into the child's forehead from just inches away.

Sharon’s mother Alice heard the gunshots and herded her sons Angelo and Keith into her bedroom to find a suitable hiding spot. Seven-year-old Scott was oblivious to the carnage, most likely asleep in another room. In a world before 911, Alice frantically tried to contact the police. She wouldn’t have enough time. Ten-year-old Angelo hid under the bed as 13-year-old Keith looked into his mother’s bedroom through a crack in the closet door. George entered the room, grabbed the mother of three, and shot a bullet directly up her nasal cavity. With the combination of the initial explosion from the gunshot and the force of the exiting bullet, the top of Alice’s head blew apart leaving chunks of brain and skull fragments scattered like monochrome confetti throughout her bedroom. The bullet had literally decapitated her.

By this point Scott knew that something was going horribly wrong. He entered the bedroom and screamed maniacally at the sight of his butchered aunt. As Scott ran down the hall, George followed him, knocked him from his feet and proceeded to beat the child until he stopped resisting. Angelo and Keith stayed hidden quietly in the room with their mother’s corpse. They listened helplessly as Scott’s whimpers were silenced by a bullet through the back of his head. After watching the child drop to the ground, George made for the front door.

George left the mobile home the same way he entered it, stepping over Sharon’s body. The only difference now was she was no longer living. Speckled with blood and clutching his weapon, George triumphantly screamed “I killed them all!” before crossing the bicycle and Tonka-truck-strewn front lawn to the stolen car.

Having left the previous crime scene with such a high-profile exit, George abandoned the stolen vehicle in downtown Wilkes-Barre. Outside of the Cabaret Lounge, Banks waved down a driver from the middle of the street. With the AR-15 against his head, the motorist surrendered his 1972 Chevrolet to the gunman.

While driving his new car through the east-end neighborhood of town, George seemed to be running out of ideas. In a span of 45 minutes, he had murdered his entire family. He knew that his house would by now be swarming with cops. With the high from the gin and the pills wearing thin, George grew tired. He dropped the car, picked up his gun and wandered around the abandoned streets of the city that had been his disdain for practically his entire life. He found one of Wilkes-Barre’s extensive number of deserted lots, laid down, and drifted into a state of unconsciousness.

Wilkes-Barre Police Lt. John Lowe headed to Schoolhouse Lane as soon as he received the call that shots were fired. Coming around the corner off of Scott Street, he saw two bodies bleeding heavily in the beams of his headlights. John called for backup. The red lights of ambulances flashed across the exteriors of nearby houses as paramedics prepared to transfer the two men in their 20s to Wilkes-Barre General Hospital. Ray Hall would be pronounced dead within hours. Jimmy Olsen would be the only victim of Banks to survive.

Hoping to find the gunman somewhere still in the neighborhood, Lowe cautiously walked up to the small, white two-story house marked with the number 28. In the darkness of the home, Lt. Lowe’s nose was assaulted by the strong metallic stench of iron and salt. The smell of gun powder nearly rivaled it. Flashlight in hand, he scanned the interior of the home catching terrifying glimpses of the massive amount of carnage around him. Bullet holes pocked the wallpaper right beside idiosyncratic wall hangings. The glass of family photos, bullet casings, and slowly coagulating blood reflected the beam from the flashlight back at the officer.

At about 2:30 a.m., while Wilkes-Barre Police were attempting to make sense of the carnage at Bank’s former house, an anonymous call would lead two Jenkins Township patrolmen to investigate a possible shooting at the Heather Highlands Mobile Home Park. The carnage, both inside and outside of the trailer, was haunting. With police officers inside of the family home, Angelo and Keith felt safe enough to come out of their hiding spots within view of their headless mother. They immediately told the officers who was responsible for the bloodshed. The brothers were, no doubt, traumatized beyond understanding, but at least they had managed to survive.

An all-points bulletin was put out for Banks’ arrest. Major roads leading out of the Wyoming Valley were blocked by police. In the remaining darkness of the early autumn morning, police departments throughout Luzerne County searched continuously for the mass murderer with no results.

At around 5:30 a.m. the first rays of sunlight passed over the mountains where George had previously secured supplies and ammunition for the third world war that never came. George awoke in a ditch, soaking wet, with his assault rifle lying next to him. His memory was a thick haze much like the fog that had settled in off the Susquehanna River in the several hours since he had passed out. The smell of gunpowder and the tiny chunks of gore clinging to his combat fatigues faintly stirred his memory.

The events of the past six hours conjured up in his still spinning brain, and unsure of what he should do, George picked up his gun and headed to his mother’s house at 98 Metcalf Street. He was crying when he arrived on her porch. Considering him to be upset about the custody of his child, Mary Banks Yelland asked her son what was wrong. George told his mother that he needed a ride, and if she didn’t take him where he wanted, she may be involved in a shootout. Mary, confused, probed George for more information. He confided to her about the murder spree. Mary went into a state of shock.

Having smelled the gin on him from the night before, Mary hoped that perhaps her son’s confession was merely an inebriated delusion. As George scribbled out an improvised will in the kitchen leaving his mother all of his possessions, Mary tried calling the house on Schoolhouse Lane. She prayed that one of the girlfriends, or one of her grandchildren, would pick up the phone. The line was answered by Chief County Detective Jim Zardecki.

George took the phone from his mother and asked the agent how the kids were doing. The detective tried to deceive Banks, saying that the children were alive and needed blood transfusions. It was a ploy to keep George on the phone long enough to track the location of the call. He called Zardecki a liar, yelled that he had killed them all, then quickly hung up. George packed his bag with three thirty-round clips and nearly three hundred rounds of loose ammunition. He then grabbed his gun, and headed out with his mother to her car.

Mary drove one and one-half miles to 24 Monroe Street, just as her son had asked her to. A friend of George had rented the building, but it was currently vacated. George said his goodbyes, then ran into the house to make his final stand as his mother pulled away. By the time Mary got back to her house, Metcalf Street was crawling with local police officers. Timidly, Mary gave away the address where she dropped George off not five minutes earlier.

At around 7:20 a.m., local, county and state police converged on the two-story house half-a-mile south of Town Square, prepared for anything. George peered out of the smashed, second-story window of the barricaded house at the 110 locked-and-loaded law enforcement officers he was up against.

For several hours, over loudspeakers and across telephone lines, police tried to build rapport with Banks. His mother and a former co-worker from the prison pleaded for him to surrender. George asked a detective over the phone for a transistor radio so he could stay better informed of his exploits. Luzerne County District Attorney Robert Gillespies had a plan. He called up Pat Ward, the News Director at local radio station WILK, and asked him to make a purposefully erroneous report. At 9:58 a.m. police outside of the house put a radio up to the megaphone. A news flash stated that the children of George Banks were not dead, but severely injured. Detectives continued to back up the lie to George, telling him that his children were alive, and in desperate need of his blood for survival. Please George. Put down your weapon. Come out. Time is of the essence.

The war he’d dreamed of starting for years was now brought to him, but George no longer wanted to fight. He’d had a long day. He was tired. He believed that he had saved his family from the pain of existing in a racist society by taking all of their lives; now George felt ready to join them.

George weighed his options which seemed to be getting fewer by the minute. Only two outcomes were possible: death or surrender. A single gunshot aimed at any of the officers surrounding him would undoubtedly bring on a hail of bullets from dozens of policemen; instantaneous suicide by cop. Another possibility would be shooting himself with the weapon that he had already used to murder thirteen people within the past nine hours. The thoughts of his children possibly still struggling for life in hospital beds, desperately in need of his blood, kept returning to him. The world was hostile enough toward blacks and mixed race people; how difficult would their futures be without him? George couldn’t decide. Later that day, after learning the true fate of his children, George said that he wished he would have stuck the rifle in his mouth and blown his brains out during the standoff.

At 11:17 a.m., four hours after the siege of Monroe Street began, George decided to surrender. Going along with the officers' commands, George smashed out a back window in the house, handed his weapon to a patrolman through the broken glass, then surrendered out the front door to the hordes of police.

An investigation inside of the house would find George’s clips, and nearly 300 rounds of ammunition. All of the doors and windows were barricaded with heavy furniture. George had set up a mirror at the bottom of the steps to monitor activity at the front and back doors simultaneously.

George was put in the back of a squad car and driven half a mile north to Wilkes-Barre police headquarters. The forty-year-old ex-prison guard sat handcuffed to a chair across a desk from Chief Detective Jim Zardecki; the man who had answered the phone at Schoolhouse Lane when George’s mom called earlier that morning. During his questioning, George admitted to the murders, but was not sure of how many people he had killed. The majority of the police inquiry was met with angered rants about injustice, discrimination and racism. At around 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, George faced his arraignment, and was charged with five counts of criminal homicide . More charges would be filed in the coming week.

No longer searching for the killer, or engaged in an active standoff, the immensity of the crimes finally set in for the officers involved. Until then everything had all been reaction. Thirteen dead bodies, seven of them children; America hadn’t seen a body count this high in nearly 20 years. Throughout the next several days newspapers, radio stations and evening news broadcasts kept Northeastern Pennsylvanians informed of the worst familial slaughter known to man. Some residents in their 40s and older who had lived in the Wyoming Valley most of their lives would liken the shootings to JFK’s assassination, the Knox Mine Disaster, or the September 11th attacks; an event so shocking, you can still remember when and where you were when you first heard of it.

George was deemed fit to stand trial on Jan. 15, 1983, by Dr. Anthony Turchetti. In the months leading up to the June 6, 1983 trial, both the prosecution and the defense focused on one major issue; was George Banks sane? Experts on both sides of the trial would agree that George suffered from a “serious mental defect.” For six years before his shooting spree, George focused the majority of his thoughts and energies on racial conspiracies, thoughts of civil war, and the persecution of minorities. Paranoia psychosis was a mental illness generally marked by strongly fixed delusional beliefs. The categories to diagnose the illness have changed since the 1980s. George’s mental issues are now considered to be akin to some sort of delusional disorder.

Public defender Basil Russin would raise issues about his client’s competency on three separate occasions before the trial. Since his incarceration, George had grown to believe that he and his family were the victims of a police conspiracy. It was white Wilkes-Barre police officers that had slaughtered his family hoping to frame the biracial man. They then changed the clothing of the victims, the body locations, and plastered bullet holes shut at the scenes of the crimes. The defense counsel testified that George was unable to relate accurate information about the crimes and had no comprehension whatsoever of the criminal proceedings.

Due to the excessive amount of publicity the case brought to the surrounding region, the defense, logically, requested a change of venue. A compromise was met by having the jury members sent from the other side of the state. Jurors were brought nearly 300 miles from Pittsburgh to determine whether Banks would live or die.

Spectators, reporters, cameramen and photographers congregated in the designated area outside of the Luzerne County Courthouse on the morning of June 6, 1983. For weeks the prosecution and the defense argued their cases for George’s fate. Throughout the trial Banks’ lawyers would do their best to prove to the jury that their client was mentally ill. George on the other hand felt that he was completely sane and demanded to testify. Against the wishes of his public defenders, George took the stand.

On June 16, George sat next to Judge Toole defiantly. With his thick, black mustache and slightly protruding afro-style haircut, the ex-prison guard looked like a deranged version of Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale. Living up to that role, George took his only chance to “pull the mask off of the devil.” He calmly ranted about racist cops, and their conspiracy to destroy the truth about what happened on the morning of Sept. 25. After George merely injured his family members with his weapon, bigoted police officer had come in and mutilated up to nine of them with the fatal bullets. His lawyers shuddered as he requested that the bodies be exhumed for forensic investigation. To try to prove his point, George showed the jurors photos of the butchered corpses lying in his house and in Mazzillo’s trailer. Basil Russin, Joseph Sklarosky, and Al Flora Jr. watched helplessly as their client destroyed all chances for leniency.

On June 21, 1983, the jurors would find George Emil Banks guilty of 12 counts of first-degree murder, one count of third-degree murder, aggravated assault, robbery, theft, and endangering the life of another person. The next day, for his 41st birthday, the State of Pennsylvania gave George Banks a death sentence. As was the common means of execution at the time, he was to fry to death in the electric chair. To one emotional juror, Banks stated “It’s not your fault ma'am. You were lied to. A two-hour exhumation would clear me.”

Just like Wilkes-Barre, the city he called home for two-thirds of his life, George Banks has been in a continuous slow and steady state of decline since his incarceration. Over the years he has gone on various hunger strikes for nonsensical causes, and has attempted suicide on four different occasions. His mental illness has gotten progressively worse, as his liver rots away from cancer. That may account for why he believes that his stomach is being eaten by a demon. Recent interviews with psychologists show that Banks is also convinced that Muslims control the state of Pennsylvania, he had engaged in spiritual combat with the anti-Christ in New York, and that he had waged a “private war with President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.” George has held true to his racial conspiracies and thoughts of war for over three decades.

When it comes to the subject of possibly being executed, George believes that God and Jesus have absolved him of his crime. With his AR-15, he released his children from this life clean of sin in the eyes of God. His deity won’t let him die, and any mention of the lethal injection is merely his Creator testing his faith. After twenty-seven years on death row, Banks is still alive.

George Banks still appears periodically in the pages of Wilkes-Barre’s two newspapers, the Times-Leader and the Citizen’s Voice. Every few years the state tries to have him put him to death, and every single time he
’s deemed too mentally ill to understand that he was facing execution. At this point he seems more likely to die of natural causes in a prison cell than from a concoction of poisons shot through a syringe.

Weissman Park sits just around the corner from Schoolhouse Lane on Scott Street, just as it had when George Banks and his bizarre family lived nearby over a quarter-century ago. Dirty heroin needles sit among the broken bottles and assorted trash along the sidewalk next to the deteriorating playground equipment. Another LCTA bus takes another group of goths and have-nots to the Wyoming Valley Mall. Across the street homeless men of indeterminable age sip cheap gin and eat dumpstered doughnuts in front of abandoned stores. The park that Dorothy Lyons, Regina Clemens, Susan Yuhas and Sharon Mazzillo would take their children to on summer afternoons slowly rusts and falls to pieces, like everything else in Luzerne County. And the weeds turn a little bit browner in the vacant lot on Schoolhouse Lane.