It’s a case that once horrified the nation and now, four decades later, it has quietly come to an end. George Emil Banks, one of America’s most infamous mass murderers, has died at the age of 83 while serving a life sentence at the State Correctional Institution Phoenix in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

Banks, a former Army veteran and prison guard, was convicted in 1983 of murdering 13 people, including five of his own children during one of the darkest rampages in U.S. history. He died on Sunday of renal neoplasm, a form of kidney cancer, according to Montgomery County Coroner Dr. Janine Darby.

A Crime That Shattered a Community

The killings began in the early hours of September 25, 1982, when Banks, reportedly under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs, turned an AR-15 rifle on his family in their Wilkes-Barre home. He murdered three women and five children, four of whom were his own. He later shot two teenagers nearby, killing one and critically injuring the other, before heading to a trailer park and killing another woman, her mother, a nephew, and his own 5-year-old son.

In his chilling confession, Banks claimed he was “saving” his mixed-race children from a “racist world.” He believed their suffering would be greater alive than dead, an explanation that baffled psychiatrists and left the nation struggling to understand how a father could commit such an atrocity.

The Arrest That Shocked America

After the massacre, Banks barricaded himself inside a friend’s home. It took then–District Attorney Robert Gillespie’s desperate radio ploy, falsely broadcasting that the victims had survived to convince Banks to surrender. When police finally arrested him, they found him calm, distant, and delusional, convinced that powerful people were conspiring against him. “I had to do it,” Banks told investigators. “They were going to suffer.”

Inside the Trial: A Window Into Madness

At trial, prosecutors described a calculated killer, while his defense argued Banks was a mentally ill man haunted by racial paranoia and personal collapse. The jury convicted him of 12 counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder, sentencing him to death. But the question of whether Banks was ever truly sane never went away. Over the years, psychologists described him as delusional, paranoid, and intermittently psychotic. Even on the witness stand, Banks showed gruesome crime photos, despite his lawyer’s objections, seemingly unable to grasp the horror of his own actions.

A Life Behind Bars

Banks’ long, tortured life behind bars was marked by suicide threats, hunger strikes, and repeated mental breakdowns. He refused psychiatric treatment and food for extended periods. His death sentence was overturned in 2001, reinstated in 2004, and suspended again two years later when a judge declared him mentally incompetent to be executed. By 2011, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court permanently removed the death penalty, ruling that Banks’s psychological state rendered him unfit for execution. He would live the rest of his days in prison, largely in isolation until his death in 2025.

When a Death Sentence Meets Mental Illness — Your Rights, Our System

The question every reader asks: “If someone is too mentally ill to understand their punishment, can the state still execute them?” The story of George Banks raises one of the most haunting questions in American justice: What happens when a person sentenced to death loses their mind? In the eyes of the law, even the guilty have constitutional rights.

Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent Ford v. Wainwright (1986), executing someone deemed “insane” violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In Banks’s case, Pennsylvania courts found him mentally incompetent to