GEORGE Banks – one of America’s most notorious mass murderers – has died in prison at 83.
Banks spent 43 years behind bars in Pennsylvania for shooting 14 people in 1982 – with five of his own kids among the 13 who died.
He died from kidney cancer on Sunday afternoon at Phoenix state prison, according to Montgomery County Coroner Dr Janine Darby.
The drunken rifle rampage Banks unleashed upon the town of Wilkes-Barre was at the time considered one of the most severe mass murders in US history.
He was convicted of 12 counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder.
Banks had been drinking at a party late at night before reaching for an AR-15 rifle and beginning to shoot at his home.
He murdered five of his children, aged from one to six.
Four more of the victims were mothers of his children.
He also killed bystanders, including a seven-year-old, and 11-year-old, and a teenager.
Banks killed three women and five children at his home, authorities said at the time.
Then, dressed in green army fatigues with an ammunition bandolier around his chest and shoulders, Banks left the house into the night.
When he saw four teenagers walking to their car from a nearby friend’s house, he shot two of them – killing one and wounding another.
He stole a car and drove to the Heather Highlands Trailer Park, where police found the bodies of Banks’ son and the child’s mother – as well as her mother and her nephew.
After that, Banks went to his own mother’s house and told her: “I killed them. I killed them all,” according to court records.
Banks eventually surrendered after a four-hour standoff at a friend’s house.
Police tried to convince him that his victims had survived, in order to talk him down.
Banks would have faced the death penalty, but state courts blocked it on the grounds that he was not mentally competent.
Instead, he got life imprisonment.
The teen who survived being shot by Banks, Jim Olson, was frustrated by Banks dodging capital punishment.
He said in 2012: “What is the sense of having a death penalty if you don’t use it or enforce it?”
Defense lawyers had argued that Banks was insane when he went on the shooting spree.
After his arrest, Banks, who was mixed race, claimed he killed his children to save them from the pain of growing up in a racist society.
During his trial, he abandoned his lawyer’s strategy.
He argued instead that prosecutors, the judge and the mayor of Wilkes-Barre were conspiring against him.
Banks also showed the jury gory pictures of his victims, even after his lawyer got the photos barred on the grounds that they were gruesome and prejudicial.
