Editorial: Banks, the death penalty, and finding justice

Forty-three years after the staggering violence that thrust George Banks and our region into the national limelight, his saga ended with the muted silence of a natural death in a nearly forgotten Pennsylvania prison cell. Stories in Tuesday’s paper recounted the many horrors of his 1982 killing spree that left 13 dead, seven under the age of 12, the youngest his 20-month-old daughter.

At the time it was the largest mass murder by a single person in Pennsylvania history, later deemed the first such slaughter performed with an AR-15 rifle. The facts unearthed as the investigation and trial played out can chill bone.

At a party before the murders, he swapped shirts with a woman and wore it under his army fatigues when the shooting began. It read “Kill Them All and Let God Sort it Out.” Deca