’79 murder case won’t lay to rest

Nancy Banks was 8 years old in 1979, the youngest member of her family in Brewer, when she learned that her father had been murdered while attending a convention of historians in New Orleans.

It was a time of confusion and fear, she says now as she remembers the enormous grief that engulfed her family and devastated her mother for years to come.

“I stayed in bed the whole time, scared to death at what was happening,” Banks recalled.

Ronald F. Banks, a 45-year-old professor of history at the University of Maine, had gone to New Orleans on April 12 with three campus colleagues for an annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Banks and John Hakola, a good friend and colleague, had just returned to the Hyatt Regency Hotel near the Superdome after touring the French Quarter that night. It was shortly after 9 p.m. At the door of the hotel, two teenagers confronted the men and demanded their money.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Banks said as he began to struggle with one of the young assailants. Hakola managed to get through the hotel door, where he watched in horror as one of the teens raised a gun to Banks’ face and shot him through the eye, killing him instantly.

The gunman and his accomplice fled on foot.

While Nancy Banks grieved for the loss of her father, the Maine academic and political communities were shocked by the violent death of one of the state’s most prominent historians. As a historian of Maine and its Indian tribes, Banks was the leading researcher on the Indians’ claim to state land. He wrote or edited three distinguished books of Maine history, and was completing another when he was killed. Sen. Edmund Muskie and Gov. Joseph Brennan, who were among the 400 people at the funeral, praised Banks as a kind and gentle man and an eminent scholar whose reputation extended well beyond Maine’s borders.

Within a month, the New Orleans police had arrested the suspected gunman, Isaac Knapper, a promising 16-year-old boxer and Olympic hopeful, along with 14-year-old Leroy Williams. They were charged with first-degree murder, although Williams later turned state’s witness against his friend in exchange for a manslaughter charge. Knapper, whose long juvenile record included two armed robberies, was convicted of murder in 1979 and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. Williams got seven years.

Harry Connick, the New Orleans district attorney and father of the singer of the same name, informed the Banks family of the sentencing by letter. It was the last time they would hear from him.

In the early 1980s, the family sued the Hyatt Regency for failing to warn its guests that the area around the hotel was indeed a dangerous place where many crimes had been committed around the time of Banks’ murder. In 1984, the family was awarded $975,000 in damages.

“At that point, we thought it was over,” Nancy Banks said. “We were moving on with our lives.”

And they did so admirably in the 25 years since the murder. Nancy’s mother, who died five years ago, remarried in 1985 and moved to East Holden. Nancy lives in New York, where she is studying for her doctorate in American history at Columbia University. Her sister Amy is a psychiatrist in Massachusetts, her other sister, Kathy, is a successful writer of children’s books in France, and her brother, Philip, the oldest, worked until recently as an investment banker in Boston.

“Through the years, whenever we talked about this horrible thing that happened to our family, we always took comfort in knowing that the killer was in prison for life without parole,” Nancy Banks said. “As far as we were concerned, justice had been served.”

Last July, however, Nancy Banks made a startling discovery that since has undermined her family’s comfort and reopened some old wounds. When her husband, out of curiosity, typed the name “Isaac Knapper” into an Internet search engine, he found a Louisiana newspaper story explaining that the young man had been released from prison in 1991 when his murder conviction was overturned by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

“I was in utter shock when my husband told me what he’d found,” Banks said. “My family had never been told anything about this development, and the more I’ve read, the more troubling it is.”

Laurie White, trying her very first case as a New Orleans criminal defense attorney, appealed Knapper’s 1979 murder conviction on the grounds that the prosecution had failed to provide the defense with a 31-page police report that contained information – Brady material, in legal terminology – that could have been favorable to the defense and might have changed the outcome of the trial.

In the police report, Hakola, Banks’ companion, stated that the gunman wore a white shirt; on the witness stand he said the teen was dressed in black. The police report also described an armed robbery of tourists a week after the murder, near the New Orleans hotel where Banks died. Not only did the eyewitness description of all three apprehended robbers closely match the descriptions of the two murder suspects, one of the trio was carrying the pistol that was used to kill Banks.

In a 4-3 vote, the state high court determined that the prosecutor had violated Knapper’s due process by not sharing the police report with his lawyer and overturned the murder conviction.

After serving 12 years, 29-year-old Knapper walked out of the state prison at Angola a free man. He was never retried. Eight months after his release, he won a bronze medal in the Olympic boxing trials in Barcelona, Spain. He boxed for a few more years before becoming the owner of a liquor store in New Orleans.

“I was railroaded,” Knapper told a reporter a few years after his release.

In 1999, he was back in prison, serving 20 years for trafficking cocaine.

Meanwhile, the Banks family is plagued with questions that no one is willing to answer. Why hasn’t anyone spoken with Leroy Williams since his release from prison, Nancy Banks asks, or the three robbers who were found with the murder weapon? Why did no one ever contact her family – not the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office nor the reporters who covered the highly publicized appeals case? Mostly, she wants to know, why does no one care enough to reopen the case and find out who is responsible for her father’s murder?

“We just want the truth, finally,” Nancy Banks said. “I don’t know if Knapper did it or not. If he did and got out on a technicality, that’s a very distressing thought to live with. If he didn’t do it and was sent away for 12 years on a wrongful conviction, I feel deeply troubled about that, too. But no one is willing the make the effort to find out.”

The Banks siblings have called the New Orleans DA’s office repeatedly in the last few months, but have gotten nowhere. Connick retired two years ago, and the current administration has expressed surprise and sympathy that the Banks family was never told of Knapper’s release. It was sloppiness or laziness on the part of their predecessors, they’ve said, and they’re sorry about it.

“They say they still believe they had the right guy all along, but that they got screwed by a procedural mistake,” Nancy Banks said. “But the DA’s office botched this case on so many levels that it’s hard to believe them. They tell us the case has been sealed forever and is considered an unsolved murder. Basically, it was just dropped. It’s over.”

The Banks siblings are desperate to change that, to regain the small bit of comfort that had sustained them all those years when they believed that justice had been served. They hope that Maine people who knew and respected their father will join them in writing the New Orleans authorities and urging them to reopen the case and make the killer accountable for his crime. They’re not optimistic it will ever happen – many of their father’s friends and colleagues have died, including Hakola in 1995 – but they feel obligated as a family to try.

“It’s as if we’ve been reliving that time again, the original feelings of frustration, helplessness and powerlessness,” Nancy Banks said. “After 25 years, the emotions are raw again. I just feel that we owe this to my father and to his memory.”