Maine Woman Writes A Book With The Man Wrongly Convicted Of Killing Her Father

In April 1979, Amy Banks, then 17, had the strange, painful experience of picking up a copy of the Bangor Daily News to see two stories about her family. One, headlining the sports section, was an article about Banks, a star basketball player for Brewer High School, being named to the Maine Girls’ All-State Basketball Team for that year. The other, on the front page of the paper, was a news story about how her father, University of Maine history professor Ronald Banks, had been murdered on April 12 in a robbery attempt outside a hotel in New Orleans, where he was attending an academic conference. As grief washed over her and her family, Banks, now 59, recalls the numbness that set in, even as New Orleans police said they had arrested a suspect, a 17-year-old boy named Isaac Knapper.