A Fake Death and a Real One; Or, At Home With the Banish Family

"South Bend Tribune," August 23, 1965, via Newspapers.com

All families have their little mysteries.  Thankfully, however, few are as bizarre and apparently senseless as the one inflicted on a seemingly quite normal household in South Bend, Indiana.

Things began getting weird on the morning of June 3, 1965, when 18-year-old Scott Banish casually told his parents, Edward and Loretta Banish, that he was going with a group of friends to Warren Dunes State Park, to do some swimming in Lake Michigan.  When by the end of the day Scott had failed to return home, his parents went looking for him.

Edward and Loretta found Scott’s car in the lake’s parking lot, with his wallet and clothing inside.  On the beach was Scott’s towel and blanket.  When they failed to find Scott himself, his parents called police.

Investigators learned that the friends Scott was supposedly going to swim with had all called off their plans because the lake was too cold.  Police divers failed to find Scott’s body in the lake, but it was presumed he had drowned.  The young man was pronounced dead of a tragic, but hardly unusual accident.  Little did the Banish family know that their tragedies were just beginning.

On the night of August 22, just over two months after their son’s disappearance, Edward and Loretta were playing cards in their family’s basement game room with their thirteen-year-old daughter Kathy and two visiting relatives.  After a while, Edward announced that he was tired, and would go upstairs to bed.  Soon after he left, Loretta heard loud thuds from above.

When she went to see what was going on, she found her husband standing in the living room, near the front door.  He was covered in blood.  Before Loretta could go to him, Edward collapsed, dead from seven savage stab wounds.  Police assumed that he had confronted a burglar, who then attacked him.

Nine days after Edward’s murder, Loretta received what may have been the biggest shock of all, when police informed her that Scott was alive, if not exactly well, as he had just been arrested in Fort Wayne, Indiana after submitting a forged ID to an army recruitment office.  The recruiter had read newspaper items about Scott’s “drowning,” and immediately recognized him.

When questioned by police, Scott readily admitted to deliberately faking his own death.  His motive was an honorable one, even if his methods were slightly cracked: he wanted to join the army.  The Banish family had a long history of serving in the military, and Scott longed to carry on that tradition.  However, when he had tried to enlist before, he was rejected on medical grounds.  (He had Hodgkin's Disease.)  Scott thought that if he tried again under a new identity, he might be more successful.

The young man immediately became the police’s number one suspect for Edward’s murder, apparently on the theory that anyone capable of faking a death was also capable of creating a real one.  Scott professed to be shocked when he learned his father had been murdered.  He stated that for the past two months he had been working on a tuna fishing vessel, the “Joanne,” operating in the waters off Oregon, under the name of “Danny McFarland,” and he had the paycheck stubs to prove it.  This failed to convince the police of his innocence.  They reasoned that Scott could have sneaked away from the boat long enough to kill his father.  However, when investigators contacted the “Joanne” captain, Paul Vines, he confirmed that a boy matching Scott’s description who called himself “Danny McFarland” had been working for him as a deckhand for the past two months.  Vines added that on the night Edward Banish was murdered, his boat, with “Danny” on it, was one hundred miles off the coast.

This would seem to be about as cast-iron as alibis get, but the police were stubbornly determined to prove that Scott was their elusive killer, especially after the youth failed a lie detector test.  They argued that “McFarland” must have been another young man who happened to resemble Scott, and that their suspect had somehow obtained the pay stubs from him.  The local sheriff, William Locks, hauled the teenager in for interrogation.  Locks bluntly told Scott that there was enough evidence to convict him of his father’s murder--blood had been found on Scott’s pants that was “the same general type” as Edward’s.  After twelve straight hours of what was probably fairly brutal questioning, Scott finally confessed to the slaying.  He told Locks that the killing was accidental--that he had panicked and attacked his father as he was caught trying to find his birth certificate so he could enlist in the army.

Scott was, of course, immediately arrested.  He then repudiated his confession, stating that the sheriff had pressured him into it by threatening to put him in jail for the rest of his life, whether he was “innocent or not.”  Locks told him that the only way to escape a lifetime sentence was if he confessed, after which he would be given probation for involuntary manslaughter.

At the preliminary hearing, the captain and crew of the “Joanne” testified that on the night of the murder, Scott was on the ship, as he had been every night for the two months of his employment.  Two more witnesses who had helped repair the boat on the night Edward died also swore they had seen Scott on the boat.  They were able to provide a log proving they had indeed done this maintenance on the night of August 22.  After this eight-day hearing, the case was sent to a grand jury, which ruled there was not enough evidence against Scott to justify an indictment.

In 1968, Scott sued the sheriff and six of his deputies, claiming false arrest, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution.  However, the court ruled against him on the grounds that the blood on Scott’s pants, the lie detector results, and his confession all were probable cause for his arrest.

Soon after this, the Banish family moved to Illinois, where Scott led a quiet, respectable life until his death in 2015.  As for his father, this was one of those cases where once the police lost their pet suspect, they simply threw up their hands and moved on to other crimes.  Edward’s unnervingly strange murder remains unsolved.