Michael Chisholm, a 36-year-old man from Pasadena, Maryland, was killed on November 19, 1991, after a night that began as drinking among friends and ended on a roadside. Prosecutors later said Lawrence Banks had been out in Pasadena with two companions when the evening turned violent and Chisholm was shot and left along the road.
What made the case even more chilling, according to later reporting and court records summarized in the years that followed, was how quickly the violence
continued beyond Chisholm. Authorities said that on the very same day, Banks drove into Baltimore and fatally shot his 17-year-old son at the boy’s foster home on Northern Parkway. Investigators and prosecutors tied that second killing to rage over child-abuse allegations—claims that Banks had been abusive, and that his daughter had reported sexual abuse while he was intoxicated.
Banks was arrested and faced homicide charges connected to both deaths. In the Chisholm case, Banks ultimately pleaded guilty, and he entered a no contest plea in the killing of his son; the outcomes were shaped by the realities of what could be proven, with later accounts describing problems involving witnesses and evidence. The sentence that followed ran concurrently, and Banks served prison time before being released in 2002.
Public accounts of the Chisholm homicide consistently identify Banks as the shooter, and they do not describe any separate suspect being charged as the person who pulled the trigger. Beyond Banks’ conviction, later summaries of his criminal history revisit Chisholm’s death as one of the earlier murders attributed to him, alongside the subsequent violence that kept drawing investigators back to his name for years.
