Lester Bower

Lester Leroy Bower junior (born November 20, 1947 in Kansas City , Missouri , † June 3, 2015 in Huntsville , Texas ) was an American convict who was executed for four murders.

Course of events

Lester Bower worked as a sales representative, was married and had two daughters. He and his family had moved from Colorado to Texas a few months before the murders and most recently lived in Arlington .

On October 8, 1983, four men were shot dead in an aircraft hangar near Sherman , Grayson County . The dead were 51-year-old hangar owner Bob Tate, 52-year-old deacon Jerry Brown, 39-year-old former police officer Ronald Mayes and 29-year-old Sheriff's Deputy Philip Good. Three of the men knew each other through their shared passion for microlights . The bodies were discovered by Tate's wife after he failed to come home at an agreed time.

The alerted police discovered that Tate's microlight had been stolen. According to his family, Tate planned to sell this plane to a Dallas man on October 8th for $ 4,000 . On January 19, 1984, Lester Bower was arrested on suspicion of murder. He had wanted to get hold of such an aircraft for a long time and was also in Bob Tate's hangar, which he had denied during previous interrogations. Parts of the stolen aircraft were also found in his garage, along with a fingerprint of the victim, Jerry Brown. It was also proven that a few months before the murders, Bower obtained a rare type of ammunition that was only offered by a few dealers in Texas. This Fiocchi .22 LR subsonic hollow-point ammunition was also used in the four murders. In April 1984, Bower was found guilty of four murders and sentenced to death.

The verdict was by no means undisputed. Because the investigators had not been able to secure fingerprints, DNA evidence or a murder weapon at the crime scene. In addition, Bower had no criminal record and denied the crimes. Bower spent more than 31 years on Texas death row . This was the second longest time an inmate in Texas had been on death row. His execution was postponed six times shortly before the execution. In June 2015 he was finally at the age of 67 years in the Huntsville Unit with the lethal injection executed. A few hours earlier, the US Supreme Court rejected another postponement. He thus became the oldest Executed in Texas since the reintroduction of the death penalty in this state in 1976. On February 28, 2019 Billie Coble was executed, of 70 years, 5 months and 21 days became the oldest Executed in Texas.

Web links

• Texas Executes Lester Bower
• Bower v. State