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Thread: Lester Leroy Bower, Jr. - Texas Execution - June 3, 2015

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    Lester Leroy Bower, Jr. - Texas Execution - June 3, 2015






    Summary of Offense:

    Lester Bower was convicted on four counts of capital murder in the October 8, 1983 shooting deaths of four men at an ultralight airplance hangar near Sherman. The bodies were found at one of the victim's ranch. Parts of an ultralight plane missing from the hanger were later found in Bower's garage in Arlington. Authorities said Bower killed one of the men in order to steal an ultralight he had advertised to sell for $4,000 and then killed the three other men when they showed up unexpectedly at the hangar.

    Victims: Bob Tate, Ronald Mayes, Philip Good and Jerry Mac Brown.

    Bower was sentenced to death in Grayson County in May 1984.

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    April 21, 2008

    HOUSTON -- One of the state's longest-serving death row prisoners lost an appeal Monday in the U.S. Supreme Court, moving him closer to punishment for the shooting deaths of four men in North Texas almost a quarter-century ago.

    Lester Bower, 60, has been on death row since 1984, a year after the bodies of four men were found in an airplane hangar near Sherman in Grayson County.

    At least five previous attempts to execute him have been blocked by the courts.

    In August, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction and death sentence after a federal district judge allowed him to pursue claims that his trial attorney was ineffective.

    Monday, without comment, the Supreme Court upheld the 5th Circuit decision by declining to review Bower's case.

    Bower has maintained his innocence in the October 1983 shooting deaths af Bob Tate, 51, a Denison building contractor; Ronald Mayes, 39, a former Sherman police officer; Philip Good, 29, a Grayson County sheriff's deputy; and Jerry Mac Brown, 52, a Sherman interior designer. The four men were found shot execution-style in a hangar at Tate's ranch northeast of Sherman.

    Evidence showed parts of an ultralight plane missing from the hangar later were found in Bower's garage in Arlington.

    Prosecutors said Bower, a college graduate who worked as a chemical salesman, killed Tate to steal the ultralight plane that was for sale for $4,000. Authorities argued the three others were gunned down when they unexpectedly showed up at the hangar.

    Investigators looking at phone records determined Bower had responded to an advertisement placed by Good, who was helping Tate find a buyer for the aircraft.

    Questioned by the FBI, Bower denied meeting Good or Tate and denied buying the plane, according to court documents. But detectives searching Bower's home found pieces of the plane and arrested him.

    Bower had no previous criminal record and did not testify at his trial. At an evidentiary hearing in 2000, he acknowledged meeting with Good, Brown and Tate and buying the plane. He said he read about the slayings in a newspaper but decided to not say anything because he didn't want to become a suspect.

    He does not have an execution date.

    In a second Texas case Monday, the high court lifted a reprieve it granted last year for Carlton Turner Jr., a Dallas-area man condemned for killing his parents in 1998.

    Turner won a stay of execution last year about four hours after he was scheduled to be put to death in Huntsville. Justices stopped his punishment in the wake of their decision to consider whether lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel.

    Last week, in a 7-2 vote, the high court rejected the constitutional challenge, clearing the way for executions to resume nationally and for Turner's reprieve to be removed. Dallas County prosecutors said his execution now likely will be set for sometime this summer.

    (Source: The Houston Chronicle)

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    April 25, 2008

    Just days after the Supreme Court refused Lester Bower’s request for a new trial, Judge Jim Fallon signed a death warrant that could end Bower’s life on July 22.

    Bower, 60, was convicted in April 1984 of killing Bob G. Tate, Phillip Good, Ronald Mayes and Jerry Brown at the Tate Ranch near Sherman. The men were discovered shot to death in an airplane hangar located on the Tate Ranch, northeast of the city, on Oct. 8, 1983. Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that affirmed Bower’s conviction in the deaths. The Supreme Court justices didn’t comment on the reasoning behind their decision.

    The death warrant released Thursday by Grayson County District Attorney Joe Brown said that Bower is to be executed “some time after the hour of 6 p.m. on July 22, 2008, by causing a substance or substances in a lethal quantity to be intravenously injected into the body of (Bower) sufficient to cause death, and until (Bower) is dead, obeying all laws of the State of Texas with reference to such execution.”

    Grayson County District Clerk Tracy Powers signed the warrant as did Fallon.

    Bower has never wavered from the claim that he is innocent of the capital murder charges that landed him on death row. When first questioned by authorities about the killings, Bower said he had never met Mr. Tate, Mr. Good, Mr. Mayes or Mr. Brown. However, the former salesman then said he came to Sherman to talk about buying an ultralight aircraft that Mr. Tate was selling. But Bower contends he did not kill anyone to get the craft.

    Evidence at Bower’s trial, and several hearings afterward, showed that authorities found pieces of Tate’s ultralight plane in Bower’s garage in Arlington during a search of his home. Mr. Tate had been trying to sell the plane for around $4,000 at the time of his death.

    The U.S. 5th Circuit Court decision upheld this week denied Bower’s request for a new trial based upon several factors relating to claims of ineffective assistance of council claim and that the prosecution withheld important evidence that should have been turned over to the defense.

    The opinion said the justices found no merit to Bower’s claim that his attorney, Jerry Buckner, failed to provide a defense that reached the level of what a professional attorney would present for someone charged in a death penalty case.

    Bower’s appeal took aim at Buckner’s trial strategy of pointing out the prosecution’s case was based on circumstantial evidence. That evidence could not prove Bower was in Grayson County the day of the killings, Buckner claimed in 1984. Buckner’s strategy also rested on pointing out that even though law enforcement officers found pieces of Bobby Tate’s ultralight at Bower’s home, the prosecution couldn’t prove that Bower didn’t, as he claimed, buy the small plane from a third party.

    The appeal also took issue with the way Buckner prepared for the trial and whom he chose to question during the trial. Furthermore, Bower’s appeal said he wanted to testify at his murder trial and Buckner would not allow him to do so.

    The justices who reviewed the appeal said that the claims Bower presented did not rise to the level of ineffective assistance of counsel and refused to grant him a new trial based on the way Buckner conducted the defense portion of the trial.

    Justices also rejected Bower’s contention that the prosecution failed to release to the defense information that would have made a difference in the outcome of the case.

    (Source: The Houston Chronicle)

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    June 29, 2008

    Just a few paragraphs into the Star-Telegram story, the woman knew something was terribly wrong. A man named Lester Leroy Bower Jr. was on Death Row for the 1983 massacre of four men in a Sherman airplane hangar, she read that morning in 1989. But the woman, who asked to be identified by the pseudonym "Pearl," had reason to believe that Bower wasn’t the killer at all — that it was her ex-boyfriend and three others who had committed the crime.

    The woman showed the story to her sister, the one person she had told of her suspicions about the old boyfriend.

    "They’re going to put that guy to death for that," she remembers her sister saying.

    "Yeah, I know," Pearl replied.

    "But he didn’t do it?"

    "No," Pearl said.

    "You’ve got to do something," the sister said.

    After a day of struggling with fears for her own life, Pearl did. The next day, she contacted Bower’s lawyers from Washington, D.C., told them her story and signed a legal affidavit attesting to it.

    Now, 19 years later, information she related is at the heart of an increasingly urgent effort to save Bower’s life. On July 22, after 24 years on Texas Death Row, Bower is scheduled to die by lethal injection.

    Bower’s lawyers say they have identified the four men whom Pearl alleges to be the killers, have documented their long criminal records and have confirmed other key parts of her story. In recent months, a defense investigator has also located another witness, the wife of one of alleged accomplices who said she heard the four men discussing the killings. The names of the new suspects, though known to defense lawyers, have remained sealed by court order.

    "I don’t want Mr. Bower to die for something that he didn’t do," said Pearl, who broke up with her boyfriend shortly after the slayings and remains fearful of him today. Since she signed the affidavit in 1989, her identity has been concealed by court order. "I know in my heart that he didn’t do it. I just could not in my conscience sit back and just go, 'Oh well, sorry.’

    "If he would have gotten life in prison, I can’t sit here and honestly say I would have done something different. Life is what, 30 years in the state of Texas? But he got the death penalty, and there’s no getting out of that."

    This past week, Bower’s lawyers filed a 65-page legal motion in Sherman’s 15th state District Court detailing the scenario developed after Pearl came forward. The petition asks state Judge Jim Fallon to delay Bower’s execution, vacate his conviction and death sentence, and conduct hearings on his innocence claim.

    Because of the plodding appellate system in death penalty cases — Bower’s appeal languished in federal court alone for 16 years — and the shifting nature of capital punishment law, this is the first opportunity for a Texas court to seriously consider the merits of Bower’s innocence claim, his lawyers say. When Pearl first came forward, Texas law precluded state judges from considering evidence gathered more than 30 days after a conviction. The so-called 30-day rule is no longer in effect in Texas because federal judges have ruled that such post-conviction claims need to be adjudicated by the state.

    "Whatever you think about the benefits of having capital punishment, no one could possibly argue that executing an innocent man is in the interests of the state, or our society," said Anthony Roth, one of Bower’s lawyers. "Our interests as lawyers and as people should be that our government, when in doubt, should not go forward with an execution. There is ample evidence to give people reasonable doubt about whether Les committed these murders. In my view, the evidence is compelling that he didn’t."

    A Grayson County prosecutor, Karla Hackett, said Wednesday that the state will vigorously contest Bower’s innocence claim. Prosecutors also oppose a defense motion to have saliva, hair fibers and cigarette butts from the crime scene tested for DNA. Bower’s lawyers hope that the analysis will link one of the men accused by Pearl to the crime.

    "There’s no way there is actual innocence here," Hackett said, citing the large amount of circumstantial evidence against Bower. "DNA is not going to make all that go away. It’s another delaying tactic. It’s normal. We expect it. There’s four dead men, and all the evidence points straight to Lester Leroy Bower Jr."

    The wife of victim Philip Good says she is also convinced the right man was convicted. Marlene Bushard, who has since remarried and is living in Arizona, said her husband would have turned 30 the day after his death. He left an infant son, Curtis Good, who is now 25.

    As for Bower, Bushard said, "They’re just trying to draw this out."

    Bushard said she plans to attend Bower’s execution.

    Bower’s account

    Several months before the slayings, Bower, his wife, Shari, and their two young daughters moved from Colorado to North Texas, where he took a job as a chemical salesman. Lester Bower was a former college football player and devout Baptist with no criminal history. He was also an inveterate hobbyist whose pastimes included rafting, hunting, backpacking and archery.

    In the fall of 1983, he was considering another diversion, purchasing and flying an ultralight aircraft. His wife was opposed.

    Shari Bower said in a recent interview that she and her husband had watched a news program about crashes and injuries associated with ultralights. "I looked at him," she said, "and pretty much said, 'Over my dead body. You played football, weigh 240 pounds and you’re talking about [an aircraft with] a lawnmower engine. I don’t think so.’ "

    But Lester Bower secretly went ahead, calling Philip Good after coming across his name in a magazine ad for the ultralights. Good, in turn, planned to introduce Bower to Bob Tate, who had an ultralight for sale.

    On Saturday, Oct. 8, Bower told his wife he planned to spend the day bow hunting. Instead, he drove to Tate’s B and B Ranch just outside Sherman, arriving in mid-afternoon. Bower said he paid $3,000 in cash for the aircraft, then watched Tate and Good disassemble it and strap it to his vehicle.

    Bower says he then made the two-hour drive back to Mansfield, where he stashed the aircraft at a shooting range, and arrived at his Arlington home before dark.

    At 8:30 p.m. that day, Tate’s wife and son discovered the bodies of the four men. Tate, 50, was a self-employed building contractor; Good was a former Sherman police officer and had begun work as a Grayson County deputy sheriff only a few days before. The other victims were Ronald Mayes, 37, a former Sherman police officer, and Jerry Brown, a 52-year-old interior designer.

    Tate, Good and Brown were found wrapped in rolls of carpet inside the hangar. Mayes, who was found by the door, was apparently killed as he tried to flee. All of the victims had been shot in the head, killings described at the time as "execution-style."

    The killings dominated the news for days to come, and even Shari Bower commented about the massacre to her husband a few days later. But Bower kept his secret from her and did not come forward.

    Then in January, FBI agents traced Bower’s telephone calls to Good. Bower admitted making the calls. But he lied to agents, denying that he had traveled to Sherman on the day of the murders.

    After a subsequent search of Bower’s home, where investigators found pieces of the ultralight with Tate’s name on it, Bower was arrested. Prosecutors later contended that theft of the aircraft was Bower’s motive for the slayings.

    In a recent interview on Death Row near Livingston, Bower denied involvement in the killings, as he has from the time of his arrest. After learning of the murders, Bower said, "I realized that I had no idea about what I may have gotten myself into or what I may have literally just missed. If I came forward, what might happen about the safety of my family? Then, of course, I had not exactly been truthful with my wife, so there was a level of embarrassment there, family-wise.

    "So then October rolls around, November, December and we get into January. Then all of a sudden they [FBI agents] show up. And once you kind of start a lie, it just kind of grows and it rolls along. It just consumed me. You ask, 'Why would an intelligent person do something like that?’ I find that hard to explain."

    Bower did not testify during his capital murder trial in April 1984. Grayson County jurors deliberated less that two hours before convicting him on four counts of capital murder, and the next day he was sentenced to die. Bower, now 60, says he can understand how the jury reached its verdict, how his own account could be considered suspect because of the lies he told to investigators.

    But the new witness has no reason to lie, he says.

    "OK, don’t believe me," Bower said recently in prison. "Don’t believe anything I say. I’m not the one who has come forward and finally told exactly what happened out there."

    'A dope deal that went bad’

    Pearl is now 48 and raises two grandchildren because her own daughter was murdered several years ago. In the recent interview at her home, she recalled another time in her life, the summer day in 1983 at Lake Texoma when she and a friend met the men known as Lynn and Rocky. She said they were two handsome guys driving a black sports car.

    In the whirlwind romance that followed, Pearl said, she quickly moved into Lynn’s home in southern Oklahoma. On the weekend of the Sherman murders, she left to visit her mother in Hillsboro, and was surprised to find Lynn sitting outside sometime after midnight on Oct. 9.

    Her first thought was "he missed me so much he had come all the way down here to see me," Pearl said. "That’s how stupid I was."

    Lynn was unusually agitated, insisting that Pearl immediately return with him to Oklahoma, she said. He drove until the couple passed through Dallas. As they neared Sherman, Lynn pulled off the road and told Pearl to drive, and when she took the wheel, he stretched out and hid in the back seat.

    "He told me to drive straight through Sherman, don’t stop, and don’t do anything to get us stopped," Pearl recalled. "I was like, 'Why, what did you do?’

    "He said they had a dope deal that went bad and they had to kill four people. I asked him, 'Who killed four people?’ He said, 'Me and Ches and Rocky.’ I assumed at the time that Bear was there, too, and of course he was."

    Pearl’s story, naming the four, is also recounted in the defense motion that was filed last week.

    Still, Pearl said, she was skeptical until a few days later, when for the first time she met Ches, who was the head of a drug operation that involved Lynn and the others. Pearl said she overheard Ches and Lynn talking about murders.

    "[Ches’ girlfriend] and I were in the kitchen, and Ches and Lynn were in the living room and they were pretty drunk," Pearl recalled. "They had their guns out, talking about it, laughing about it. Ches thought everything was funny. He said something about, 'Did you see that guy’s eyes when he opened the door?’ or 'Did you see that guy’s face when I shot him?’

    "I kept asking [the girlfriend], 'Did you hear that?’ She kept telling me, no, and that I needed to not hear it, either."

    In the weeks to come, Ches also acknowledged the murders to Pearl, telling her that one of the victims "had been a cop and the killings had happened because things had gone wrong," according to the defense motion filed last week.

    Pearl also said that in the weeks following the murders, Lynn was agitated and had trouble sleeping. After one nightmare he told her that he saw one of the victim’s eyes staring at him, a big tin building and shots reverberating inside it. Yet Pearl said she still wasn’t certain that any killings in Sherman had actually occurred, because she did not read newspapers or listen to radio or television news at the time.

    "There was a big part of me who still wanted to believe it was all dopers talking, bragging," Pearl said last week. "But then there was another part of me that thought, 'Well, maybe they did.’ But I wasn’t going to stick around to find out. I called my mom and I told her that I needed money, that I needed to get out of there right then."

    For the next five years, she says she tried to put her time with Lynn out of her mind. Then came the October morning when she read about the Sherman massacre. Until then, she said she had assumed that Lynn, Ches and the rest would have been arrested if they were guilty of the killings. For the rest of that Sunday, Pearl said she anguished over whether to come forward.

    "Was my fear of Ches and Lynn bigger than my fear of not doing the right thing?" Pearl said. "I wanted to do the right thing, but not at the expense of my children. I just had to know that I could protect them and do the right thing."

    Accusations in court

    Eleven years after signing her affidavit, Pearl, as Witness Number One, told the same story in an appellate hearing in federal court, where Bower was contending that he had not received a sufficient legal defense.

    At that same hearing in Sherman, another defense witness testified that back in 1984, after a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Pearl had told him about Lynn’s participation in the murders. And a third witness said that about 5:30 on the evening of the massacre, she saw several men standing in front of the Tate hangar. There was also testimony from a man who said he had worked as a drug courier for Tate, one of the victims.

    In the hearing, the men accused by Pearl were remembered by a former Oklahoma sheriff, Arnold Isenberg. At the time of the killings, Isenberg was a sheriff’s deputy in southern Oklahoma, and recalled that the men were under investigation for manufacturing and selling methamphetamine. Each had a dangerous reputation and "went underground for a while" after the killings in Sherman, Isenberg said. Two years later, federal Judge Richard Schell denied Bower’s appeal, saying the testimony did not prove Bower’s constitutional claim that his lawyer didn’t adequately defend him

    Bower’s current lawyers, who took the case after his conviction, say authorities have only minimally investigated the alternative suspects. No state or federal investigator has contacted Pearl about her account. Current prosecutors still contend that the man who committed the murders is the one who will die next month.

    "The strength of the case against this man, the lies he told the FBI investigators," said Hackett, the Grayson County prosecutor. "The fact that he made phone calls setting up the meeting with one of the victims; that the meeting happened at the time of the murders and portions of the aircraft stolen from the crime scene found at his residence, as well as a tremendous amount of other circumstantial evidence and eyewitnesses. With the strength of all that . . . the solid evidence that was there against him doesn’t go away just because someone said something in an affidavit."

    In her home last week, Pearl said she has reason to believe differently. If Lester Bower is executed next month, she said, "I would feel really sad for the state of Texas."

    If he would have gotten life in prison, I can’t sit here and honestly say I would have done something different. Life is what, 30 years in the state of Texas? But he got the death penalty and there’s no getting out of that.

    "Pearl," a woman who says her ex-boyfriend has admitted responsibility in the slayings. Her identity is concealed by court order.

    http://www.star-telegram.com/804/story/730176.html

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    Here's the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit opinion on Bower:

    http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions...80-CV0.wpd.pdf

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    July 3, 2008

    LIVINGSTON — A state district judge has signed an order halting the date of the lethal injection execution of Texas's longest-serving death row prisoner, a Dallas television station reported.

    WFAA-TV reported Wednesday Lester Bower's July 22, 2008 execution date was stayed by state District Judge Jim Fallon on Tuesday. Fallon's order grants Bower's prolonged request for a court to decide whether cigarette butts and strands of hair found at the murder scene, will undergo DNA testing, the station reported.

    "Well I'm happy about that," Bower, 60, told the station. "Anytime you can get the date stopped, get the system stopped... I've been waiting 24 years for a court, any court, anywhere, just to hear the evidence."

    Bower has been on death row since 1984, a year after the bodies of four men were found in an airplane hangar near Sherman in Grayson County.

    At least five previous attempts to execute him have been blocked by the courts.

    In August, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction and death sentence after a federal district judge allowed him to pursue claims that his trial attorney was ineffective.

    In April, without comment, the Supreme Court upheld the 5th Circuit decision by declining to review Bower's case.

    Bower has maintained his innocence in the October 1983 shooting deaths of Bob Tate, 51, a Denison building contractor; Ronald Mayes, 39, a former Sherman police officer; Philip Good, 29, a Grayson County sheriff's deputy; and Jerry Mac Brown, 52, a Sherman interior designer. The four men were found shot execution-style in a hangar at Tate's ranch northeast of Sherman.

    Evidence showed parts of an ultralight plane missing from the hangar later were found in Bower's garage in Arlington.

    Prosecutors said Bower, a college graduate who worked as a chemical salesman, killed Tate to steal the ultralight plane that was for sale for $4,000. Authorities argued the three others were gunned down when they unexpectedly showed up at the hangar.

    Bower admitted being in the Sherman hangar where the four men were murdered but he said he was there buying an ultra-light aircraft and left before anything happened.

    When Bower was convicted in 1984, Texas law said new evidence had to be presented within 30 days of the conviction in order to get a new trial. That law has since been repealed. But Bower has not been able to get a court to consider what he has found.

    Several years after his trial, a woman came forward implicating four other men in the murder. It was a deadly drug deal, she claimed. The station, quoting Bower's attorney, reported that despite having four other named suspects, prosecutors, to this day, have never investigated them.

    (Source: The Houston Chronicle)

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    July 5, 2008

    SHERMAN, Texas — Three months after four bodies were found shot execution-style in an airplane hangar on the B&B Ranch north of Dallas, chemical salesman Lester Leroy Bower Jr. was charged with capital murder.

    Four months later, a Grayson County jury deliberated two hours before convicting him. It took them only another two hours the next day before deciding he should die for the crime.

    No fingerprints put him at the scene. No witnesses saw him there. The murder weapon never was recovered. Bower never confessed. DNA testing wasn't available in 1984.

    Now a state district judge has stopped a scheduled July 22 execution for Bower and has agreed to consider his request that evidence in the case be examined to see if DNA testing could back up his quarter-century-long claims of innocence.

    Prosecutors, who oppose the testing as yet another delay tactic, said the mild-mannered salesman with a long marriage, two daughters and no record of criminal activity or mental-health problems just snapped. It happens, they said.

    Bower made them suspicious. He had lied to his wife, and authorities, about his efforts to buy an ultralight plane. His wife didn't want him cavorting through the air in such a flimsy craft. He sold firearms on the side, including the kind that carried the ammunition used to kill the men.

    "I was quite capable of purchasing whatever I need without killing four people," Bower, now 60, said recently from Texas death row. "Virtually no one, except for the prosecution, thinks this sounds like anything I would do.

    If mass murderers fit a profile, Bower stands out. Texas A&M University graduate, good job, family man, father of two daughters, soccer dad, stable marriage, no mental disabilities, no history of childhood abuse, no previous criminal record.

    "An absolutely stellar record," Bower said. "Then one day, as the prosecutor says, I snapped, killed four people and snapped back. Those are his words, not mine.

    "I'm not minimizing that people don't snap, that people walk into schools and start shooting, former employees walk into post offices. I mean, am I a threat? Does this really sound like something I would do?"

    Yes, prosecutors insist.

    "There is no question in my mind that Bower is guilty," said Ronald Sievert, a federal prosecutor named as a special prosecutor to assist in Bower's trial. "Contrary to some television and movie portrayals, the fact is that no ethical prosecutor would ever seek a capital conviction, in fact any conviction, unless they were convinced of the defendant's guilt."

    Sievert is now a professor of National Security Law at the University of Texas Law School and the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University. He and Grayson County District Attorney Stephen Davidchik, who has since died, built a circumstantial case surrounding Bower's purchase from Grayson County Sheriff's Deputy Philip Good, 29, of an ultralight airplane stored at the hangar owned by building contractor Bob Tate, 51.

    Tate, Good, Jerry Brown, 52, a Sherman interior designer; and Ronald Mayes, 39, a former Sherman police officer, were all executed at the hangar.

    "I lied to the FBI about my involvement" in the purchase of the plane, said Bower. "I wish it hadn't happened."

    "If you haven't done anything wrong, there's absolutely no reason to lie to the police — ever," Karla Hackett, an assistant Grayson County district attorney handling the appeals on the case, said. "I don't care what kind of spat you're going to have with your wife or husband. When you are about up to your eyeballs in a murder investigation and they're clearly looking at you as a suspect, I think you come clean."

    "In life you make decisions sometimes you wish you could take back," Bower said from prison. "I was there."

    He said Brown was with Good that Saturday afternoon when he was negotiating the $3,000, or 75 percent, down payment. They all waited about 15 minutes for Tate to show up with a key to the hangar.

    "We got along well," Bower recalled, saying Tate welcomed him to return to use the facilities. "They were flying. I wanted to learn to fly."

    He never saw Mayes, Bower said.

    Prosecutors said Bower was obsessed with the plane. Some of the aircraft's frame is gathering dust today, resting against cell bars in the old jail in downtown Sherman.

    Evidence at trial centered on Bower's two purchases in 1982, when he lived in Colorado Springs, Colo., of Italian-made Fiocchi-brand .22-caliber ammunition, the kind used in the killings. There also was evidence he had owned a .22-caliber Ruger pistol, which prosecutors said was fitted with a silencer he made.

    Prosecutors showed jurors his books about guns and gun parts, a Ruger target pistol manual and a book about silencers.

    Bower's federal firearms dealer license is among the paperwork in three file boxes of evidence and trial exhibits, including a sledge hammer prosecutors said the killer used to smash pieces of the plane to destroy evidence.

    Also in an unsecured cardboard box are four plastic foam heads, the kind used normally to display wigs. These four, however, have long blue knitting needles stuck in them like oversized pin cushions, representing the path bullets took to kill the person whose last name is etched in ball pen ink at the base of each — Tate, Good, Brown and Mayes.

    "They took some information and twisted it to their benefit," Bower said.

    "When you've got time on your hands, it's real easy to sit and justify," Hackett responded.

    Investigators seized on Bower when Good's phone records showed three calls from Bower charged on his company telephone credit card. Tate had told his wife that he and Good were going to meet someone they believed wanted to buy their plane.

    A search of Bower's home turned up parts of Tate's ultralight aircraft missing from the hangar.

    "The FBI found the damaged wings in his garage," Sievert said. "We produced documentary evidence he had ordered silencer parts, we had documentary evidence he purchased a .22 Ruger, we had the evidence he purchased the Julio Fiocchi subsonic bullets, we had the Allen wrench in his brief case that fit the silencer and would attach it to the pistol.

    "The scientific evidence demonstrated he had tried to destroy the engine block with a sledge hammer found in his trunk and of course the phone documents showed he arranged to meet the victims on the day of the offense. And that is just the evidence I remember without looking at the record."

    Sievert said not only was it clear Bower was guilty, "but the jury logically concluded that any person who was capable of systematically killing four people, execution style, was a continuing threat to society."

    Questions about his conviction first were raised in 1989 when a woman reading a newspaper article about an appeal filed in Bower's case called one of Bower's attorneys to say her ex-boyfriend and three of his friends were responsible for the slayings, the result of a dope deal gone bad. She said she didn't know anyone had been convicted of the murders.

    The identity of the witness, who signed a sworn affidavit, and the names of the four men she implicated for the slayings, identified in court filings as Rocky, Ches, Lynn and Bear, all have been sealed by court order.

    "The defense speculation about drug dealers in this case is just the type of wild speculation that all defense attorneys throw out in all capital appeals to get their client off or delay punishment," Sievert said. "It is not unusual.

    "But just ask yourself: What concrete evidence have they produced that would justify a conviction, or even an indictment or arrest, of these drug dealers? Nothing. Contrast that with the very hard and concrete evidence that demonstrates Bower committed the crime."

    Hackett said the woman who called Bower's lawyers has her own credibility issues and the appeal, sent to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, should be rejected.

    Bower did own a Ruger pistol but said he lost it in 1982. Evidence in his appeals shows that Bower's lost gun couldn't have been the murder weapon because a specific kind of firing pin used when that gun was made didn't match the marks on bullet casings recovered from the hangar.

    Bower's attorneys also point to FBI reports that initially suggested the four slayings possibly were drug or gambling related.

    Bower's lawyers also question whether he could have driven the 135 miles from the hangar to his house in less than two hours. His wife testified he was home by 6:30 p.m. The killings occurred between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m.

    Bower is realistic about his chances for reprieve in the nation's most active death penalty state.

    "I'm hoping somebody will take a look at it and say there seems to be enough to bring the verdict into question and there is a likelihood this is a miscarriage of justice," he said. "That's probably the best I can hope for."

    In their DNA request, to be reviewed July 17, Bower's lawyers want to see if substances on items removed from the crime scene match DNA of any of the four men they claim are the real killers.

    Hackett said the evidence has not been protected over the years and there's no guarantee it hasn't been substituted or tampered with and altered. And she said even if testing would point to "these four mystery killers," the results couldn't say when they were at the hangar.

    Bower said he doesn't want a short-term solution, like a 30-day setoff of his execution, "then start over and do it again."

    "Either this is good enough to stop it to take a good serious look or, 'Hey, let's go people.' I told my wife I put in my time and my last words will be: 'I'm out of here. Adios, people,'" Bower said. "I tell the family: 'No disrespect on any of you, but that's kind of it.'"

    http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5873002.html

  8. #8
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    July 6, 2008

    SHERMAN — Three months after four bodies were found shot execution-style in an airplane hangar on the B&B Ranch north of Dallas, chemical salesman Lester Leroy Bower Jr. was charged with capital murder.

    Four months later, a Grayson County jury deliberated two hours before convicting him. It took them only another two hours the next day before deciding he should die for the crime.

    No fingerprints put him at the scene. No witnesses saw him there. The murder weapon never was recovered. Bower never confessed. DNA testing wasn't available in 1984.

    Now a state district judge has stopped a scheduled July 22 execution for Bower to consider his request that evidence in the case be examined to see if DNA testing could back up his quarter-century-long claims of innocence.

    Prosecutors, who oppose the testing as yet another delay tactic, said the mild-mannered salesman with a long marriage, two daughters and no record of criminal activity or mental health problems just snapped. It happens, they said.

    Bower made them suspicious. He had lied to his wife, and authorities, about his efforts to buy an ultralight plane. His wife didn't want him cavorting through the air in such a flimsy craft. He sold firearms on the side, including the kind that carried the ammunition used to kill the men.

    "I was quite capable of purchasing whatever I need without killing four people," Bower, now 60, said recently from Texas death row. "Virtually no one, except for the prosecution, thinks this sounds like anything I would do."

    If mass murderers fit a profile, Bower stands out. Texas A&M University graduate, good job, family man, father of two daughters, soccer dad, stable marriage, no mental disabilities, no history of childhood abuse, no previous criminal record.

    "An absolutely stellar record," Bower said. "Then one day, as the prosecutor says, I snapped, killed four people and snapped back. Those are his words, not mine.

    "I'm not minimizing that people don't snap, that people walk into schools and start shooting, former employees walk into post offices. I mean, am I a threat? Does this really sound like something I would do?"

    Yes, prosecutors insist.

    "There is no question in my mind that Bower is guilty," said Ronald Sievert, a federal prosecutor named as a special prosecutor to assist in Bower's trial. "Contrary to some television and movie portrayals, the fact is that no ethical prosecutor would ever seek a capital conviction, in fact any conviction, unless they were convinced of the defendant's guilt."

    Gun parts purchases

    Sievert is now a professor of National Security Law at the University of Texas Law School and the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University. He and Grayson County District Attorney Stephen Davidchik, who has since died, built a circumstantial case surrounding Bower's purchase from Grayson County Sheriff's Deputy Philip Good, 29, of an ultralight airplane stored at a hangar owned by building contractor Bob Tate, 51.

    Tate, Good, Jerry Brown, 52, a Sherman interior designer; and Ronald Mayes, 39, a former Sherman police officer, were all executed at the hangar.

    "I lied to the FBI about my involvement" in the purchase of the plane, said Bower. "I wish it hadn't happened."

    "If you haven't done anything wrong, there's absolutely no reason to lie to the police — ever," Karla Hackett, an assistant Grayson County district attorney handling the appeals on the case, said. "I don't care what kind of spat you're going to have with your wife or husband. When you are about up to your eyeballs in a murder investigation and they're clearly looking at you as a suspect, I think you come clean."

    "In life you make decisions sometimes you wish you could take back," Bower said from prison. "I was there."

    He said Brown was with Good that Saturday afternoon when he was negotiating the $3,000, or 75 percent, down payment. They all waited about 15 minutes for Tate to show up with a key to the hangar.

    "We got along well," Bower recalled, saying Tate welcomed him to return to use the facilities. "They were flying. I wanted to learn to fly."

    He never saw Mayes, Bower said.

    Prosecutors said Bower was obsessed with the plane. Some of the aircraft's frame is gathering dust today, resting against cell bars in the old jail in downtown Sherman.

    Evidence at trial centered on Bower's two purchases in 1982, when he lived in Colorado Springs, Colo., of Italian-made, Fiocchi-brand .22-caliber ammunition, the kind used in the killings. There also was evidence he had owned a .22-caliber Ruger pistol, which prosecutors said was fitted with a silencer he made.

    Prosecutors showed jurors his books about guns and gun parts, a Ruger pistol manual and a book about silencers.

    Bower's federal firearms dealer license is among the paperwork in three file boxes of evidence and trial exhibits, including a sledge hammer prosecutors said the killer used to smash pieces of the plane to destroy evidence.

    Also in an unsecured cardboard box are four plastic foam heads, the kind used normally to display wigs. These four, however, have knitting needles stuck in them, representing the path bullets took to kill the person whose last name is etched in ball pen ink at the base of each — Tate, Good, Brown and Mayes.

    "They took some information and twisted it to their benefit," Bower said.

    "When you've got time on your hands, it's real easy to sit and justify," Hackett responded.

    Search yields plane parts


    Investigators seized on Bower when Good's phone records showed three calls from Bower charged on his company telephone credit card. Tate had told his wife that he and Good were going to meet someone they believed wanted to buy their plane.

    A search of Bower's home turned up parts of Tate's ultralight aircraft missing from the hangar.

    "The FBI found the damaged wings in his garage," Sievert said. "We produced documentary evidence he had ordered silencer parts, we had documentary evidence he purchased a .22 Ruger, we had the evidence he purchased the Julio Fiocchi subsonic bullets, we had the Allen wrench in his briefcase that fit the silencer and would attach it to the pistol.

    "The scientific evidence demonstrated he had tried to destroy the engine block with a sledge hammer, found in his trunk, and, of course, the phone documents showed he arranged to meet the victims on the day of the offense. And that is just the evidence I remember without looking at the record," said Sievert.

    Sievert said not only was it clear Bower was guilty, "but the jury logically concluded that any person who was capable of systematically killing four people, execution style, was a continuing threat to society."

    Conviction questioned

    Questions about his conviction first were raised in 1989 when a woman reading a newspaper article about an appeal filed in Bower's case called one of Bower's attorneys to say her ex-boyfriend and three of his friends were responsible for the slayings, the result of a dope deal gone bad. She said she didn't know anyone had been convicted of the murders.

    The identity of the witness, who signed a sworn affidavit, and the names of the four men she implicated for the slayings, identified in court filings as Rocky, Ches, Lynn and Bear, all have been sealed by court order.

    "The defense speculation about drug dealers in this case is just the type of wild speculation that all defense attorneys throw out in all capital appeals to get their client off or delay punishment," Sievert said. "It is not unusual.

    "But just ask yourself: What concrete evidence have they produced that would justify a conviction, or even an indictment or arrest, of these drug dealers? Nothing. Contrast that with the very hard and concrete evidence that demonstrates Bower committed the crime."

    Hackett said the woman who called Bower's lawyers has her own credibility issues, and the appeal, sent to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, should be rejected.

    (Source: Houston Chronicle}

  9. #9
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    July 9, 2008

    Texas death row inmate hopes DNA test will clear him

    State district judge stops scheduled July 22 execution to consider evidence not available in 1984.

    SHERMAN — Three months after four people were found shot to death in an airplane hangar on the B&B Ranch north of Dallas, chemical salesman Lester Leroy Bower Jr. was charged with capital murder.

    Four months later, a Grayson County jury deliberated two hours before convicting him. It took them only another two hours the next day to decide he should die for the crime.

    Bower's fingerprints were not found at the scene. No witnesses saw him there. No murder weapon was recovered. Bower didn't confessed. And DNA testing wasn't available in 1984.

    Now a state district judge has stopped a scheduled July 22 execution for Bower and has agreed to consider his request that evidence in the case be examined to see whether DNA testing could back up his quarter-century-long claims of innocence.

    Prosecutors, who say the testing is a delaying tactic, said the salesman with a long marriage, two daughters and no record of criminal activity or mental-health problems just snapped. It happens, they said.

    Bower's behavior had made investigators suspicious, officials say. He had lied to his wife, and authorities, about his efforts to buy an ultralight plane. He sold firearms on the side, including the kind that carried the ammunition used to kill the men.

    Yet if mass murderers fit a profile, Bower stands out: Texas A&M University graduate, good job, family man, father of two daughters, soccer dad, stable marriage, no mental disabilities, no history of childhood abuse, no previous criminal record.

    "Does this really sound like something I would do?" Bower, now 60, said recently from Texas death row.

    Yes, it does, prosecutors say.

    "There is no question in my mind that Bower is guilty," said Ronald Sievert, a federal prosecutor named as a special prosecutor to assist in Bower's trial.

    Sievert is now a professor of national security law at the University of Texas Law School and the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M. He and Grayson County District Attorney Stephen Davidchik, who has since died, built a circumstantial case surrounding Bower's purchase from Grayson sheriff's Deputy Philip Good, 29, of an ultralight airplane stored at the hangar owned by building contractor Bob Tate, 51.

    Tate, Good, Jerry Brown, 52, a Sherman interior designer, and Ronald Mayes, 39, a former Sherman police officer, were all killed at the hangar.

    "I lied to the FBI about my involvement" in the purchase of the plane, Bower said. "I wish it hadn't happened."

    "If you haven't done anything wrong, there's absolutely no reason to lie to the police — ever," said Karla Hackett, an assistant Grayson County district attorney handling the appeals on the case.

    Bower said Brown was with Good that Saturday afternoon. They all waited about 15 minutes for Tate to show up with a key to the hangar.

    "We got along well," Bower recalled, saying Tate welcomed him to return to use the facilities.

    He never saw Mayes, Bower said.

    Investigators seized on Bower when Good's phone records showed three calls from Bower charged on his company telephone credit card. Tate had told his wife that he and Good were going to meet someone they believed wanted to buy their plane.

    A search of Bower's home turned up parts of Tate's ultralight aircraft missing from the hangar.

    Questions about his conviction were raised in 1989 when a woman reading a newspaper article about an appeal filed in Bower's case called one of Bower's attorneys to say her ex-boyfriend and three of his friends were responsible for the slayings, the result of a drug deal gone bad. She said she didn't know anyone had been convicted of the murders.

    The identity of the woman, who signed a sworn affidavit, and the names of the four men she implicated for the slayings, identified in court filings as Rocky, Ches, Lynn and Bear, have been sealed by court order.

    Hackett said the woman who called Bower's lawyers has her own credibility issues and the appeal, sent to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, should be rejected.

    Bower's attorneys point to FBI reports that initially suggested the four slayings possibly were drug or gambling related.

    Bower's lawyers also question whether he could have driven the 135 miles from the hangar to his house in less than two hours. His wife testified he was home by 6:30 p.m. The killings occurred between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m.

    In their DNA request, to be reviewed July 17, Bower's lawyers want to see whether substances on items removed from the crime scene match DNA of any of the four men they claim are the real killers.

    "I'm hoping somebody will take a look at it and say there seems to be enough to bring the verdict into question and there is a likelihood this is a miscarriage of justice," Bower said. "That's probably the best I can hope for."

    http://www.statesman.com/news/conten...tlid=inform_sr

  10. #10
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    July 17, 2008

    SHERMAN, Texas — A death row inmate condemned for a 1983 quadruple slaying got at least another two-week reprieve Thursday when a judge postponed deciding whether old evidence will undergo DNA testing not available nearly a quarter-century ago.

    Lester Leroy Bower Jr. must now wait until at least Aug. 1 before knowing whether testing will be done on items collected in a Grayson County airplane hangar where four men were shot execution-style.

    Bower's attorneys argued during a 90-minute hearing that the results could point to other suspects. Prosecutors called the request a "fishing expedition" aimed at delaying Bower's execution.

    State District Judge Jim Fallon, after indicating he'd hoped to make a ruling Thursday, gave attorneys for both sides more time to submit documents to the court.

    "I'm sympathetic to victims' families that need closure on this one way or another," Fallon said. "It's been 24 years."

    Bower, a chemical salesman with no prior criminal record, had been set to die July 22 for the killings at the B&B Ranch north of Dallas. He was convicted in 1984 after prosecutors built a circumstantial case surrounding Bower's purchase of an ultralight airplane from one of the victims.

    No fingerprints put Bower at the scene, no witnesses saw him there and a murder weapon never was recovered. Prosecutors say he simply snapped.

    Bower's execution has been halted until Fallon rules on whether to allow DNA testing on hair, saliva and cigarette butts found in the hangar. The items were never tested because the technology did not exist during Bower's original trial.

    Bower's attorneys believe the crime may have been committed by four other men in a dope deal gone bad. They want DNA testing to determine if any of the items can be linked to the men, one of whom is dead and the other is in prison, according to Bower's attorneys.

    Peter Buscemi, Bower's attorney, made reference to convicted homemaker Darlie Routier recently being granted new DNA testing on blood stains while arguing his case. Routier was sent to death row after her two young sons were stabbed to death in 1996 in their suburban Dallas home.

    "This is the kind of case in which the testing ought to be allowed," Buscemi said.

    Karla Hackett, an assistant Grayson County district attorney, argued that the evidence used to convict Bower was strong. She told Fallon that the items Bowers seeks to be tested could have been left in the hangar at any point in time long before the murder.

    DNA testing wouldn't change the facts of the case, said Hackett, who also questioned why Bower waited so long to make his latest request.

    "The timing of this filing alone is sufficient enough for this court to rule that this has been filed for the purposes of delay alone," Hackett said.

    Fallon is expected to make a ruling after all documents and responses are filed to the court by Aug. 1.

    http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5894113.html

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