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Lester Bower

American murderer who killed four men in Texas

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ20872547
Source-derived summary

Lester Leroy Bower Jr. (November 20, 1947 – June 3, 2015) was an American man executed for the 1983 murders of four men in Grayson County, Texas. Bower spent 31 years on death row and received six stays of execution. He was executed at the Texas State Penitentiary, aged 67, becoming the oldest prisoner executed by Texas since 1976, until the execution of 70-year-old Billie Coble in 2019.

Biography

Lester Leroy Bower Jr. was born on November 20, 1947, in Arlington, Texas. A college-educated chemical salesman, Bower was married with two children and had no criminal record prior to his conviction.

Crime

On October 8, 1983, the bodies of four men, Bob Tate, Jerry Brown, Philip Good and Ronald Mayes, were discovered in a Texas airplane hangar, all were shot in the head at close range. Mayes was a former police officer and Good was a sheriff's deputy. Bower was later arrested after pieces of the victim's aircraft were found at his home.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lester Bower” is american murderer who killed four men in Texas. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lester, Bower and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1947, 2015, 1983, 1976—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1947-11-20. For this dossier, Lester, Bower and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american murderer who killed four men in Texas” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20872547. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1947, 2015, 1983 and 1976.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Lester Bower”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Lester Bower primary sources, Lester Bower archive and Lester research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Lester Bower” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.