Lester Bower
American murderer who killed four men in Texas

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.
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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.