TEXAS: impending execution

Days from execution, inmate pins hopes on woman's story

Lester Bower, at the Polunsky Unit in East Texas, has been on death row since 1984. He acknowledges meeting 2 of the victims on the day they died but has denied involvement in their slayings.

Witness says condemned man isn't responsible for 1983 slayings

Since 1984, Lester Leroy Bower Jr. has sat on Texas death row, convicted for the 1983 massacre of 4 men in a Sherman airplane hangar.

The Arlington man now faces execution on July 22, and as time runs out, his lawyers are fighting to save his life by trying to prove he was not the killer after all.

One key witness, a woman who came forward years ago, says it was her then-boyfriend and 3 other drug dealers who were responsible for the slayings.

Though a prosecutor says she is certain that the right man has been convicted, Bowers lawyers say their investigation has verified key details of the woman's story.

But for Bower, will it be too late?

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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.

"Theyre 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 4 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 4 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.'

Source for both: Fort Worth Stgar-Telegram

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