In the early summer of 2008, the woman known as Witness Number One sat in the living room of her East Texas home and told me the following story.

It was the second weekend of October 1983 and her boyfriend at the time, a man named Lynn, seemed particularly agitated, she said. He finally explained why as the two of them were driving through Sherman, a small city in a rural area an hour north of Dallas. A dope deal near Sherman had gone sour, Lynn said, and he and three accomplices—guys who went by Ches, Rocky and Bear—“had to kill four people.”


She was skeptical until a few days later when, at the apartment of one of the men, she heard them discussing—joking about—the killings. Another night, after a nightmare, Lynn told her about seeing the eyes of a victim staring back at him, and hearing shots reverberate inside a big tin building.

The woman, who said she broke up with Lynn a short time later, first came forward to tell her story in 1989. That year, while reading a newspaper, she learned that another man, Lester Leroy Bower, Jr., was about to be executed for the crime that Lynn had described—the slaughter of four men in a North Texas airplane hangar on October 8, 1983.

Bower, a devout Baptist, husband and father, and former college football player, had no previous criminal record and no connection to Lynn and the others.

“I don’t want Mr. Bower to die for something that he didn’t do,” the witness told me that day in 2008. Her identity has been concealed by federal court order because of the violent nature of the men she was accusing of murder. “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.’”

Bower’s 1989 execution was delayed as his legal team was allowed to dig into the woman’s story. In the years to come, three other witnesses, including the wife and son of the man known as Bear, had independently come forward to corroborate her version of events.

Given the compelling stories of Witness Number One and the others, I assumed that they would someday have a chance to tell them to a jury of Bower’s peers. Or that Bower’s conviction would be vacated altogether.

But this is American criminal justice, where there is no real process for reviewing the accuracy of convictions, and, in the end, broad structural factors tend to block the possibility of getting another chance in front of a judge—even when you’re faced with a sentence as extreme as the death penalty. The factors that could have given Bower another shot—a sympathetic prosecutor, definitive DNA evidence, someone else admitting their own guilt—are black-and-white, and comparatively rare.

And Lester Bower had no such luck.

After a dramatic series of hearings in 2012, Texas State Judge James Fallon went so far as to say that if the new witnesses had been available at Bower’s trial in 1984, the outcome might well have been different. The judge then went on to reject Bower’s request that the new witnesses have a chance to be heard.

That decision led to my second conversation with Witness Number One that took place just a few weeks ago.

“My heart is broken for him,” she told me then. “I don’t know what else to do. I know in my gut that this is just not right. I don’t understand why people cannot just listen or not want to see the obvious. No one will ever convince me that Mr. Bower did it.”

A few days later, in the early evening of June 3, the 67-year-old inmate was strapped to a gurney in Huntsville.

“I’ve fought the good fight,” Bower said in his final statement.

He began to gently snore as a deadly cocktail of drugs began to take effect. Eighteen minutes after the process began, a prison physician pronounced Bower dead.

On a steamy Texas afternoon two weeks before his execution, Bower grinned broadly as I sat down on one side of the visiting room glass. I was 45 minutes late to our interview after misplacing my driver’s license, a necessity for gaining entrance to the prison visiting area.

“What kind of reporter forgets his ID when he comes to Death Row?” he said, laughing.

He and I were familiar by then. I had interviewed him once before, in 2008, and had closely followed his case ever since. As we sat together that recent day, it was clear his appeals were exhausted and the looming execution date, his eighth in 31 years on The Row, would likely be his last.

But Bower was cheerful and voluble, still stocky and athletic looking after decades behind bars. This surprised me. I asked him if he was afraid to die.

“What am I to be afraid of?” he said. “If they kill me two weeks from now, my last words will probably be, ‘I’m out of here.’ What can possibly be worse than this?”

I asked Bower if he had killed the four men.

“I did not,” Bower said. “What’s more, I feel we have had a reasonable number of people come forward with credible stories to say I did not commit these murders.”

But Bower conceded that he was mostly to blame for his predicament. In the fall of 1983 he was married to his high school sweetheart and the father of two daughters, with a nice home in a Fort Worth suburb and a good job selling chemicals.

But he was a restless, eccentric man, an avid outdoorsman and inveterate hobbyist always looking for the next great diversion. In the fall of 1983, that was piloting an ultralight aircraft. His wife, Shari, had other ideas.

“I looked at him 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,’” Shari Bower said she told her husband. “I don’t think so.”

But Lester Bower went ahead anyway, responding to a magazine ad for an ultralight for sale. On Saturday, October 8, Bower told his wife he would spend the day bow hunting. Instead, he drove to the hangar on a ranch near Sherman, arriving in mid-afternoon. Bower said he paid $3,000 in cash for the ultralight that he stashed at a shooting range. That Saturday he arrived home just before dark.

The bodies of the four men were discovered in the hangar about the same time. The victims included one current and one former cop, a home builder and interior designer. Three of the men were found wrapped in carpet inside the hangar. The fourth was found by the door, 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 slaughter dominated North Texas headlines for days and Shari Bower even mentioned it to her husband. But Bower kept his secret—that he had been to the hangar the day of the crime—from her and everyone else.

“I realized that I had no idea about what I may have gotten myself into or what I may have literally just missed,” Bower told me on Death Row in 2008. “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.”

But his lies would be exposed. In January 1984 , the FBI traced Bower’s telephone calls to one of the victims. When questioned by agents, Bower admitted making the calls, but denied visiting the hangar on the day of the murders.

“So then October rolls around, November, December and we get into January. Then all of a sudden they [FBI agents] show up,” Bower said in 2008. “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 was arrested after pieces of the ultralight were found in his home. Prosecutors later argued he killed the four men to conceal his theft of the aircraft. At trial, a state witness linked Bower to what was described an exotic brand of ammunition used in the killings. (His defense attorneys have since demonstrated that the ammunition was much more commonly available than the state had argued at Bower’s trial.)

In any event, the most damning evidence was Bower’s own initial duplicity. On the advice of his attorney, he did not take the stand to try and explain his numerous lies. Jurors deliberated two hours before finding him guilty.

“I blame myself mightily for the position I’m in,” he told me in our last conversation. “The minute you start bucking the system, you immediately go from a person of interest to a prime suspect.

“I’m not upset with the prosecutors, the jurors or the judge,” he said. “They did the best job they could with the information they had at the time. But now there would be a lot of other evidence to consider, and I wish they would have [gotten] the chance.”

***

Unlike many in his circumstances, Bower did not lack for the finest legal representation. A high-powered Washington, D.C., law firm, Morgan, Lewis and Bockius, had taken his case pro bono, spending thousands of hours in his defense.

The defense lawyers and their investigators quickly determined that the four men accused by the new witness did indeed exist, and were known by authorities to have engaged in the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine in Southern Oklahoma, just across the Texas border from Sherman.

But Bower’s legal team began to bump head-long into various realities of American jurisprudence.

One problem was that the appellate process in state and federal courts focuses on procedural and constitutional issues—that is, whether a defendant received a fair trial. Bower arguably did.

Unless you’ve had an unfair trail, “once you are convicted, it’s really difficult to get back into court on an innocence claim unless you’ve got something like DNA,” said Maurice Possley, senior researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations. As a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, he also wrote extensively about wrongful executions. “I understand the legal theory behind it. We don’t want cases dragging on continually. Defendants can’t keep having unlimited bites of the apple.

“But at the same time, you never know when something critical is going to be discovered—that if it had been there at the beginning there would have been a strong likelihood of acquittal.”

As such, under the current system, the fate of Death Row inmates is left largely to the whim of individual courts. In some cases where new evidence has surfaced, prosecutors and judges have reduced death sentences to life in prison, what one legal expert called a “consolation prize.”

Texas’ Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson recently went further, dismissing a capital murder charge against a man named Alfred Dwayne Brown altogether. Brown had served 10 years on the state’s Death Row for the murder of a Houston police officer, but had always maintained his innocence.

In 2013, a Houston detective cleaning out his garage found telephone records bolstering Brown’s innocence claim. An appellate court subsequently ordered that Brown receive a new trial. Anderson reviewed the facts and decided, over the objections of police, that the evidence was too weak to bring to court.

Just five days after Lester Bower was executed, Brown walked free. Such reversals often depend on the temperament and efforts of individual prosecutors.

“It varies so much from place to place,” Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said recently. Gross is an author of a 2014 study that showed more than four percent of Death Row inmates in the United States have been wrongly convicted.

If an inmate doesn’t find a sympathetic judge or prosecutor (like Anderson, apparently, in Alfred Dwayne Brown’s case,) “you find yourself in a never-never-land, where there is strong evidence of innocence, but a jury never heard it,” Gross said.

Despite that strong evidence, judges are legally justified under the current system to let inmates stay in prison or even be put to death.

“To me it’s one of the most troubling features of our justice system” Gross said. “In the absence of procedural error, you have no effective escape valve. We don’t have a procedure for reviewing convictions for accuracy.”

***

Yet the new evidence in Bower’s case, consisting mostly of the testimony of four new witnesses, was thoroughly reviewed in court. Judge James Fallon’s small courtroom was crowded for a series of hearings in the fall of 2012 where the defense got the chance to lay out their case for innocence.

Witness Number One took the stand, as did Bower himself. Much of the testimony concerned Brett “Bear” Leckie, who had died of cancer a few years before. His wife told Fallon that he had heard her husband and the other men discuss the hangar slayings.

“I believe they committed the crime, yes,” the wife said.

A man named Rickey Joe Donaghey described his conversation with Leckie, who said he was searching for cocaine in the hangar when he was surprised by three men.

“He then pulled his gun and shot the three men,” Donaghey testified. “Another man walked in and he had no choice but to shoot him.”

A fourth witness, Leckie’s son, said that shortly after his father was diagnosed with cancer, he admitted being present when the slaughter occurred.

But no DNA evidence linked the four men to the crime scene. Bower’s lawyers worked for years, getting hair fibers, saliva and cigarette butts tested for a possible genetic link to one of the alternative suspects, with no success.

Meanwhile, if prosecutors had any qualms Bower’s guilt, they didn’t let on publicly. (They have not returned phone calls.) Instead they pointed to the drug use of the new witnesses and hammered away at inconsistences in their testimony, labeling their stories “preposterous.”

Judge Fallon’s ruling came in December 2012.

“…the new evidence produced by the defendant could conceivably have produced a different result at trial,” he wrote. His next phrase essentially ensured Bower’s demise. “…it does not prove by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant is actually innocent.”

The ruling illustrated the dilemma for defendants.

“He [Fallon] points out in pretty clear terms that this guy probably would have been found not guilty had this evidence been available at trial,” Maurice Possley said. “But now, all these years later, he can’t meet the new standard, which is actual innocence. That was not the standard at trial. Then it was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

“To me the system as designed makes it almost impossible for someone in that kind of situation to succeed unless you’ve got DNA or someone else comes in to say, ‘Judge, I did it. I killed those men.’”

Hence what is arguably the most compelling criticism of the death penalty, its finality. Wrongful convictions are inevitable in a system populated by fallible humans, but mistakes can’t be rectified if an inmate is dead.

After Fallon’s ruling, Bower’s lawyers tried to buy time, hoping other witnesses would come forward. They are still waiting. It’s now too late for the man whose memorial service will be held June 20.

“You never know when someone is going to come up and say, ‘I know more about this,’” Bower told me in our last visit. “Or one of the three men who are left will come forward and say, ‘I found Jesus.’”

“If that happens and you’re dead,” he said. “it does you no good.”