Lester Bower

Bower was executed by lethal injection in the Huntsville Unit and pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m on June 3, 2015, hours after the United States Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch appeal from Bower's lawyer. Justice Stephen Breyer, as well as Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the majority.

After Bower's conviction, his lawyers argued the prosecution had withheld information relating to a police tip that the killings may have been connected to drug trafficking, noting the high level of drug activity in the area and Tate's history of selling cocaine. Further questions concerning Bower's innocence were raised in 1989, when a woman called one of Bower's attorney's, explaining that the killings were the result of a drug deal gone wrong, and that her ex-boyfriend and three of his friends were responsible.

On April 28, 1984, Bower was found guilty of four counts of capital murder and was sentenced to death.

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.

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.

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