Sunday's Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, "Witness says condemned Arlington man isn't responsible for 1983 slayings," by Tim Madigan.
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.
"They’re 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 four 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 four men discussing the killings. The names of the new suspects, though known to defense lawyers, have remained sealed by court order.
And:
This past week, Bower’s lawyers filed a 65-page legal motion in Sherman’s 15th state District Court detailing the scenario developed after Pearl came forward. The petition asks state Judge Jim Fallon to delay Bower’s execution, vacate his conviction and death sentence, and conduct hearings on his innocence claim.
Because of the plodding appellate system in death penalty cases — Bower’s appeal languished in federal court alone for 16 years — and the shifting nature of capital punishment law, this is the first opportunity for a Texas court to seriously consider the merits of Bower’s innocence claim, his lawyers say. When Pearl first came forward, Texas law precluded state judges from considering evidence gathered more than 30 days after a conviction. The so-called 30-day rule is no longer in effect in Texas because federal judges have ruled that such post-conviction claims need to be adjudicated by the state.
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