James Spencer III: Man posed as minor online to lure convicted sex offender before fatally shooting him
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HOUSTON, TEXAS: After posing as a minor online, according to the police, a 24-year-old Texas man was taken into custody on Wednesday, January 31, with the intention of luring in and killing a convicted sex offender.
According to a press release from Houston police, James Lewis Spencer III is charged with the murder of Sean Connery Showers, a convicted sex offender who was discovered dead in a ditch in the early hours of May 29, 2023.
James Spencer seen shooting Sean Showers in footage
Surveillance footage showed Spencer driving up to Showers and firing multiple shots into his body before speeding off, according to a bail order that HuffPost was able to obtain.
Under the victim's body, investigators discovered a phone, which disclosed that he had arranged to meet up with a neighbor, according to ABC affiliate KTRK.
Investigators were able to track cellphone records back to Spencer, who they claimed pretended to be a minor and spoke with Showers about his "prior sexual history with minors," in accordance with the terms of the bail order.
Conversations between Spencer and Showers on the instant messaging app Kik were "sexual in nature," according to Rehaman Merchant, the chief prosecutor for the 179th District Court in Houston, who told KTRK that police thought they were meeting to have s*x.
Showers was sentenced to 30 months in prison after entering a guilty plea to federal charges of possessing child pornography in 2009, as per a ruling examined by HuffPost.
Sean Showers charged with soliciting minor
After his supervised release, Showers was mandated to register as a sex offender and attend sex offender treatment. Nevertheless, there are no results for his name when searching the national sex offender registry's website.
Showers was charged with soliciting a minor after being arrested once more in 2018, according to a request to change his conditions. He received a sentence of nine months in prison and, upon his release, lifelong supervision.
According to Spencer's bail order, a third-party witness informed investigators that Spencer had expressed views about how he thought the police "were not doing enough to keep pedophiles incarcerated."
According to the document, the witness claimed that Spencer intended to "rob and harm those type of men [because] they would do bad things to little children and other people and he knew how to track them by an app on the phone."
The witness then reported to the police that, after a month, Spencer had wondered, "Maybe he should kill them himself, if the cops were not going to do anything."
Merchant told KTRK that Spencer's case is being looked into by detectives to see if he targeted other sex offenders, calling the alleged crime a "planned execution."
“I think he targeted an individual, he set up a meet, knew where he was going to be, and then discharged a weapon multiple times and then just went back home like nothing happened,” Merchant told the outlet.
