SOLID CONVICTIONS: Veteran Arapahoe County prosecutor looks back on a career of storied trials

AURORA | Standing before a jury and a gallery packed with rapt onlookers, John Hower’s baritone voice often boomed in Arapahoe County courtrooms.

The longtime prosecutor’s words were probably the last things many Arapahoe County defendants — including some of Aurora’s most infamous — wanted to hear. They also offered a modicum of calm to families wracked with worry about whether they’d get justice.

Those moments, when he gave impassioned opening statements or forceful closing arguments, saw Hower in his element, laying out often complicated cases in painstaking detail with no shortage of rhetorical flourishes mixed in.

It’s not that those arguments in front of the jury were “fun,” per se. The gravity of the cases he handled — he prosecuted two men sentenced to death row for gunning down an Aurora murder witness in 2005 and several other murderers, rapists and robbers — made sure of that.

But anybody who watched Hower speak to a jury knew he wanted to be there, standing at the lectern or pacing near it.

“I enjoyed tremendously speaking to jurors and persuading them,” he said.

Last month Hower retired from the district attorney’s office after almost 36 years as a prosecutor.

Hower prosecuted dozens of high-profile cases in his career, most notably the Robert Ray and Sir Mario Owens cases. He and his prosecution team convicted Ray and Owens of gunning down Javad Marshall-Fields and his fiancee, Vivian Wolfe, to stop Marshall-Fields from testifying in a 2004 slaying. The pair was later sentenced to death and are currently among three people on the state’s death row.

Hower also played a role in the trial of the other man on death row, Nathan Dunlap, who was sentenced to die for killing four at an Aurora  Chuck E. Cheese’s. Before the Chuck E. Cheese’s killings, Dunlap held up a Burger King restaurant and Hower prosecuted him for that, a conviction that  used as an aggravating factor in Dunlap’s death penalty trial.

The Ray and Owens cases lasted for years and the post-conviction appeals are still playing out. In all Hower prosecuted more than a half-dozen trials related to the crimes, including separate Ray and Owens trials for their role in the initial 2004 slaying at Lowry Park and then two separate death penalty trials for the Marshall-Fields and Wolfe slayings. He also prosecuted a third co-defendant, Parish Carter, for his role in the witness slayings, Ray’s stepfather in a related drug and weapons case and Ray on a weapons charge.

Each trial lasted a few weeks in court, but Hower said that was just a small portion of the work involved. Each hour in trial required about 100 hours outside of trial, he said, poring over details, gathering evidence and crafting arguments.

Pressure is a constant for prosecutors in any criminal case, Hower said. The fear that a mistake could let a killer go free is always there, no matter how high-profile the case.

But these cases were especially pressure-packed. It wasn’t just the victims and their families Hower said he and his team felt like they were representing. It was the whole criminal justice system, a system Hower said was itself attacked when a witness was killed. “If a witness perceives getting a summons or a subpoena to testify as a death warrant, we are in big trouble,” he said in an interview this month, echoing a line from one of those closing arguments.

Marshall-Fields’ mother, State Sen. Rhonda Fields, said that when she first met Hower back in 2005, just a short time after her son was killed, she was still deeply frustrated with law enforcement.

Her son hadn’t just agreed to testify in the Lowry Park slaying of his close friend, Gregory Vann, but he had done so knowing he was testifying against dangerous men.

“He never wavered, he said this is the guy, this is what I saw,” she said.

Still, he was left largely unprotected and shortly before he could take the witness stand, he was killed.

Fields later made her first foray into state politics advocating for better protections for witnesses, but that summer her emotions were still raw.

“I was very frustrated with the police department, and with the DA’s office, because I felt like they should have protected him,” she said.

In the following years she spent months in Arapahoe County courtrooms, often watching Hower deliver those booming arguments.

Because the case involved a dead witness, police and prosecutors were barred from saying much about the case, even to Fields, so those trials were her first glimpse at what happened to her son and his fiancée.

Hower and the prosecution team were meticulous, she said, laying out a framework that explained the clear connections between the Vann slaying and her son’s.

“He was very strategic, he was very orderly in laying out the facts,” Fields said.

The trials weren’t free of stress, she said, because no matter how compelling the arguments were from Hower and his team — which included deputy district attorneys Ann Tomsic and Emily Warren — the defense always responded with their own attempts to poke holes in the story.

In the end though, Ray, Owens and Carter were convicted of all of it, first for killing Vann at Lowry Park and later for killing Javad and Vivian. That, Fields said, is a remarkable feat.

“I had three strong champions for justice in the courtroom, and they fought for Javad and Vivian,” she said.

Hower said he always liked being in the courtroom, arguing those big cases. It’s why he never sought a judgeship or ran for office.

“I much prefer being in the arena and arguing the case rather than sitting up there and deciding,” he said.

But the job was always more than that. He said his first boss, former DA Bob Gallagher, always harped on his prosecutors to simply “do the right thing.” That meant seeking convictions often, but other times it meant dropping charges when the prosecutors believed a defendant was innocent. Hower said he did that in the case of a battered woman who killed her husband, a decision he remains particularly proud of to this day.

Hower said he became a prosecutor because he wanted to serve the public good. It was the same motivation that first lead him to be a history teacher out of college, then to the Air Force before he eventually went to law school.

And while he’s retired now, he doesn’t think that public service is really over. During that almost 36 years, he had a chance to train other prosecutors, something he said was particularly gratifying, especially now that he’s stepped away.

“That carries on even after you are gone,” he said.