A Texas man posed as a minor and lured a convicted child sex offender to his death because he felt law enforcement didn’t do enough to keep pedophiles in prison.
James Spencer III, 24, had been in contact with Sean Connery Showers, 37, on the messaging app Kik, where he posed as an underage individual as the two planned to meet up while some of their messages appeared “sexual in nature,” according to ABC 13.
Showers had shown up to the 900 block of Northwood St in Houston on May 29, 2023, when a car pulled up beside him before the driver fired numerous “automatic-like” shots and sped off.
In 2009, Showers pleaded guilty to federal child porn possession and was sentenced to 30 months in prison, along with being required to register as a sex offender.
Ten years later, he was sentenced to two more years in prison for failing to register as a sex offender, records obtained by the outlet said.
Another driver found Showers’ lifeless body in a ditch within the residential neighborhood.
Investigators connected Spencer to Showers’ death after a phone that was found under the man’s lifeless body had messages indicating he was planning on meeting someone at the nearby Montie Beach Park.
“(Spencer and Showers) were communicating using a social media app,” said 179th District Court Chief Prosecutor Rehman Merchant.
“The communications were sexual in nature. The officers believe that they were meeting up at this park to engage in sexual activity.”
Some of the messages from Spencer were seemingly used to get Showers to admit his past.
“There are some communications on the phones or between the two about (Showers’) dealings or past interactions with children or underage individuals,” Merchant said.
Spencer allegedly became a vigilante after claiming law enforcement wasn’t doing enough to stop the other predators.
“(A) third party states (Spencer) told them he believed police were not doing enough to keep pedophiles incarcerated and (Spencer) wanted 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,” his bail order, obtained by KTRK read. “A month later, defendant made the same comment that ‘if the cops were not going to do anything, maybe he should kill them himself.’”
Police also connected Spencer to the murder using phone records that tracked the man to the area of the murder, with him later admitting to going to the location “a few times.”
“Based on the conversation he had with the girlfriend, that sort of comment he had made ‘pedophiles’ in the plural,” Merchant said. “As of now, we’re still investigating that.”
Spencer was arrested on Wednesday by the Gulf Coast Violent Offenders Task Force.
He is currently being held on a $25,000 bond at the Harris County Jail on the first-degree felony murder charge according to jail records.
The district attorney’s office filed a motion to have him held without bond, citing that he is out on bond for possession of a controlled substance charge in Brazoria County, according to KTRK.
“This was diabolically cunning,” Andy Kahan, Victim Services Director of Houston Crime Stoppers told Click2Houston. “When I look at this, I’m going ‘this is the stuff you see in movies.’”
“This guy had to have done a lot of deep background, had to prepare for this. This was not some random spur of the moment deal,” Kahan said.
