A jury sentenced a 44-year-old man to death for killing three individuals in a hotel room, sexually assaulting one, consuming another’s heart, and dismembering and burning the remains.
Jason Thornburg rented a room at the Mid City Inn in Euless in September 2021 and often read the Bible outside, according to the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office.
He invited 42-year-old David Lueras, 33-year-old Maricruz Mathis, and 34-year-old Lauren Phillips into his room one at a time over a week. He severed Lueras’ throat, penis, and heart. Thornburg slashed Mathis’ throat and strangled Phillips. Phillips’ corpse was sexually raped by Thornburg.
A.D.A. Amy Allin remarked that, “He knows Scripture. He knows the Scripture well. It’s his weapon of choice. He uses it to get vulnerable people to lower their guard. He will be the friend who gives you a place to sleep, right before he cuts your throat.”
Thornburg stored the victims’ remains in trash bags beneath the bed and dismembered them in the bathtub. Later, he moved the bags to storage boxes made of polypropylene. Thornburg disposed of the trash bags in a dumpster on Bonnie Drive and burned them on September 22, 2021. According to reports, he gave the plastic containers back to the retailer from whence he purchased them. Firefighters found the body parts and put out the fire. Thornburg’s car was located nearby when the fire started, according to Fort Worth Police.
During the hearing, another assistant district attorney, Kim D’Avignon, stated: “His actions were vicious and systematic. He enjoys causing harm to other people.
Following his arrest, Thornburg admitted to the murders of his girlfriend Tanya Begay in 2017 and his roommate Mark Jewell in 2021.
According to a news outlet, A house explosion claimed Jewell’s life. According to reports, Thornburg admitted to the police that he killed Begay by sacrificing her. Her remains are still missing.
Thornburg admitted his activities in statements read by the prosecution, such as “I couldn’t use my chain saw because that would be too loud, and I would get caught. I have to use my knife. I can’t carry out the bodies like that. That would be too obvious.”
He mentioned purchasing buckets to carry them to his vehicle and explaining that burning the remains was required “because I’ve done it twice before, and I know that works, and I need to destroy the fingerprints.”
The defense team for Thornburg contended that he was “psychotic” and “doomed in the womb” at the time of the murders.
“He believed his sacrifices were correct, and we know, as citizens, it’s not correct,” one of his lawyers said.
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The second went on, “You have to decide as jurors, do we execute someone who is psychotic at the time they did something? You have to ask yourself, do we execute someone who is delusional? Is that what we’re about as a civilized society? Do we execute someone whose mother left them in a position where they were susceptible to all of the evils in our society? Do we do that as a civilized society?”
But according to the prosecution, “He is a psychopath. He is evil. He is the type of evil that we want to believe doesn’t exist in our community. We want to believe we are not raising our children in a world where people like Jason Thornburg exist. We want to believe we live in a world where the Bible is not a weapon, where your vulnerabilities don’t make you prey to a serial killer. But so long as we live in a world with Jason Thornburg, said evil will exist.”
