FORT WORTH, Texas (TCN) — A jury opted to sentence a 44-year-old man to death for killing three people in a motel room, sexually assaulting one of the corpses, eating another victim’s heart, and dismembering the bodies before burning them.
According to the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, Jason Thornburg had been renting a room at the Mid City Inn in Euless in September 2021 and often spent time outside reading the Bible. Over the course of a week, he lured 42-year-old David Lueras, 33-year-old Maricruz Mathis, and 34-year-old Lauren Phillips into his room one at a time. He slit Lueras’ throat, cut off his penis, and ate part of his heart. Thornburg also cut Mathis’ throat and fatally strangled Phillips. Thornburg then sexually assaulted Phillips’ corpse.
Assistant District Attorney Amy Allin said, “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 dismembered the victims’ bodies in the bathtub and kept their remains in trash bags under the bed. He later transferred the bags to plastic storage bins. On Sept. 22, 2021, Thornburg threw the trash bags away in a dumpster on Bonnie Drive and set them on fire. He reportedly returned the plastic containers to the store where he bought them. Firefighters extinguished the blaze and located the body parts. Fort Worth Police identified Thornburg’s vehicle as being in the area when the fire broke out.
Kim D’Avignon, another assistant district attorney, said at the hearing, “What he did was methodical and sadistic. Hurting people is something he likes to do.”
After he was arrested, Thornburg confessed to killing his roommate Mark Jewell in 2021 and his girlfriend Tanya Begay in 2017.
KDFW-TV reports Jewell died in a house explosion. Thornburg reportedly told police he sacrificed Begay as part of her killing. Her body has not been found.
Prosecutors read statements Thornburg made admitting his actions, including, “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 spoke about buying bins to load them to his car and how it was necessary to light the remains on fire “because I’ve done it twice before, and I know that works, and I need to destroy the fingerprints.”
Thornburg’s defense attorneys argued he was “doomed in the womb” and was “psychotic” at the time of the killings.
One of his attorneys said, “He believed his sacrifices were correct, and we know, as citizens, it’s not correct.”
The second continued, “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?”
Prosecutors, however, argued, “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.”
