A jury sentenced 44-year-old Jason Thornburg to death over the gruesome murder of three people whose bodies were found burning in a dumpster in 2021.
Thornburg was convicted in November of capital murder and sentenced on Wednesday for the murders he referred to as a “human sacrifice to God.”
‘He is a psychopath. He is evil. He is the type of evil that we want to believe doesn’t exist in our community.’
The bodies of David Lueras, Lauren Phillips, and Maricruz Mathis were found “heavily dismembered” in the dumpster in Fort Worth. Police quickly identified one of the bodies but took longer on the other two because of the state of the remains.
Thornburg confessed to the murders when he spoke to police and offered horrifying details about what he did to the victims. He said that he had studied the Bible and that the sacrifices were made for religious reasons.
He said he rented a room at the Mid City Inn in Euless and brought each of the victims to the room on separate occasions. He slit the throats of two of the victims and strangled the third. He admitted to sexually assaulting a victim’s corpse and severing the genitalia of another. He also said he ate part of the heart of a victim.
Thornburg said he dismembered the bodies in the bathtub of his room and then hid their remains under his bed.
After disposing of the bodies in a dumpster and setting them on fire, Thornberg said that he cleaned out the plastic tubs he used in his insidious crime and then returned them back to the store from which they were purchased.
He then confessed to two other murders.
Thornberg said that he was responsible for the suspicious death of his roommate, 61-year-old Mark Jewell. Firefighters found Jewell’s body after his home exploded in May 2021.
He also said that he killed Tanya Begay, who was his girlfriend at the time, in Arizona in 2017. Her body has never been found.
Thornberg’s attorneys argued that he was suffering from psychotic delusions at the time of the murders and said it would be unjust to execute him.
“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?” argued one attorney.
A prosecutor argued to the jury that it was far too dangerous to allow him to live.
“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,” the prosecutor said. “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.”
The jury deliberated for only five hours. Thornburg had no reaction to the reading of the sentence.
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