Just after 6:15 on the morning of September 22, 2021, a man in a full hazmat suit backed a Jeep Grand Cherokee up to a dumpster behind a business in the 3100 block of Bonnie Drive in west Fort Worth, emptied plastic storage bins into it and set it alight. Firefighters who put out the blaze found the badly burned, heavily dismembered remains of three people, with parts missing. The man was Jason Alan Thornburg, forty-one, and afterward he washed the bins and took them back to the store where he had bought them.
Thornburg, born August 27, 1980 in Cerritos, California, was working as an electrician's apprentice and had preached on the street. He was living in Room 113 of the Mid City Inn in Euless, one of the Mid-Cities between Dallas and Fort Worth, where he could be seen reading his Bible in a chair outside the door. He told detectives he had an in-depth knowledge of Scripture. He had attended a leadership conference taught by one of the people he later killed, and on a worksheet there wrote that he wanted to be a missionary and that his greatest strength was a sense of purpose and destiny. Prosecutors said he used that faith to befriend his victims.
David Lueras, forty-two, had been sharing the room with him for a few days when, in mid-September, Thornburg decided, he later told police, that Lueras had to be sacrificed. He cut his throat and dismembered him in the bathtub, kept the parts in trash bags for several days, and then bought the storage bins. Over the following days two women he knew casually, Maricruz Mathis, thirty-three, and Lauren Phillips, thirty-four, came separately to the room. He killed both. By the District Attorney's account one had her throat cut and the other was strangled; an affidavit described the second as stabbed and strangled. Their remains went into the bins with his. At trial he said he had eaten part of Lueras's heart, and admitted sexually assaulting Phillips's body.
Surveillance cameras near the dumpster recorded the Jeep. Fort Worth detectives traced it to the Mid City Inn, where more footage placed Thornburg, and arrested him there late on September 27. He confessed in detail. The arrest warrant recorded that he believed he had been called by God to commit human sacrifices, and that he volunteered two more.
The first was Mark Jewell, sixty-one, his former roommate, who had died on May 21, 2021 when their house in Fort Worth filled with gas and exploded. The medical examiner had not been able to determine a cause of death. Thornburg now said he had slit Jewell's throat, uncapped a natural gas line and lit a candle. He had spoken at Jewell's funeral. The second was Tanya Begay, thirty-six, a Navajo woman from Gallup, New Mexico, who had gone on a trip to Arizona with him in March 2017 and never come back. He told detectives he had sacrificed her there. Her body has never been found.
In October 2021 a Tarrant County judge found reasonable cause to believe he had a mental illness or intellectual disability and ordered an expert assessment. In December he was indicted for capital murder for the three motel killings, and in February 2022 for murder and arson in Jewell's death. The Tarrant County District Attorney, Sharen Wilson, announced that her office would seek death, saying the penalty was reserved for the worst of the worst. Arizona authorities, by one account, indicted him for Begay's murder; the Begay case has not come to trial.
The trial in Criminal District Court No. 3 ran fourteen days of testimony in November 2024. His own lawyers called him a serial killer and a cannibal, argued that fetal alcohol syndrome lay behind what he did, and asked for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The prosecutor, Amy Allin, told the jury he was a psychopath and evil. On November 20 the jury convicted him of capital murder. On December 4, after a few hours' deliberation on punishment, it returned a sentence of death. Thornburg sat still and showed no reaction; several jurors were crying.
Outside the courthouse the families held photographs of the dead, and Mary Boydston, Lueras's mother, said each victim's name aloud. Begay's sister, Edith Tsoie, said there could be no closure while her sister's body was still missing. "We never had a funeral," she said. Thornburg is held at the Polunsky Unit, and his conviction and sentence go automatically to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.