Jason Alan Thornburg was forty-one when he was arrested in September 2021 and forty-four when a jury sentenced him to death. He described himself to detectives as having an in-depth knowledge of the Bible, had preached on the street, and was working as an electrician’s apprentice. He was living in Room 113 of the Mid City Inn on the Euless side of the Dallas-Fort Worth Mid-Cities, and could be seen reading the Bible in a chair outside the door. Prosecutors said he used that faith to befriend the people he later killed.
He had been sharing the room for a few days with David Lueras, forty-two. In mid-September 2021 he decided, he told police, that Lueras needed to be sacrificed. He cut his throat, dismembered him in the bathtub, and kept the parts in rubbish bags for several days before buying plastic storage bins to hold them. Over the following days two women he said he knew casually, Maricruz Mathis, thirty-three, and Lauren Phillips, thirty-four, came separately to the room. He killed each of them, one by cutting her throat and the other, according to the District Attorney’s office, by strangulation, and added their remains to the bins. Seven days passed between the first killing and the fire. The trial heard that he had also eaten parts of the bodies.
Just after 6:15 on the morning of September 22, 2021 he put on a full hazmat suit, loaded the bins into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, drove to the 3100 block of Bonnie Drive in west Fort Worth, emptied them into a dumpster behind a business and set it alight. Firefighters who put the fire out found badly burned, heavily dismembered human remains, with parts missing. He cleaned the bins and returned them to the store he had bought them from.
Surveillance video near the dumpster captured the Jeep. Fort Worth detectives traced it to the Mid City Inn, where more footage placed Thornburg, and arrested him there late on Monday, September 27, 2021. In interview he confessed, going, the arrest warrant said, into intimate detail about how he had killed each of the three. He also told police he believed he had been called to commit sacrifices, and volunteered two more deaths: his roommate Mark Jewell, sixty-one, whose body had been found after a gas explosion at their Fort Worth house in May 2021, and his girlfriend Tanya Begay, in Arizona in 2017. He was charged with capital murder of multiple persons, and indicted in December 2021 for the three motel killings and separately for Jewell.
The trial opened in Criminal District Court No. 3 in Tarrant County in November 2024. The defence argued he was not guilty by reason of insanity. After fourteen days of testimony the jury rejected that and convicted him of capital murder. The punishment phase turned on whether he was a future danger; the defence’s last witness was his uncle. On December 4, 2024 the jury returned a sentence of death. Thornburg showed no reaction. Several jurors were in tears. Outside, the families stood in a prayer circle, and Mary Boydston, Lueras’s mother, read out the name of every victim.
This archive counts three victims, the three he was convicted of killing. The deaths of Mark Jewell and Tanya Begay rest on his own confession: Jewell’s produced an indictment that had not been tried when he was sentenced, and Begay’s has produced no charge that the sources consulted record. They are noted here as confessed, not as established, which is the same line the Texas courts have drawn so far.