Fort Worth serial killing suspect spoke at victim’s funeral, preached on street
At the funeral of Mark Jewell in May, Jason Thornburg told a small crowd at Hope Works church in Fort Worth how his roommate was a “good friend” and the two of them constantly studied the Bible.
Scott Black heard Thornburg speak about Jewell and later offered Thornburg condolences on the death of his friend and their Fort Worth home burning to the ground.
In the days after the funeral, Black, a Fort Worth life coach and inspirational speaker, even prepared meals for Thornburg, offered his friendship and allowed him to attend one of Black’s leadership training sessions at a Dallas-Fort Worth hotel with eight other people, Black told the Star-Telegram in a telephone interview Wednesday.
Fort Worth police said that, on Monday, Thornburg confessed to slicing Jewell’s throat as a sacrifice and then uncapping a natural gas line before he lit a candle, igniting their home in the 4500 block of Valentine Street, according to a warrant.
“I told him there was a reason he wasn’t there that day. I prayed with him,” Black said Wednesday, referring to the day in May when Thornburg and Jewell’s Fort Worth home burned down. “I feel like an idiot.”
Thornburg, 41, also confessed to “sacrificing” three other people earlier this month, dismembering their bodies at a Euless motel and then leaving the remains in a Fort Worth dumpster which he set on fire, the warrant states.
Thornburg was arrested late Monday at the Euless motel where authorities said he killed the three people at separate times this month. The victims were David Lueras, 42, who had been staying at the motel with Thornburg, and two women who police said will be identified by the medical examiner’s office.
Black remained in shock on Wednesday after finding out that the man he had befriended was accused of being a serial killer in Fort Worth and Arizona.
Along with the four killings in Fort Worth, Thornburg confessed to sacrificing his girlfriend in Arizona, police said. Relatives said that girlfriend was Tanya Begay of Gallup, New Mexico, who went missing in 2017. Her body has not been found.
“How can a man kill people and then chop them up?” Black said. “I noticed the darkness he had, but he was fighting it.”
Thornburg described himself to Fort Worth detectives as having in-depth knowledge of the Bible. He believed he was being called to commit sacrifices, according to his arrest warrant released by Fort Worth police on Tuesday.
After befriending him, Black said, he even thought about asking Thornburg to live with him and his family.
“My wife was the one who said she would not feel comfortable with him living with us for some time,” Black said. “I wonder now that my family could have ended up sacrificed by him.”
On several occasions, Black said, Thornburg asked him to go street preaching with him in Fort Worth. Black said he knew that Thornburg would stand on a street corner with a microphone and preach.
Residents of the Mid City Inn in Euless, where police say three of the murders happened, told reporters Thornburg would hand out church fliers and invite people to his room. He had been staying at the motel since July, according to police.
Black said Thornburg’s act was fake.
“The devil knows the Bible,” Black said Wednesday. “He was just pure evil.”
Before moving to the house on Valentine Street, Thornburg lived at the Fort Worth Transitional Center, a halfway house at 600 N Henderson St. The center is listed as his address on his driver’s license.
Danzell Mack, who has worked at the center for six years, said he was shocked when he heard the news of Thornburg’s arrest. He said Thornburg would read his Bible and preach to his roommates every day.
“He was never violent, at least here,” Mack said.
Kyndra Morse, a Valentine Street neighbor of Thornburg’s, said she got a creepy feeling from the moment she met him.
Morse, who has lived on the street since January, said Thornburg told her he had rented the house from an older woman since August 2020 and was trying to get his life together.
One of her first encounters with him was when she called Atmos Energy to respond to a gas smell at her house. Morse, who was pregnant at the time, said he came outside, hung out around the Atmos Energy worker and wouldn’t stop offering to help her around the house, going so far as to invite her and her young child to stay at his house if Atmos Energy wasn’t able to fix the problem the same day.
When Morse told him her boyfriend would be home later that day, she said, he gave her a look.
“He kind of chuckled and he goes, ‘Ha ha, that’s cute. I just like how you threw that in there that you had a boyfriend’,” she said.
After explaining that she said it to let him know she would be OK, he told her, “No, it’s fine, I get it” and got irritated, Morse said.
When Thornburg’s house caught fire in May, Morse said, she thought it might have been caused by a cigarette Jewell didn’t put out properly. She said Jewell, 61, worked night shifts and would always help bring her trash bins in and mow her grass. Jewell invited her and her boyfriend to a church Easter event, which they didn’t go to, and she said the next day a flier about it was on her car but she didn’t know who left it.
On Sundays, Morse said, Thornburg would leave his front door open and watch her as she unloaded groceries. She said she saw a wall-mounted TV with a church program turned on inside; underneath the TV was an office chair and desk with a big Bible on top of it. Thornburg would talk to himself and preach as if he were at church, she said.
Morse said she often saw Thornburg back his vehicle in the driveway and load the trunk, but never saw what he was putting in the car.
A week ago, she said, she called the police because her house’s motion sensor lights kept going off. She said officers checked Thornburg’s house, which was boarded up, but they said there wasn’t a way for someone to come in or out.
The house, at 4505 Valentine St., was demolished Wednesday. Morse talked to some of the demolition team in the morning and said one man was able to go straight into the house from the front door and split the plywood in front of the garage with a hand.
She was told by one of the demolition men that when the cleanup crew came, the house had dead rats and opossums inside and smelled like a dead body.
Since Thornburg’s arrest, Morse said, she’s ready to move.
“They were saying that he was [killing] people he casually knew. Well, he casually knew me,” she said. “I’m really scared. I’m honestly, truly scared. Even though he was caught and everything, it doesn’t matter.”
The house exploded minutes after Thornburg left for work on May 21, police wrote in the warrant. Before his confession, he was considered a person of interest in Jewell’s death but the medical examiner was unable to conclude whether it was a homicide due to the explosion, police said.
An attorney for Thornburg was not listed in court records as of Wednesday.
Thornburg worked as an electrician’s apprentice.
Before moving to the west Fort Worth neighborhood and later the Euless motel, he was sentenced to two years in prison for evading arrest with a vehicle in Wise County and was imprisoned on Nov. 15, 2018, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice records. The incident occurred on June 12, 2018.
“According to the report there was nothing unusual, or out of the ordinary of a basic arrest, for a charge of that type,” Rhome Police Chief Eric Debus said in a Tuesday email.
Thornburg was released to mandatory supervision on May 16, 2019, and discharged from parole on June 11, 2020, according to state records.
He previously lived in Arizona, where his criminal record included arrests on a drug charge and for carjacking a woman in Tucson in 2014, public records show.
This story was originally published September 29, 2021 at 12:59 PM.
