Neighbor of Fort Worth serial killing suspect’s burned house says he watched, scared her
Kyndra Morse, who lived near suspected serial killer Jason Thornburg on Valentine Street in west Fort Worth, 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 and exploded in May and his roommate, Mark Jewell, died, Morse said she thought it might have been caused by a cigarette Jewell didn’t put out properly. She said Jewell 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 Tuesday, Fort Worth police released an arrest warrant that says Thornburg, 41, confessed this week to killing the 61-year-old Jewell and four other people. Thornburg told police he felt he was biblically called to sacrifice the victims by slitting their throats and in one case strangling a woman. He said he uncapped a natural gas line and set the house on fire after cutting Jewell’s throat.
Three victims he is accused of killing at a Euless motel this month were found dismembered and burned in a dumpster on Bonnie Drive in Fort Worth, police said. According to the warrant, Thornburg also confessed to killing a girlfriend in Arizona.
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.”
