Woman found in Fort Worth dumpster battled addiction before her slaying, mother says
The body that looked like a child was Lauren’s.
When three dismembered people seared by fire were found last month in a dumpster in west Fort Worth, it was clear that a man and woman were among them.
The other victim appeared much younger, but it was Lauren. At 5 feet 2 inches and slight even without heroin and methamphetamine, Lauren Phillips weighed under 100 pounds.
Thirty-four years old. Mother of two teenage boys. Resident of a cheap motel. Thinned from drugs.
Beyond pieces of bodies, there was little else in the dumpster that sat outside a sign production company and across from a line of houses and other businesses. The steel container held the detritus of the three lives unloaded into it.
Jason Thornburg told detectives that he killed them over five days in mid-September at Mid City Inn in Euless. Lauren was the last to die. Thornburg said that he strangled her. To kill the others, he said that he used a Milwaukee straight blade knife to cut their throats.
He put parts of the victims in Rubbermaid-type tubs and drove in two trips on one night to the dumpster, about 25 miles each way.
Thornburg, 41, said that he separately killed two other people, a roommate in Fort Worth in May and, in 2017, a girlfriend outside Texas.
The motivations for the killings are not clear. Thornburg told detectives that he has deep knowledge of the Bible and said that he believed that he was being called to commit sacrifices.
Lauren’s mother, Kathie Phillips, has another explanation, at least for the death of her daughter. She wonders whether Lauren, who met Thornburg as he handed out church flyers at another motel about a mile away, was killed because she smelled or saw the bodies in Thornburg’s Room 113.
A life fueled by dysfunction led Lauren to the Mid City Inn. She grew up in North Richland Hills and was involved in gymnastics and dance. Friends were often over to play in a swimming pool or on a trampoline.
Lauren’s father, who died eight years ago, was quite strict. She was rebellious and spurned his tough rules.
Lauren began to use hard drugs before she was a teenager. She did not attend school after she became pregnant at 15. She was in eighth grade.
Lauren had schizophrenia and heard voices. She would not stay at long-term rehabilitation facilities and declined offers of help from her parents and others.
Once, she drove her Jeep Cherokee to the south side of Fort Worth to buy drugs and handed over the vehicle to the seller to pay for them.
There was bright time. For a yearslong period in her 20s and during the early life of her second son, Lauren avoided drugs and steered a better life. She ferried her boys to school. There were camping trips and time spent fishing.
She reconnected with an acquaintance about five years ago and again became consumed by addiction. In late summer, after the flyer encounter with Thornburg, he began to pay her for sex, her mother said.
When Kathie Phillips took a call from the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office, she was not entirely surprised to hear that Lauren was dead. She assumed that sooner or later, her daughter would die of an overdose.
And it felt at times as if Lauren was already gone.
“She was so much out of our lives the last few years and involved in drugs that we kind of let her go a long time ago because it hurt too much,” Kathie said.
There is frustration in a mother’s inability to change the course of her child’s dark life. Kathie is certain that she could not have done more. Lauren’s addiction was too strong. She felt as though she did not need help.
“I loved her so much,” Kathie said. “She was my whole world.”
Less is known about the two other people Thornburg is accused of killing at the motel. Maricruz Mathis’ father said last week that he and his wife wanted to put the death of their 33-year-old daughter behind them and declined an interview request. Her parents told WFAA-TV that she, too, had struggled off and on with drug addiction and had been staying at the Mid City Inn. Relatives of David Lueras, 42, could not be reached. Police said that Lueras had been staying with Thornburg at the motel.
The second person that Thornburg is accused of killing, Mark Jewell, 61, died in a house in the 4500 block of Valentine Street where they were roommates. The medical examiner’s office knew of Jewell’s thermal and blast injuries, but it was not clear that his death was criminal until Thornburg told police he sliced Jewell’s throat. He said that he created the explosion by uncapping a natural gas line and lighting a candle in a bedroom, according to an affidavit supporting an arrest warrant in the Phillips, Mathis and Lueras case.
There was a blast at the house minutes after Thornburg left for work on May 21. Firefighters found Jewell’s body in a bedroom.
Before the victims were found in the dumpster on Sept. 22, police had investigated Thornburg in Jewell’s death, but said after his arrest that they had previously concluded that they did not have probable cause to arrest him earlier.
It was Thornburg’s connection to the Jewell case that narrowed for police a list of suspect vehicle owners in the dumpster triple homicide on Bonnie Drive.
Detectives began with about 7,000 Jeep Grand Cherokees that were manufactured between 2005 and 2010 whose registered owners live in Tarrant or Dallas counties. The make, model and year range came from a vehicle that detectives saw on a video surveillance recording at the Bonnie Drive scene.
Thornburg owns such a vehicle, and with his connection to Jewell’s death, became a suspect in the dumpster case. The Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office charged the serial slaying suspect with capital murder of multiple persons.
The body of the girlfriend Thornburg confessed to killing has not been found. Her relatives last heard from Tanya Begay, 36, when she said that she was in Arizona.
For Kathie Phillips, now there is misery. Lauren was her only child.
She knows that her daughter’s search for a place to sleep put her into Thornburg’s path. There is deep sadness in that.
At the Fort Worth Police Department’s Homicide Unit office on Calvert Street, Kathie and her sister met on Tuesday morning in a conference room with the officers who investigated the case.
Kathie wanted to thank them. She also wanted to ask about the condition of Lauren’s body in the dumpster.
She wondered if Lauren’s face was intact.
It was.
This story was originally published October 17, 2021 at 5:30 AM.
