In Tarrant trial, state expected to tell jury defendant was serial killer of at least 5
The task of getting the remains of three homicide victims out of a black dumpster fell to Amy Renfro.
A police officer backed a pickup truck to the steel container in west Fort Worth, and Renfro, an investigator at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office, stood on the tailgate.
Wearing boots borrowed from a firefighter, she climbed in.
For almost three hours, Renfro lifted body parts and passed them to her supervisor, Steve White, who stood outside the dumpster.
She stepped through water that reached mid-calf. The water had been used to extinguish a fire in the dumpster.
White had placed body bags on the ground.
“There’s no delicate way to say this,” lead prosecutor Kim D’Avignon said on Thursday at the beginning of a question to Renfro at the capital murder trial of the man who authorities allege is responsible for the dismemberment.
How did White and Renfro determine how many body bags they needed, D’Avignon asked.
“The amount of heads,” Renfro said.
There were three.
Five days after Renfro worked to remove the bodies, suspected serial killer Jason Thornburg was questioned on Sept. 27, 2021, in an interview room at the Fort Worth Police Department’s Homicide Unit office off of North Henderson Street northwest of downtown.
At 8:08 p.m., about two hours into the interview, Thornburg was avoiding answering the questions asked by two detectives.
A Sonic hamburger on a table was getting cold.
“It already don’t look good on me, man,” Thornburg said.
“But it’s like we said, there’s an opportunity to at least --,” Detective Matthew Barron tried.
“Like you said, it’s a done deal. I’m done, you know,” Thornburg said.
“It’s a done deal that we know what you did. OK?,” Barron’s partner, Detective Thomas O’Brien, said. “But there’s more to the story, is there not?”
Eventually Thornburg confessed.
He told the detectives that he killed three people — 42-year-old David Lueras, 34-year-old Lauren Phillips and 33-year-old Maricruz Mathis — over five days in mid-September 2021 at Mid City Inn in Euless.
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Thornburg said that he strangled Phillips. To kill the others, he said that he used a Milwaukee straight blade knife to cut their throats.
Thornburg is accused of dismembering their bodies, driving the parts in plastic bins to the dumpster in Fort Worth and setting them on fire in an attempt to burn the remains.
No longer in need of the plastic containers, Thornburg told the detectives that he returned the bins to Home Depot for a refund.
On Thursday afternoon in Criminal District Court No. 3 in Tarrant County, testimony before the jury began in Thornburg’s capital murder trial. The state is seeking the death penalty in one of the most gruesome homicide cases in North Texas’ history.
Defense attorneys Bob Gill, Miles Brissette and Warren St. John were appointed to represent Thornburg.
D’Avignon is prosecuting the case with Assistant Criminal District Attorneys Emily Dixon and Amy Allin.
Thornburg, 44, told police that he separately killed two other people, a roommate in Fort Worth in May 2021 and a girlfriend, Tanya Begay, in Arizona in 2017.
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Mark Jewell, 61, died of thermal and blast injuries in a house in the 4500 block of Valentine Street, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office, which classified the manner of his death as undetermined.
Before the triple homicide, police had connected Jason Thornburg to the death of Jewell, who was his roommate, but concluded that they did not have probable cause to arrest him.
Indeed it was Thornburg’s connection to the Jewell case that narrowed a list of suspect vehicle owners in the motel killings.
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 dumpster scene.
Thornburg owns such a vehicle, and he became a suspect in the dumpster case.
After Thornburg admitted to the September killings in the interview with detectives, the discussion turned to Jewell’s death.
Thornburg told police he slit Jewell’s throat and started the fire by uncapping a natural gas line and lighting a candle in the bedroom, according to an affidavit supporting an arrest warrant in the dumpster case.
Firefighters found Jewell’s body in the bedroom where the fire originated, according to a Fort Worth Fire Department report.
The home exploded minutes after Thornburg left for work, police said.
A detective wrote in the affidavit that Thornburg said that he has in-depth knowledge of the Bible and said that he “believed that he was being called to commit sacrifices.”
The trial, at which Judge Doug Allen is presiding, is expected to take several weeks. If the jurors return a guilty verdict on capital murder in the motel killings, they would move into a second phase of the trial to hear punishment evidence. Prosecutors could present evidence related to additional victims in the trial’s second phase.
In the punishment phase, the jury would deliberate to consider two options, life in prison without parole or death. Jurors would consider the probability that the defendant poses to society a continuing threat of criminal violence, and whether there is mitigating evidence that a juror might regard as reducing the defendant’s moral blameworthiness that warrants a sentence of life without parole.
The last time a Tarrant County jury sent a defendant to death row was in April, when a state district court jury concluded that a man who in 2018 strangled his girlfriend and her daughter after he raped the 10-year-old should be executed.
Paige Terrell Lawyer was sentenced to die by lethal injection in connection with his capital murder conviction in the east Fort Worth killings.
A second capital murder trial also is underway this week in Tarrant County. Christopher Turner is accused of shooting Anwar Ali, a 62-year-old convenience store owner, during a robbery at Ali’s business in 2020.
This story was originally published November 7, 2024 at 8:28 AM.
