Tarrant County jury rejects insanity, finds guilty man who drank victims’ blood, ate heart
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story contains graphic information that may be disturbing to readers.
The Mid City Inn could not have been mistaken for the Waldorf Astoria.
At the cheap motel in Euless, about half of the guests paid weekly and were largely responsible for cleaning their own rooms. Customers who were short on money could pay by performing maintenance tasks like changing a shower head.
Domestic fights were routine at the now-demolished motel, as was prostitution. Calls to the police were not unusual.
“It’s a — You go there if you’re struggling,” said Megan Hodge, who was a guest in 2021 when she met Jason Thornburg, who stayed in another room.
Thornburg spent much of his free time reading the Bible in a chair outside his room in a first-floor nook next to a set of stairs.
Inside room 113, Thornburg had a killing lair. The tile floor was nonporous, easy to clean and would not easily absorb blood.
Over five days in September 2021, Thornburg cut the throats of two people and strangled another, chopped up their bodies and put them in garbage bags under his motel room bed. When his sport utility vehicle was back from a repair shop, Thornburg drove the dismembered bodies to a dumpster in Fort Worth and poured fuel from a gas can into the steel container to set them on fire.
He killed David Lueras, 42, Maricruz Mathis, 33, and Lauren Phillips, 34.
Thornburg told two psychologists that he sexually abused Phillips’ corpse and had sex with Mathis and Lueras when they were alive.
Thornburg said he drank the victims’ blood, ate a bite of Lueras’ heart and put the remaining part of the organ back inside his chest.
A jury in Tarrant County Criminal District Court No. 3 on Wednesday evening found Thornburg guilty of capital murder after about two hours of deliberation.
Thornburg’s attorneys argued that he was legally insane at the time of the killings. Severe mental disease or defect caused Thornburg not to comprehend that his conduct was wrong, they argued.
“Jason Thornburg is quite literally insane,” his lead attorney, Bob Gill, told the jury in an opening statement on Monday as the defense began its case.
With the guilty verdict, the panel will move into a second phase of the trial to hear punishment evidence.
Thornburg, 44, told police that he separately killed two other people, his roommate, Mark Jewell, in Fort Worth in May 2021 and a girlfriend, Tanya Begay, in Arizona in 2017. Evidence of their deaths could be presented to the jury during the trial’s punishment phase.
The jury will deliberate to consider two options, life in prison without parole or the death penalty. Jurors will 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 Thornburg’s moral blameworthiness that warrants a sentence of life without parole.
In the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, Thornburg said he found a call to sacrifice.
Rather than symbolism, Thornburg saw in the New Testament verse literal direction from God to kill and eat people.
The biblical reference was among several signs that Thornburg assessed as directives to kill, according to testimony at the serial killing suspect’s capital murder trial.
A “bad brain” stirred within Thornburg psychotic delusions, Gill suggested. He believed the sacrifices were the pathway to God’s kingdom for himself and the victims, who were, in Thornburg’s view, willing participants, Gill said.
“Don’t try to make sense of it because you can’t,” Gill said.
Danny Zuniga, who attended church services with Thornburg and hired him to do electrical work at his remodeling company, testified as a witness called by the state that the defendant had said “lizards and all kinds of stuff were talking to him.”
“I was like, ‘Dude, you’re crazy,’” Zuniga testified.
Residents of the Mid City Inn told reporters in 2021 that Thornburg would talk about religion, hand out church flyers and ask people to come to his room. Witnesses have testified that two of the victims had been living at the motel and that Thornburg befriended the first victim, Lueras, and invited him to stay in his room.
Matthew Mendel, a psychologist hired by the defense to evaluate Thornburg, testified that in his opinion the defendant was insane at the time of the killings. Christine Reed, a psychologist hired by the state who testified on Tuesday, disagreed.
Assistant Criminal District Attorneys Kim D’Avignon, Emily Dixon and Amy Allin are prosecuting the case.
Beyond Gill, Miles Brissette and Warren St. John were also appointed to represent Thornburg.
The trial, at which Judge Doug Allen is presiding, was continuing with the state’s punishment case on Thursday.
This story was originally published November 20, 2024 at 6:54 PM.
