A man who sliced the throats of five people over 4 1/2 years, cut three of the bodies into pieces, and sexually abused in a motel bathtub the dismembered corpse of one of his victims should be executed in the state’s death chamber, a jury in Fort Worth determined on Wednesday.
Jason Thornburg, who said he ate a piece of the heart of his third victim, was, after 14 days of testimony in his capital murder trial in Criminal District Court No. 3 in Tarrant County, condemned to die by lethal injection.
Thornburg butchered three people over five days in September 2021 at the Mid City Inn in Euless. The killings were fueled by his methamphetamine use, sexual sadism and desire to have intercourse with a sex worker for free, the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office suggested to the jury.
“He is a psychopath. He is evil,” Assistant District Attorney Amy Allin said in the state’s punishment phase closing argument. The slayings revealed Thornburg’s depraved indifference to life, Allin said.
After hacking the victims’ bodies with a Milwaukee straight blade knife, Thornburg scrubbed with ammonia and a lavender solution his easy-to-clean tiled motel room floor and temporarily stored the bodies of David Lueras, Maricruz Mathis and Lauren Phillips in garbage bags under his bed. In two trips, he drove with the bags in plastic containers to west Fort Worth, unloaded the bins into a dumpster and lit the bodies on fire.
Later that morning, Thornburg drove to a Home Depot to return the four empty 20-gallon totes for a cash refund, and a store employee put the containers back on a shelf.
The jury two weeks ago found Thornburg guilty of the capital murder of multiple people during the same course of conduct.
The panel then learned in the trial’s punishment phase that Thornburg admitted to Fort Worth police homicide detectives 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.
Family members of the victims addressed Thornburg from the witness stand in statements after he was sentenced.
“The pain that you have caused by killing my sister doesn’t just go away,” Mathis’ sister said. “The pain stays in our hearts.”
She called Thornburg a danger to society and told him, “I hope that you receive forgiveness in heaven because personally I don’t think I can do it. … The only thing you deserve is death.”
The defense argued in the trial’s guilt-innocence phase that the jury should find Thornburg not guilty by reason of insanity. Defense attorneys Bob Gill, Miles Brissette and Warren St. John called to the witness stand a series of psychologists and a psychiatrist who suggested that Thornburg was, and remains, psychotic. Severe mental disease or defect caused Thornburg not to comprehend that his conduct was wrong, they argued.
Thornburg, who is 44 and Native American, largely grew up in northern Arizona on the Navajo reservation in an octagon-shaped traditional shack with a dirt and concrete floor in which there was no electricity or running water. He attended a community college and worked as an electrician.
Images of Thornburg’s brain and its electrical activity suggested he suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder as a result of his mother’s drinking and a moderate traumatic brain injury when he was assaulted in 2002, defense witnesses testified.
The jury deliberated on punishment for about four hours. Judge Doug Allen pronounced the sentence to a courtroom jammed with relatives of the victims.
The case began when a firefighter involved in the effort to extinguish a dumpster fire probed body parts with a long pole meant for turning trash. The smell of burning flesh and the flames that destroyed evidence floated in the air.
To be sure, the path to identifying Thornburg as the suspect in the Bonnie Drive burning bodies case and securing his confession was filled with examples of dogged policework.
Detective Kyle Sullivan’s culling of a potential suspect vehicle list of about 7,000 down to Thornburg, and Detective Matt Barron and Tom O’Brien’s patient interview of the suspect are but two examples.
Earlier, though, there was a significant law enforcement blunder that, handled differently, may have landed Thornburg in custody a year before September 2021 and could have deprived him of the opportunity to kill Lueras, Mathis and Phillips.
Sean Galegher, a former Fort Worth Police Department domestic violence unit detective, did not take seriously a September 2020 aggravated assault case in which Thornburg sliced the neck of another roommate, Billy Hernandez, the state and defense agreed.
Galegher, now in the narcotics unit, acknowledged on the witness stand that his investigation involved only reading another officer’s report and making two telephone calls.
The report Galegher reviewed indicated that the suspect was a person whose first name was Jason. The last name was unknown but began with a T. The detective did not determine his full name.
Did he ever drive out to the Valentine Street offense location, Gill asked.
“I don’t believe I did,” Galegher testified.
Though not an excuse, Galegher testified that he was assigned hundreds of cases each year.
“I have no idea why after September 23rd there is no other information in the report,”
No case was filed. Less than an year later, Thornburg killed Jewell at the same house on Valentine Street and set the home on fire to hide the evidence, prosecutors said.
“I’m sorry for the way you were treated by law enforcement,” Allin told Hernandez before passing the witness to Gill.
Prosecutors also said Thornburg got away with murder when the FBI mishandled the investigation of Begay’s disappearance.
Begay’s cousin, who thought of her as a sister, said that Tanya “was a strong, beautiful Navajo woman.” She told Thornburg that the way he portrayed the reservation gave the Navajo nation a bad name.
Thornburg said he “cremated” Begay and her remains were never found, according to prosecutors. “You took my little sister from us. … and you’ve shown no remorse for what you did,” her cousin said. “You won’t even tell us where she’s at.”
The jury was instructed to consider two options, life in prison without parole or the death penalty. Jurors considered the probability that the defendant poses to society a continuing threat of criminal violence, and whether there was mitigating evidence that a juror might regard as reducing Thornburg’s moral blameworthiness that would have warranted a sentence of life without parole.
Rather than symbolism, Thornburg saw in a New Testament verse literal direction from God to kill and eat people, defense attorney Gill argued.
The biblical reference was among several signs that Thornburg said he assessed as a call to sacrifice. Thornburg believed the sacrifices were the pathway to God’s kingdom for himself and the victims, who were, in Thornburg’s psychotic delusion, willing participants, Gill said.
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