December 10, 2024
Warning: Details of murder contained within the following post. Reader discretion is advised.
The shocking details of several murders have been revealed this week at the trial of Jason Alan Thornburg, who stands accused charges including murder and cannibalism.
Thornburg was charged in December 2021 with the murders of David Lueras, Lauren Phillips, and Maricruz Mathis.
He later confessed to two more murders, that of his girlfriend, Tanya Begay, in Arizona in 2017, as well as a man named Mark Jewell, 61, in May 2021, whose remains were found in his burned home on Valentine Street. Jewell was an ex-roommate of the killer.
Thornburg told detectives that he had “uncapped the gas line and lit a candle in the room,” and evidence was found to corroborate the story.
According to the FBI, Tanya Begay's case remains open, and her body has not been found.
In 2021 Thornburg was working as an apprentice electrician in Fort Worth, Texas.
The murders of Maricruz Mathis, 33, Lauren Phillips, 34, and David Lueras, 42, happened in September 2021, over a period of several days, in room #113 at the Mid City Inn Hotel in Euless.
Others staying at the hotel remembered Thornburg sitting outside of his room at night reading a bible. He also left related religious materials around common areas of the Mid City in.
Although he appeared like a man of God on the outside, inside the room Jason Thornburg had been killing, decapitating, and eating body parts of the victims he had lured inside. The killer said he felt compelled to murder the victims, which he would later refer to as “sacrifices” for “religious reasons.”
Details of the killings in a statement issued by Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney Phil Sorrells, describe how Thornburg lured the victims into his hotel room one by one, slitting the throats of Lueras and Mathis, and strangling Phillips to death.
The statement revealed further details that shocked both the court, and those following the story in the media, involving acts of cannibalism and abuse of a corpse.
Thornburg was said to have cut off and ate part of Lueras’ penis, as well as cutting out and consuming part of his heart.
Back in 2021, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that Lueras had been staying in Thornburg's hotel room with him, short term before he was murdered. The killer confessed to police that he had put Lueras' body into the hotel bathtub and dismembered him there and did the same with the other victims.
Thornburg was also said to have sexually assaulted the body of Phillips after death.
The killer then dismembered the bodies and stored the remains in trash bags under the hotel bed.
The remains were then put into plastic storage containers to be transported to a dumpster in the area.
On the morning of September 22, 2021, clad in a full hazmat body suit, Thornburg dumped the contents of containers into a dumpster standing in front of the lawn of a storage business at 3120 Bonnie Dr, Tarrant County, Texas, and set it alight before fleeing the scene in his Jeep Grand Cherokee. He then rinsed out the plastic container and returned them to the place of purchase.
Firefighters were quick to respond to the scene, showing up at approximately 6:15am and extinguishing the flames.
The victim's remains were recovered, and surveillance footage was checked for any indication pertaining to the perpetrator.
Police described the bodies as burned and heavily dismembered, with some body part unaccounted for.
The first victim to be identified was David Lueras.
Police used what remained of a large tattoo on a part of a back spelling out the letters U-E-R-A-S and from this were able to identify Lueras. Entering the name into the Facebook search bar they were eventually able to find David Lueras's profile, with pictures of his tattoos published to his page.
Investigators watched Thornburg flee the scene in his Jeep on the footage and soon tracked him down.
Fort Worth Police Chief Neil Noakes said in a news conference in 2021: “It’s shocking. It’s unsettling. And we knew bringing someone to justice was paramount.”
On September 27, 2021, Thornburg was arrested at a home he was working on in Arlington, Texas.
He willingly went to be interviewed at the homicide office where he spoke with detectives and told them that he had an "in-depth" knowledge of the bible and was killing people as "sacrifices.”
The trial started in November 2024 and continued for weeks.
At the trial, the prosecution said of Thornburg: "He is a psychopath. He is evil. He is the type of evil that we want to believe doesn't exist in our community. We want to believe we are not raising our children in a world where people like Jason Thornburg exist."
The defense said Thornburg was "doomed in the womb," and “lacked executive functioning.”
They said due to him being born with fetal alcohol syndrome, he didn’t get “to be the correct person he should be. He didn't choose to be that way."
The trial concluded in a guilty verdict on December 2, 2024, resulting in a death sentence for Thornburg, who is currently being detained in Tarrant County, Texas.
December 17, 2024
