A Texas man who said he killed people because he was called to “commit sacrifices” has been convicted on three counts of murder and sentenced to death.
Jason Thornburg, 44, was found guilty this week of killing and dismembering David Lueras, 42; Lauren Phillips, 34; and Maricruz Mathis, 33, in 2021 the Associated Press reported.
Thornburg also said he killed his roommate in 2021 and his girlfriend in 2017
The roommate, 61-year-old Mark Jewell was found dead in a housefire in 2021. The girlfriend, Tanya Begay, went missing after taking a trip to Arizona with Thornburg in 2017. Thornburg was indicted for Jewell’s death.
Thornburg’s attorneys made an insanity defense, but the jury didn’t buy it.
Evidence presented at trial said that Thornburg was staying a a motel in Euless, Texas, during the murders, according to KDFW. He called each of the three separately into the room he was renting over the course of a week. He slit the throats of Lueras and Matthis and strangled Phillips and sexuallly assaulted her body. He also ate some of Lueras’s heart and cut off his penis.
Thornburg dismembered the bodies in the motel bathtub and stored the remains in trashbags under the bed before transferring them to plastic tubs. Then, on September 22, 2021, he took tubs to a dumpster in Fort Worth, dumped the remains in, set them on fire, and drove away.
Then he cleaned the plastic tubs and returned them to the store where he bought them.
He was tracked down when investigators found video of his Jeep Grand Cherokee in the area of the dumpster at the time of the fire.
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[Featured image: Jason Alan Thornburg/Tarrant County Police Department]
