At 8:08 p.m., about two hours into the interview, Jason Thornburg avoided answering the questions asked by two detectives.
A hamburger on the table went cold.
“It’s not looking good for me already, man,” Thornburg said at the Fort Worth Police Department’s homicide unit office on North Henderson Street, northwest of downtown.
“But it’s like we said, there’s a possibility of 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. Okay?” Detective Thomas O’Brien asked. “But there’s more to the story, isn’t there?”
Ultimately, Thornburg confessed.
He told investigators 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. Thornburg said he strangled a woman. To kill the others, a woman and a man, he said he used a Milwaukee straight-blade knife to slit their throats.
Thornburg is accused of dismembering their bodies and transporting the parts in plastic bins to west Fort Worth, where they were burned in a large black steel dumpster.
Because Thornburg no longer needed the bins, he told investigators he was returning the bins to Home Depot for a refund.
Testimony in Thornburg’s murder trial begins this morning in Criminal District Court No. 3 in Tarrant County. The state demands the death penalty.
Thornburg, 44, told police he separately killed two other people: a roommate in Fort Worth in May 2021 and, in 2017, a girlfriend in Arizona.
Mark Jewell, 61, died of heat and blast injuries at a home 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 linked Jason Thornburg to the death of Jewell, who was his roommate, but concluded they had no probable cause to arrest him.
Indeed, it was Thornburg’s connection to the Jewell case that narrowed the list of suspected vehicle owners in the motel murders.
Detectives started with approximately 7,000 Jeep Grand Cherokees produced between 2005 and 2010 and whose registered owners live in Tarrant or Dallas counties. The make, model and year came from a vehicle that detectives saw on a video surveillance recording at the dumpster on Bonnie Drive.
Thornburg owns such a vehicle and he became a suspect in the dumpster case.
After Thornburg admitted to the murders in September, the discussion turned to Jewell’s death in an interview with detectives.
Thornburg told police he slit Jewell’s throat and started the fire by unscrewing the cap on a natural gas line and lighting a candle in the bedroom, according to an affidavit in support of an arrest warrant in the dumpster case.
According to a Fort Worth Fire Department report, firefighters found Jewell’s body in the bedroom where the fire started.
The house exploded minutes after Thornburg left for work, police said.
A detective wrote in the affidavit that Thornburg said he has an in-depth knowledge of the Bible and said he “believed he was called to sacrifice.”
The process is expected to take several weeks. If jurors find guilty on the capital charge in the motel slayings, they would move to a second phase of the trial to hear the criminal evidence. Prosecutors could present evidence related to additional victims in the second phase of the trial.
In the penalty phase, the jury would deliberate to consider two options: life in prison without parole or death, and consider the likelihood that the defendant poses a continuing threat of criminal violence to society and whether there is mitigating evidence that a juror could regard as punishment. reducing the moral culpability of the suspect that justifies life imprisonment without parole.
The last time a Tarrant County jury sent a suspect to death row was in April, when a state court jury concluded that a man who strangled his girlfriend and her daughter in 2018 after raping the 10-year-old should be executed become.
Paige Terrell Lawyer was sentenced to death by lethal injection in connection with his murder conviction in east Fort Worth.
