Tarrant County cannibal trial: Witness testifies defendant said lizards spoke to him

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story contains graphic information about violence and sexual abuse that may be disturbing to readers.

In the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jason 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.

Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

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 in Criminal District Court No. 3 in Tarrant County.

Other cues came from a nightclub DJ and from the people whose lives he would eventually end in North Texas, he told a psychologist.

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 Euless 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.

After killing David Lueras, 42, and Maricruz Mathis, 33, Thornburg’s final victim was 34-year-old Lauren Phillips, who suffered from mental health problems and methamphetamine addiction. Phillips was a sex worker.

Thornburg and Phillips had bondage sex in his room using a rope, according to testimony. When she tried to leave, Thornburg squeezed her neck with the rope until she died.

Thornburg’s attorneys argue 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 argue.

“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. Prosecutors, who are seeking the death penalty, presented evidence over five days beginning on Nov. 7.

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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.

Thornburg told two psychologists that he sexually abused the victims’ corpses. Matthew Mendel, a clinical psychologist hired by the defense team to evaluate Thornburg, testified on Monday that in his opinion the defendant is insane. A psychologist who testified Tuesday for the state disagreed.

If the jury returns a guilty verdict on capital murder in the motel killings, the panel would 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.

In that phase, the jury would deliberate to consider two options, life in prison without parole or death. Jurors would 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 the defendant’s moral blameworthiness that warrants a sentence of life without parole.

Thornburg was indicted in December 2021, and the decision to seek the death penalty was made when District Attorney Phil Sorrells’ predecessor, Sharen Wilson, held the office.

Sorrells spent some of Wednesday and Monday afternoons observing the trial from the back rows of the gallery and conferring with the prosecutors he supervises. Assistant Criminal District Attorneys Kim D’Avignon, Emily Dixon and Amy Allin are prosecuting the case.

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 in Euless 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.

After killing Lueras, Thornburg took a bite of his heart, he told Fort Worth police detectives in a recording of an interview that was shown to the jury.

Beyond Gill, Miles Brissette and Warren St. John were also appointed to represent Thornburg.

The trial, at which Judge Doug Allen is presiding, is continuing on Tuesday with the state’s rebuttal case.