In Tarrant trial, state expected to tell jury defendant was serial killer of at least 5

At 8:08 p.m., about two hours into the interview, Jason Thornburg was avoiding answering the questions that two detectives were asking.

A hamburger on a table was getting cold.

"It already don't look good on me, man," Thornburg said at the Fort Worth Police Department's Homicide Unit office off of North Henderson Street northwest of downtown.

"But it's like we said, there's an opportunity to 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. OK?," Detective Thomas O'Brien asked. "But there's more to the story, is there not?"

Eventually Thornburg confessed.

He told the detectives that 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 that he strangled a woman. To kill the others, a woman and man, he said that he used a Milwaukee straight blade knife to cut their throats.

Thornburg is accused of dismembering their bodies and driving the parts in plastic bins to west Fort Worth, where they were burned in a large black steel dumpster.

No longer in need of the receptacles, Thornburg told the detectives that he returned the bins to Home Depot for a refund.

This morning in Criminal District Court No. 3 in Tarrant County, testimony begins in Thornburg's capital murder trial. The state is seeking the death penalty .

Thornburg, 44, told police that 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 thermal and blast injuries in a house 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 connected Jason Thornburg to the death of Jewel l, who was his roommate, but concluded that they did not have probable cause to arrest him.

Indeed it was Thornburg's connection to the Jewell case that narrowed a list of suspect vehicle owners in the motel killings.

Detectives began with about 7,000 Jeep Grand Cherokees that were manufactured between 2005 and 2010 whose registered owners live in Tarrant or Dallas counties. The make, model and year range came from a vehicle that detectives saw on a video surveillance recording at the Bonnie Drive dumpster scene.

Thornburg owns such a vehicle, and he became a suspect in the dumpster case.

After Thornburg admitted to the September killings, in an interview with detectives, the discussion turned to Jewell's death.

Thornburg told police he slit Jewell's throat and started the fire by uncapping a natural gas line and lighting a candle in the bedroom, according to an affidavit supporting an arrest warrant in the dumpster case.

Firefighters found Jewell's body in the bedroom where the fire originated, according to a Fort Worth Fire Department report.

The home exploded minutes after Thornburg left for work, police said.

A detective wrote in the affidavit that Thornburg said that he has in-depth knowledge of the Bible and said that he "believed that he was being called to commit sacrifices. "

The trial is expected to take several weeks. If the jurors return a guilty verdict on capital murder in the motel killings, they would move into a second phase of the trial to hear punishment evidence. Prosecutors could present evidence related to additional victims in the trial's second phase.

In the punishment phase, the jury would deliberate to consider two options, life in prison without parole or death, and 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.

The last time a Tarrant County jury sent a defendant to death row was in April, when a state district court jury concluded that a man who in 2018 strangled his girlfriend and her daughter after he raped the 10-year-old should be executed.

Paige Terrell Lawyer was sentenced to die by lethal injection in connection with his capital murder conviction in the east Fort Worth killings.