The core of the interview was done, but Detective Thomas O’Brien returned with another question to the room in which serial killing suspect Jason Thornburg was sitting in a chair.
Thornburg, who had just confessed to killing three people whose bodies he said that he cut into pieces and set on fire in a dumpster in Fort Worth, spent much of his time with O’Brien and Detective Matthew Barron discussing religion, including biblical references to flesh.
“Did you eat anybody?” O’Brien asked.
Thornburg, who had previously been reluctant to discuss the particulars of the killings, was direct. Yes, Thornburg said, he had taken a bite of David’s heart.
Before his body ended up in a trash bag under Thornburg’s bed at Mid City Inn and later in the dumpster, David Lueras had befriended Thornburg at the Euless motel.
Prosecutors on Friday played for the jury in Thornburg’s capital murder trial in Tarrant County Criminal District Court No. 3 a video and audio recording of the interview. The state is seeking the death penalty.
Thornburg told the detectives that he strangled 34-year-old Lauren Phillips. To kill the other victims, 42-year-old Lueras and 33-year-old Maricruz Mathis, he said that he used a Milwaukee straight blade knife to cut their throats.
The killings, which Thornburg said were religious sacrifices he felt called to commit, occurred over five days in mid-September 2021.
After luring the victims to the motel’s Room 113, Thornburg is accused of dismembering their bodies in the bathtub, driving with the parts in plastic bins to the dumpster in Fort Worth and setting them on fire in an attempt to destroy the remains. Surveillance video shows he made two trips to move the containers full of body parts from the motel to the dumpster while wearing a hazmat body suit, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
After the confession addendum on Sept. 27, 2021, O’Brien moved toward a table next to Thornburg to throw away a bag containing a partially eaten double cheeseburger and tater tots from Sonic. O’Brien then left the interview room at the Fort Worth Police Department’s Homicide Unit office off of North Henderson Street northwest of downtown.
Earlier on Friday, Dr. Richard Fries, a forensic pathologist at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office, testified that homicidal violence caused the deaths of Phillips, Lueras and Mathis.
“Here we’re looking at the decedent’s head,” Fries said as he guided the jury through autopsy photos.
Fries noted a hole in a heart he examined, although he testified he did not know to which victim the organ belonged.
The task of getting the remains out of the dumpster fell to Amy Renfro.
A police officer backed a pickup truck to the black steel container in west Fort Worth, and Renfro, an investigator at the medical examiner’s office, stood on the tailgate.
Wearing boots borrowed from a firefighter, she climbed in.
For almost three hours, Renfro lifted body parts covered in melted plastic from the dumpster and passed them to her supervisor, Steve White, who stood outside the trash bin.
She stepped through water that reached mid-calf. The water had been used to extinguish the fire in the dumpster.
White had placed body bags on the ground.
“There’s no delicate way to say this,” lead prosecutor Kim D’Avignon said on Thursday at the beginning of a question during Renfro’s testimony.
How did White and Renfro determine how many body bags they needed, D’Avignon asked.
“The amount of heads,” Renfro said.
There were three.
Defense attorneys Bob Gill, Miles Brissette and Warren St. John were appointed to represent Thornburg. The defense did not make an opening statement at the beginning of the trial but could choose to do so later. Thornburg’s attorneys might present an insanity defense, according to court documents.
D’Avignon is prosecuting the case with Assistant Criminal District Attorneys Emily Dixon and Amy Allin.
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.