Hey y’all, it’s Julie Mattson, and on this episode of Pushing Up Lilies, we’re diving into the disturbing case of Jason Thornburg, the Texas serial killer whose gruesome crimes sent shockwaves through Fort Worth. Known for his twisted religious justifications and ritualistic murders, Thornburg confessed to brutally killing multiple victims, dismembering their bodies, and even setting them on fire. But what drove him to commit such heinous acts? Join me as we uncover the chilling details of his confession, the horrifying evidence investigators discovered, and the psychological depths of a man who believed his crimes were part of a higher calling. This one is not for the faint of heart. * Listener discretion is advised.
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:31 Hey guys, we're back here at what I cannot believe is the end of January.
0:38 It's crazy.
0:39 It's driving me nuts that it's not even Valentine's Day yet and there's already Easter stuff out at the store.
0:46 I think I talked about this before, but I just want to enjoy one holiday at a time.
0:51 It's absolutely crazy.
0:54 Our family has a lot of birthdays in March and a lot of birthdays in May, and I have a cruise with my high school girlfriends planned in June and July, and it's like the year is already pretty hectic.
1:09 I don't know if many of you may know that I'm going to be on a reality TV show that is being filmed next week, so I will be in Oklahoma for that filming, and I'll be in a business incubator of some sort for about 7 days, and I will be amongst other entrepreneurs.
1:31 I'm kind of there for, well, for a lot of reasons.
1:34 I just feel like there's always something to learn about business, whether it be the podcast or the subscription box or my Med Spa, there's always room for growth and room to learn and I wake up in the middle of the night with new ideas all the time and it's terrible to be plagued like that with just your mind going 90 to nothing and never turning off.
2:00 I'll need an off switch for real.
2:03 This past weekend we were super busy at the medical examiner's office.
2:07 I say we; I was off.
2:08 I don't work weekends anymore, but I did when I first started.
2:12 I worked Sundays and statistically Sundays were the busiest days of the week.
2:20 During the summer, a lot of people are at the lake.
2:23 A lot of drownings, a lot of what I call hold my beer and watch these moments and just in general.
2:32 It seems like statistically Sundays have been our busiest day for years.
2:38 And so I was so glad when I was able to hand that shift over to one of my coworkers.
2:45 But they were super busy and of course we play catch up sometimes on Monday, doing a lot of the office work and answering the phone.
2:54 You know, I had a poor man today who drove an hour to come pick up his son's property, and we had family come in that had just found out about their loved one's death, and he'd been gone for 2 or 3 weeks, probably.
3:10 We just have a lot of families even come into the office and issues that come up every day to deal with, and then my headache today was trying to explain to a doctor that even at the age of 57, you can die suddenly and trying to get a doctor to sign a death certificate.
3:29 She couldn't believe that her patient, who was 57 and morbidly obese with diabetes and coronary artery disease.
3:38 Who was fine a week ago, died, and the nurse practitioner never lost a patient, which is great, but statistically, the longer you practice, the chances of you losing a patient are going to increase.
3:54 We all know that.
3:55 Just the math, math you know, you're going to lose a patient.
3:59 It doesn't matter how good of a doctor you are.
4:02 Sometimes they don't get their meds filled.
4:04 Sometimes even when they do, they don't take them like they're supposed to.
4:08 There's a lot of other factors that are out of the doctor's control.
4:12 There's never blame on a doctor, but I think a lot of them are scared.
4:16 A lot of them are really nervous about being wrong when they sign the death certificate.
4:22 This particular nurse practitioner asked me, well, what if they come back and say that I put the wrong cause of death on the death certificate?
4:30 And I said, well, who are they?
4:32 Because after you sign that and that body is cremated, there is not anybody that's going to come back and be able to prove you wrong.
4:40 I mean, if you have documentation of an extensive medical history and you've been prescribing this person medications.
4:49 And the police were at the residence and did a thorough investigation, counted all the medications.
4:56 There's no history of suicide attempts.
5:00 Then, you know, it's a natural death and what exactly caused it?
5:04 We may never know, but it wasn't a suicide, and it wasn't a homicide, and it wasn't an accident.
5:14 Do things slip through the cracks?
5:16 Probably.
5:18 There's a good chance that yes, they do, but we have a lot of measures in place to try to keep that from happening.
5:26 But I always have to explain to doctors that the police are our eyes and ears.
5:32 When we go to scenes, we're their eyes and ears, and we're all on the same team.
5:37 We're not trying to prove anyone wrong or have a power struggle over whose job it is to sign a death certificate.
5:45 We just need to do right by the family and get it done instead of trying to put it off on someone else.
5:53 The task of taking care of your patients does not completely go away when they die.
5:59 There you go.
6:00 That's my soapbox today.
6:02 Found a story that is super close.
6:06 This is in my area, and this happened in Fort Worth, which is in Tarrant County, which is part of Texas and part of the medical examiner system that I work with.
6:18 And this was a case that happened on September 22nd to be exact, of 2021.
6:27 Now, Fort Worth firefighters responded to a dumpster fire behind a business at about 6:15 in the morning.
6:36 Once the fire was extinguished, human body parts were found inside.
6:41 Let me tell you, first of all, that the police are not allowed to manipulate or move the body prior to our arrival.
6:52 So guess who climbs in the dumpster and guess who takes pictures of the body, and guess who moves the body around amongst the trash.
7:01 That would be the death investigator.
7:04 You can't worry about getting dirty, can't worry about smelling bad, can't worry about messing up your hair.
7:10 And don't get me wrong, I'm bougie as they get.
7:13 I mean, I get eyelash extensions, I get hair extensions, I wear my makeup to work.
7:18 I wear business casual clothing, but I also carry my rubber boots and oftentimes I am taking my high heel boots off and I'm putting my rubber boots on.
7:34 We have to be prepared for every situation and yes, as death investigators, we do climb in the dumpster, just an FYI.
7:43 I know that you never see that on TV, but that is part of what we do.
7:48 But anyway, human body parts were found inside of this dumpster and the bodies had obviously been dismembered and some body parts were missing.
8:01 Surveillance footage from a motel in Euless, Texas, which is not far down the road, and from cameras near the dumpster linked Jason Thornburgh, who was a 44-year-old electrician's apprentice, to these murders.
8:19 The victims were a man and two women, and they were identified as David Lueras, who was 42, Lauren Phillips, who was 34, and Mary Crew Mathis, who was 33.
8:34 Now Thornburgh told police that he dismembered their bodies and kept them stored in a room at the hotel in Euless before setting them on fire.
8:46 He shared the hotel room with Lueras, so he and the male shared the room, and he told police that he believed Lures needed to be sacrificed, so he cut his throat and cut him into pieces in the bathtub.
9:05 Now I know we've talked many times about deaths in hotel rooms, so how would you like to be the next one to rent that room?
9:14 I mean, think about it, that's kind of crazy.
9:17 And someone was the next person to rent that room.
9:21 I don't know the name of the hotel, don't know the room number, but yeah, think about it, kind of creepy, right?
9:29 Makes you not really want to stay in a hotel, but I can tell you this, it wasn't the Hilton.
9:36 Maybe think twice before you choose a hotel just to save money.
9:42 Just saying I'm going to put that out there.
9:44 But anyway, he cut him into pieces in the bathtub inside this hotel room that they shared together.
9:52 He kept the remains in trash bags for several days before going to get plastic bins to store them in.
10:02 You know, they probably didn't smell great.
10:05 He had them in trash bags inside this hotel room and finally put them in these storage bins, probably because of the smell, thinking that he could seal them off and it wouldn't be so bad.
10:18 But at that point, the smell is probably already kind of in the room.
10:23 It's really hard to get rid of.
10:25 And if anything seeped out of those trash bags, I can promise you, you cannot get rid of that smell.
10:32 Now he told police that he knew the women casually, and he also believed that they both needed to be sacrificed.
10:43 He slit one of their throats and put her body parts in one of the storage bins.
10:50 We got 2 victims in storage bins in the hotel room in Euless.
10:56 2 days later, the second female victim showed up at the hotel and he stabbed and strangled her and her remains were also placed in a storage bin.
11:09 That's kind of crazy to think that someone feels like these people that are acquaintance of his need to be sacrificed.
11:19 Thornburgh claimed to have an in-depth knowledge of the Bible, and he believed he was called by God to commit human sacrifices.
11:30 We've obviously got some mental issues going on now, but this guy also admitted to killing his ex-girlfriend, 36-year-old Tanya Begay in Arizona in 2017.
11:45 And Mark Jewell, who was 61 and was a former roommate of Thornburgh's.
11:53 Mark's murder supposedly happened in May of 2021.
11:58 He slit Mark Jewell's throat and then actually uncapped a gas line and lit a candle in the room that they shared.
12:09 Caused a fire.
12:10 Jewel died, and he was never really blamed for that.
12:15 There was never anything that came out of that incident, leading police to believe that Thornburgh had anything to do with it.
12:24 Now, in October of 2021, a Tarrant County judge ruled that there was reasonable cause to believe that Thornburgh had a mental illness or an intellectual disability.
12:36 I mean, yeah, there's definitely mental illness there.
12:39 Your average person does not believe that his friends need to be sacrificed and is not going to rent a hotel room and cut them up into pieces and keep them in a plastic bag for a couple of days before he moves them into a plastic storage bin.
12:55 In December of 2021, Thornburgh was indicted for the murders of the three people whose charred bodies were found in the dumpster in Fort Worth.
13:06 Now I have climbed through dumpsters.
13:09 I have pulled charred bodies out of dumpsters.
13:13 I have pulled babies out of dumpsters.
13:16 I've pulled homeless people out of dumpsters who climbed in looking for food and passed away.
13:23 In the dumpster, we have had people die in dumpsters, and then along comes a trash truck and they get dumped into the trash truck and discovered when their bodies are dumped at the landfill.
13:39 Dumpsters are interesting.
13:41 We do have to deal with them a lot and they're nasty.
13:43 I mean, I'm just going to tell you it's not a clean ever, never ever have I seen a clean dumpster.
13:50 But Thornburgh was indicted for these murders of these 3 people and despite the murders, he said that his purpose in life was to serve God and help people.
14:03 And he claimed that he wanted to be a missionary.
14:06 So there's again, obviously mental illness, obviously intellectual disability.
14:14 I don't believe he was working, I mean, living in a hotel room.
14:18 He had roommates.
14:20 There were definitely some issues.
14:22 This is not your normal functional adult male.
14:26 In February of 2022, he was indicted for the death of Jewel and faced life in prison for murder and arson for killing him.
14:38 Thornburgh though at the time, I think I remember telling y'all at the time was not accused of killing Jewel, and so he actually stood up at the funeral and spoke as a friend of his, so that would be a little but I'm sure he kind of thought, hey, if I do this, you know, they're not really going to suspect me and who knows if he's crazy, he may have forgotten he did it.
15:04 A few years went by, and court dates were rescheduled because, you know, things happen, and his trial began in November of 2024.
15:17 Now then it came out that he reported eating part of Lueras, his friend.
15:27 AndLueras, eating part of his heart before putting his remains in the plastic bin.
15:34 And he told police this, and he also claimed to have consumed some of the women's body parts and engaged in sex with the corpse of Phillips before dismembering her.
15:51 Can you say crazy?
15:53 He was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.
15:58 Now between March 3rd and 13th of 2017 is when Thornburgh killed Begay, who was his girlfriend way back then.
16:08 She was a Navajo woman from Arizona, so he's killed 5 people.
16:15 He's a serial killer.
16:17 Now he's been in trouble.
16:19 Since he's been in prison, he was caught making weapons.
16:23 Don't let this guy out.
16:25 I mean, this is one of the guys I can just see getting out on parole and breaking into somebody's house and murdering an entire family.
16:31 We've seen it happen a million times, y'all.
16:34 Lord have mercy.
16:35 It better not happen this time.
16:37 His defense attorney claimed fetal alcohol syndrome.
16:44 They claimed that his mom drank a lot and had a drug addiction during her pregnancy, and that this was very likely why Thornburgh turned out the way he did and why he believed that he was sent by God to sacrifice people and that he wanted to be a missionary.
17:03 Obviously had some screws loose.
17:06 The defense kind of blamed his mom for that.
17:09 Now they also claimed that he had a moderate traumatic brain injury from a 2002 accident.
17:18 OK, here is something you're not, you're not going to believe.
17:23 After Jason Thornburg stored his victims' remains in these bins, these plastic bins.
17:33 Which you know, we all used to put our Christmas decorations in up in our attic.
17:38 This dude cleaned them and took them back.
17:43 He took the Rubbermaid bins that his quote unquote friends were stored in back to the store where he bought them.
17:52 I mean, he cleaned them first.
17:54 I'll give him that, but he took them back to the store to get his money back.
18:00 I mean, if that's not crazy.
18:02 I don't know what is.
18:05 Now I can guarantee you that those Rubbermaid tubs did not smell normal.
18:12 When he returned them to the store, there's absolutely no way.
18:18 That they could possibly have smelled normal.
18:22 And I have a really hard time believing that a store would be able to resell those, because it's going to absorb some of that scent.
18:32 And if you've ever smelled a dead body, you know that it doesn't just go away.
18:37 You can't just air something out and then the smell is gone.
18:42 Yeah, he cleaned these things out y'all and took them back to the store.
18:47 Could you imagine going to Walmart and like trying to buy containers to put your Christmas decorations in and seeing a little bit of blood inside one of the containers or smelling a container that had had a body in it before he decided to dump it in the dumpster and burn it.
19:08 That's a crazy person right there.
19:10 I feel like store clerk should kind of be trained to recognize crazy.
19:16 I always say in the middle of the night, if someone comes into a store and buys a weapon that looks real, whether it is or not, that should trigger something in your mind that that person's probably up to no good.
19:32 Is it a store clerk's job to confront them and deny them the sale and potentially risk their life with confrontation?
19:42 No.
19:43 But certain things shouldn't be allowed to be sold at certain times, and that's just because, you know, a lot of evil comes out at night and evil is around us all the time, day and night.
19:56 I completely agree, but I feel like more people are off guard at night and people are up to no good when they're buying stuff like that.
20:07 I always thought that people that go to the grocery store and buy tons of hairspray, tons of keyboard cleaner, tons of spray paint, different colors, that it should kind of trigger something that isn't normal, something that is potentially about to happen, and Again, it's definitely not the store clerk's job to confront somebody and deny a sale because they think somebody might be up to no good, but I don't know, I've thought about that before.
20:42 I'm just like something's not right.
20:45 Who took these bins back?
20:48 Were they put back on the shelf and did someone else actually purchase them later?
20:55 Creepy.
20:56 Yeah, I can't even imagine.
20:59 And whether he had a traumatic brain injury back in 02, apparently, he had a car accident and had an injury.
21:07 Who knows?
21:07 Of course, the defense is going to claim whatever they can to try to defend him and make him look innocent.
21:14 But on December 4th of 2024, he went to the Allen B. Polotsky unit.
21:20 And he is on death row there.
21:24 Thank God there's no chance for parole.
21:28 This is not somebody that can be rehabilitated.
21:32 That story kind of creeped me out, y'all, because I can remember when I was younger before I started doing death investigation.
21:40 You always see all these crimes on TV and on television shows, and you're like, wow.
21:47 That kind of stuff happens in Chicago or in Los Angeles or in New York and it must be crazy to live there, man.
21:56 They have such bad things happening.
21:58 It's just a terrible, terrible place.
22:01 But you know what, it happens right here, and I mean, I know most of you know that, but when I was a kid, I was so naive.
22:10 I mean, I grew up in a small town and There were very little drugs and alcohol.
22:14 I mean, that I knew of.
22:15 I was probably more naive than I want to admit, but I just always thought that heinous crimes like that happened in big cities, and they do happen in big cities because of the population density, but they also happen in small cities.
22:33 A lot of them aren't televised or talked about or put on the news because they remain under investigation and the information can't be leaked or released because the police are still interviewing people, possibly to try to find the perpetrator.
22:52 It just always kind of freaked me out.
22:54 I mean, in Houston, yeah, I mean, when I worked in Houston, drive-by shootings, I mean just everything you can imagine, a hodgepodge of people from all over the world, very densely populated.
23:08 Everybody is angry because traffic sucks and, you know, no one likes their job and it was terrible, but I always thought, man, this doesn't happen in smaller towns, but you know what, some of our small towns here, we have parents who kill their children and murder suicides and homicides, people who kill their coworkers at work because they made them mad.
23:34 It happens everywhere.
23:36 It just really opened my eyes years ago, and I've been doing this for years, but it just opened my eyes to how mean and cruel people can really be and how anybody can snap, you know, you might think your coworker is normal.
23:52 We've all seen that person kind of go off the deep end, you know, they seem normal, and they seem to have their head on straight, and all of a sudden, their life changes, and they start doing weird things and you're like, what happened, you know.
24:06 So it's possible.
24:07 It's also kind of scary.
24:09 And then you got guys like this, you know, let's rent a hotel room and cut up our friends and then put them in a container and then rinse it out and take it back to Walmart and get our money back because we got to pay for our hotel room for another night, but it's just kind of crazy.
24:25 I don't know y'all.
24:26 It'll definitely open your eyes.
24:28 Y'all see it all on the news.
24:31 I feel fortunate that I get to see some of it firsthand though.
24:35 My kids definitely not grown up naive.
24:37 I think that, I mean, I think I've told y'all before, they just kind of didn't want to hear about my job.
24:42 I probably made them a little bit paranoid because I saw so many things and still see so many things that I just always want them to watch their back and not put themselves in a situation where something bad can happen and Lord knows we've all done that.
25:00 Some wonder, some of us are still here, right?
25:03 Anyway, something to think about.
25:05 So next time you're at Walmart and you're buying that Rubbermaid bin.
25:08 Give it the good sniff test before you put it in your basket, because you might not want it after all.
25:16 Oh, OK, but no, I just thought that that was interesting.
25:19 It was close to me again in Tarrant County.
25:24 This stuff happens, you know, cannibalism, mutilation, burning bodies, and there's crazy people walking amongst us down the street.
25:35 Anyway, on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful week.
25:40 Again, it's supposed to get warm, supposed to be in the 70s this weekend here.
25:44 I'm very much looking forward to that.
25:46 And again, I will be in Oklahoma all next week, filming the reality TV show that I'm going to be on.
25:54 I'm excited to let y'all know all about that and I'm going to record what I learned while I'm there and kind of what my experiences have been and all that will be available for you to watch when I return.
26:09 I don't want to say too much about it cause I've kind of been instructed not to give too much information, but it is exciting, and it will definitely be fun, and I feel like I will get an amazing chance to network with some amazing entrepreneurs, and I'm super excited about it.
26:28 I have ordered the cereal box subscription boxes; however, I have to make a change to them because I don't like the way they designed the shipping label area.
26:41 I'm trying to get them to kind of revamp that, so that the shipping labels aren't so bulky, and I just want to get it right because I'm going to order a lot of them, and I want it to be the way I want it to be.
26:56 I'm in the process of ordering all the items that are going to be in there.
27:00 Shoot me a PM or a message if you're interested again in picking up that first box.
27:06 I would love to have a group of people that would critique it and let me know what you'd like in it.
27:12 Again, it's going to be kind of death, murder, serial killer related stuff, not necessarily geared towards male or female, just geared towards those who love true crime.
27:24 And are passionate about true crime, and y'all are my peeps, so I hope you have an amazing week and be very safe.
27:33 I will talk to you next week.
27:34 Bye y'all.
27:36 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
27:40 If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcast.
27:47 This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public.
27:50 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at pushinguplilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.