Insane Religious Killer To Die For Butchering Children
EDINBURG — A Hidalgo County jury Thursday sentenced a Brownsville man to die for killing and beheading three young children he was raising with their mother.
John Allen Rubio, 29, kept his head down as state District Judge Noé González read the jury’s decision that Rubio remained a threat to society, intended to kill the children and showed no mitigating virtues that should spare him from death row.
He softly answered “yes” when González asked him if he knew what the verdict meant.
“I’m sorry it all had to come to this,” Rubio said in a low voice. He then thanked the jury for “giving me a chance to show what I could.”
The jury found Rubio, 29, guilty of capital murder Monday, then heard several days of penalty phase testimony before starting deliberations on his punishment. It took the panel about three hours to reach a decision.
González formally sentenced him to death by injection.
“If you want forgiveness, you’re going to have to get it from a much higher source,” he told Rubio.
González added that he’d sentenced more defendants to death than any judge in South Texas, but “had never seen a crime like this.”
“I can’t imagine anyone murdering their own children,” he said. “I can’t imagine anyone hurting children that age.”
Julissa Quesada, 3; John E. Rubio, 14 months; and Rubio’s biological daughter Mary Jane Rubio, 2 months, were killed March 11, 2003, by Rubio and the children’s mother, Angela Camacho.
The couple told police they thought the children were possessed and butchered them in an attempt to rid the demons.
Camacho, 30, is serving three life sentences.
The alternative to death row would have been a life sentence, where Rubio would have become eligible for parole after 40 years, seven of which he’s already served after a 2003 conviction in the case. That conviction was overturned on a prosecutorial error.
The murders happened before Texas law allowed the option of imposing a sentence of life without parole.
The punishment phase followed two weeks of testimony.
Prosecutors told the jury that Rubio was a cold-blooded and remorseless killer who showed no mercy to the children he was raising.
“I want you to imagine the last 10 minutes of these children’s lives, with the man that they knew as their father butchering them,” Assistant District Attorney Charles Mattingly said during Thursday’s closing statements. “He treated these children like garbage. He put them in trash bags.”
The defense asked the jury to consider Rubio’s life as infused with misery and dysfunction from the start and to show enough mercy to let him try to survive, and perhaps better himself, in prison.
Attorney Nat Perez brought tears to jurors’ eyes when he noted that none of Rubio’s family had shown up for the sentencing.
“And I’ll tell you we called them,” Perez said. “How alone can somebody be in this world?”
“He’s a child of the Valley, too,” Perez said, asking Rubio to stand up. “He’s a ‘children.’ And something went wrong. Something went terribly wrong.”
When Rubio sat down, he had tears in his eyes.
Perez declined to comment after the sentencing.
Rubio’s other attorney, Ed Stapleton, called the decision “sad.”
“His was a hard, sad life from the beginning, and it’s another factor. He was not going to have a good life regardless of the outcome, but it’s difficult,” he said.
District Attorney Armando Villalobos said he felt relief that “justice was done.”
“It’s been a stain for Cameron County having to deal with it,” he said.
Mattingly said the case was the most important he had handled.
“I think there’s a special place in hell for Mr. Rubio,” he said.
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