John Allen Rubio is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Texas on Thursday, November 12, after being convicted of unaliving three children in the family’s Brownsville apartment in 2003.
The victims were three-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E. Rubio and two-month-old Mary Jane Rubio. They were unalived and decapitated inside the apartment on March 11, 2003.
In an interview with KRGV, Rubio said he had witnessed things in the days before the incident that led him to believe someone was practising witchcraft against his family. He claimed Julissa began saying she was his grandmother, which he said disturbed him because he had previously dreamed that his grandmother had possessed the girl.
Rubio said his brother found the children’s bodies in plastic bags beside the beds the following day and called police.
Angela Camacho, Rubio’s wife, gave three different accounts of why the children were unalived. In one, she said the couple believed the children were possessed. In another, she said they could not afford to raise them. In a third, she said both financial hardship and their beliefs about possession played a role.
Prosecutors rejected Rubio’s account. Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz described it as the worst case he had encountered in his career.
Rubio was first convicted and sentenced to death in 2003. An appeals court overturned that conviction in 2007. He was retried, convicted again on August 2, 2010, and given another death sentence.
Camacho pleaded guilty to three capital charges in connection with the children’s deaths in 2005 and is serving a life sentence. She will be eligible for parole in 2043.
Speaking ahead of his scheduled execution, Rubio said: “Now that I have an execution date, I’m ready to be with my children, I’m ready to be with God. I know they know the truth; I adored my children.”