Just in: Texas to Execute John Allen Rubio. He Murdered His Daughter and Two Sons in One Night..

Just in: Texas to Execute John Allen Rubio. He Murdered His Daughter and Two Sons in One Night..Just in: Texas to Execute John Allen Rubio. He Murdered His Daughter and Two Sons in One Night..

Rubio said the decision whether he’s executed or spared is now up to God. He spoke to us exclusively for a special report we’re airing in May. Here’s a portion of our conversation: “I’ve been here since November 2003.”

John Allen Rubio is currently being held at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, north of Houston. He spent nearly half his life, 23 years, on death row. During that time, he’s never spoken on camera. He agreed to sit down and speak with Channel 5 News. “John, why did you agree to talk to me?” “Well, since this all happened, I’ve always wanted to get my side of the story out there. Nobody ever wanted to listen to me, right? Everybody was seeing me as a monster that I’m not.”

Rubio was convicted and sentenced for a crime that happened in March 2003. It’s a story Channel 5 News has followed since. This is archive video from that night. Investigators found 3-year-old Julissa, 1-year-old John, and 2-month-old Mary Jane dead. All the children were beheaded. “If you listen to the people that actually knew me, they would say that this is totally out of character for me.”

On November 12th, 2026, the state of Texas will execute John Allen Rubio by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas. He will die for the murders of Julissa Quesada, John Estefan Rubio, and Mary Jane Rubio. Julissa, John, and Mary Jane were the young ones in Rubio’s care. The oldest not yet old enough for school, the youngest two months into her life.

They lived with Rubio and their mother, Angela Camacho, in a one-bedroom apartment at the corner of 8th and Tyler streets in downtown Brownsville, Texas. The apartment had no electricity. It had no running water. The back door was nailed shut. On the night of March 10th and into the early morning hours of March 11th, 2003, Rubio killed all three of them inside that apartment.

He told police afterward that they were possessed, that his deceased grandmother’s spirit had taken hold of them, and that he had acted to drive it out. He surrendered on the street outside the building when officers arrived. His first words to the officer who approached him were that he would rather his young ones be dead than possessed.

Angela Camacho was inside the apartment when it happened. She held Julissa’s legs during part of what took place. She pleaded guilty in 2005 and is serving three life sentences. She will be eligible for parole in 2043. Rubio was convicted twice. His first conviction was thrown out by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2007 because statements from Camacho had been admitted at trial without giving his defense the right to challenge them.

He was retried in 2010 and convicted again. He was sentenced to death for the second time on July 29th, 2010. The case spent 23 years moving through every level of the American court system. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed it twice. A federal district judge issued a ruling of nearly 100 pages denying relief.

The Fifth Circuit affirmed. The United States Supreme Court denied his final appeal on January 12th, 2026. On May 1st, 2026, his attorneys filed a motion arguing he is not mentally competent to be executed. That motion is pending. If the courts find it insufficient to halt the process, there is nothing left after it. The warrant is signed, the date is set.

The community of Brownsville has been waiting since March 11th, 2003, and the District Attorney of Cameron County has personally asked to be present in the execution chamber when it is carried out. This is the complete story of John Allen Rubio and the murders of Julissa Quesada, John Estevan Rubio, and Mary Jane Rubio.

Every person, every detail, every layer of what happened and why. From the household that made him to the apartment that sealed their fate, through two trials, a corrupt prosecutor, 23 years of appeals, and the execution chamber that is waiting at the end of it. If this is the kind of documentary you come to this channel for, subscribe right now and turn on your notifications. You do not want to miss a single chapter of this one.

John Allen Rubio was born on August 12th, 1980, in Brownsville, Texas. His mother drank alcohol every day throughout her pregnancy. She did not stop when she found out she was carrying him. She continued through every trimester, drinking daily, and the alcohol passed through her bloodstream and into his developing body during the period when the brain was forming its most fundamental structures.

The damage done during that window was not the kind that showed up as a visible injury. It settled deeper than that into the architecture of how he would process the world, how he would regulate his own impulses, how his mind would distinguish between what was real and what was not, and how much stress it could absorb before it stopped functioning the way a healthy brain functions.

Prenatal alcohol exposure of the kind Rubio experienced produced effects that ranged widely depending on the degree and timing of exposure. At its more serious end, it could produce significant cognitive deficits, difficulty learning, difficulty making sound judgments, difficulty reading social situations, a weakened capacity for cause-and-effect reasoning, and a permeability between imagination and reality that left a person vulnerable to beliefs and perceptions that others would dismiss.

None of this was Rubio’s fault. None of it was chosen. It was the condition he was born into, shaped before he had drawn his first breath. His mother had a criminal record involving drugs. The specifics of her record were not unusual for the environment she operated in: border poverty, substance dependency, a life moving through the margins of Brownsville’s economy.

She did not hold steady work. She was not a woman who maintained schedules or stable living arrangements. The household she created around her son shifted constantly. Different addresses, different people present, different crises demanding attention. From an early age, Rubio experienced hallucinations. He heard things that no one else heard.

He saw things that were not visible to the people around him. These experiences did not arrive suddenly and then leave. They were woven into his daily life from the time he was young. He grew up with them the way another person grows up with a recurring headache—not as a crisis, but as a condition. Something that was simply there, part of the texture of being him.

The adults around him did not seek help for it. There were no referrals to mental health professionals, no evaluations, no medications, no school-based interventions. His grandmother was a central figure in the household and in the belief system that shaped everything Rubio was taught about how the world worked.

She was understood by the family to practice witchcraft—not as a casual expression, not as folklore, but as a literal description of her role and her power. She worked in a tradition that took seriously the existence of spirits, the possibility of possession, the reality of curses, and the capacity of the dead to reach into the affairs of the living.

In the Rio Grande Valley, these beliefs were not exotic. They existed alongside Catholic faith, alongside mainstream medicine, alongside modern daily life. Families sought out curanderas, traditional healers, to treat ailments that doctors could not address, or to manage situations that fell outside the clinical category entirely.

Rubio’s household was not unusual in holding these beliefs. What made it particular was the intensity with which they were held and the degree to which they were treated not as one option among many, but as the primary lens through which events were interpreted. Rubio grew up inside that lens. Spiritual possession was not a concept he encountered in a book or a movie.

It was a reality explained to him by the woman his family treated as the spiritual authority of the household. His grandmother taught him, through the normal process of living alongside her, that the dead did not simply disappear. They lingered. They could enter the bodies of the living. They could be identified, confronted, and cast out by someone who knew the methods for doing it.

She knew those methods. She was the person who held that knowledge in the family, and that position gave her enormous authority in Rubio’s understanding of how the world was structured. He attended school in Brownsville and eventually enrolled at Porter High School. He joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program there.

ROTC operated on a set of rules and routines that were entirely absent from his home life. It had structure. It had physical discipline. It had a schedule that did not change based on whoever was in crisis that week. For a young man whose home environment had none of those things, the program offered something real, even if its benefits were limited to the hours spent inside it. He participated.

He was not a disruptive student. He was not flagged as a danger or a problem. From the outside, he was an ordinary young man moving through the ordinary stages of adolescence in a border city where a lot of families were struggling. The outside was not the full picture. Before Rubio was old enough to hold a job or drive a car, his mother began sending him to men as a prostitute.

She arranged the encounters. She introduced him to the customers. She collected the money afterward. She treated it as a transaction, a way of generating income from what her son had to offer, in the same framework she used for every other resource available to her. She also introduced him to drugs during the same years.

She placed substances in front of him when he was still a young boy—not as a failure of judgment, but as an act of choice made by an adult in full awareness of what she was doing. A mind already compromised by prenatal alcohol exposure, already experiencing hallucinations, already being shaped by a belief system built around spiritual possession and the power of the dead—that mind was then given narcotics at an age when it had no capacity to evaluate or resist what they would do to it.

The drug exposure and the sexual exploitation ran together and reinforced each other. The substances dulled the parts of his developing mind that might have offered some resistance. The exploitation stripped away any sense that his body or his experiences were his own. The hallucinations, never treated, settled into the same interior landscape as everything else until the boundary between what was real, what was imagined, and what had been done to him was no longer easy to find.

By the time he reached the end of his adolescence, he carried all of it: the prenatal damage, the hallucinations, the belief in possession, the narcotics, the exploitation, and the complete absence of any adult who had ever shown him what a stable life looked like. He had no reference point for that.

He only had what had been given to him. He was not the only person in Brownsville carrying a past that had been shaped by forces outside his control. Across the Rio Grande, in the Mexican city of Matamoros that sat directly opposite Brownsville on the other side of the border, a young woman named Angela Camacho was growing up inside her own set of circumstances, different in their details, but alike in what they demanded of the person surviving them.

Angela Camacho was born in 1979 in Matamoros. She grew up on the Mexican side of the border and at some point crossed into the United States, eventually settling in Brownsville. She was living there without legal documentation. Before she met Rubio, her life had already carried its share of difficulty. She had been in a relationship with a man who physically abused her.

That man was the father of her first daughter, a girl named Julissa Quesada. The relationship was marked by violence, and when Camacho eventually left, she walked away with her young daughter and very little else. No stable housing, no steady income, no legal status in the country where she was trying to build a life.

No family close enough to serve as a safety net. She moved into an apartment complex in Brownsville, a young woman managing an infant alone in a city that offered very little to someone in her position. She kept to herself. She was not someone who invited attention or sought conflict.

She took care of Julissa and worked through the practical demands of survival one day at a time. Around 2000, she met John Allen Rubio. He lived in the same complex. They began to talk, and a relationship developed. Camacho was pregnant at the time, carrying the boy she and Rubio would eventually name John Estefan Rubio. The paternity of that boy was uncertain, but Rubio accepted both Julissa and the unborn John as his own from the beginning.

He gave the boy his surname and drew no distinction between the two. There was something in Rubio in those early months that seemed to offer Camacho a different kind of life than the one she had just left. He was not aggressive. He was present in a way her previous partner had never been. After a relationship defined by violence, that was not nothing.

What she could not fully assess was the world she had stepped into. Rubio’s household was not stable. His mother, who carried her own criminal history and substance abuse problems, was a constant presence. Rubio used spray paint and other drugs regularly. He also maintained a relationship with a man named Jose Luis Moreno, a male lover whose role in the household extended beyond the personal.

Moreno provided money when the family had none, brought groceries when the shelves were empty, and supplied Rubio with spray paint on a regular basis. The spray paint was not incidental. It was the substance Rubio returned to most consistently, the chemical that produced the altered perception that had become for him a routine part of daily life.

Moreno kept that supply running alongside the household’s material needs. The folk belief system governing the household was rooted in the witchcraft tradition Rubio had inherited from his grandmother. Camacho had not grown up inside it the way Rubio had, but the Rio Grande Valley carried its own overlapping traditions of faith and folk healing, and Camacho, raised in Matamoros, was not without exposure to those ideas.

Living alongside Rubio’s framework every day, its logic gradually became familiar. Camacho held the practical side of the household together. She managed the food stamp enrollment, tracked the paperwork, and made sure Julissa and John were fed. A nearby charitable organization served lunch and dinner on the days when there was nothing at home, and she took the young ones there without fail.

Despite everything surrounding them, the young ones were not going without meals. From the street, the household looked like any other poor family working to hold itself together. The young ones appeared healthy and well-nourished. Nothing visible from outside suggested what was accumulating within.

Rubio never stopped huffing spray paint. It was a regular part of his life, and it continued to erode the boundary between reality and delusion. He was not subtle about his use. Photographs existed, taken by someone in the household, that showed him with a bong in the presence of the young ones. Camacho knew. She saw it. She would say later that he only ever acted abnormally when he was using inhalants.

When he was not huffing, she said he seemed functional. Child Protective Services intervened at some point during this period. The trigger was Rubio’s spray paint use in front of the young ones. CPS removed Julissa and John from the home and placed them with Camacho’s mother while the couple worked through the requirements that had been set for them.

They attended parenting classes. Rubio submitted to drug testing and obtained employment. They demonstrated compliance with what CPS required. After three to four months, the young ones were returned. Rubio lost the job in December 2002. He went back to substance use almost immediately after. Camacho was pregnant during this period, and in January 2003, she gave birth to Mary Jane Rubio, a baby girl who was the only biological child of both Rubio and Camacho.

By the time Mary Jane was born in January 2003, the household at 8th and Tyler had moved past struggling and into collapse. The apartment had no electricity and no running water. Five people lived inside a one-bedroom unit: Rubio, Camacho, Julissa, John, the newborn Mary Jane, and Rubio’s mother, who occupied space in the apartment and rarely contributed anything toward what was owed.

The money Rubio generated through car washing and through Jose Luis Moreno was not enough to cover rent alongside the basic cost of keeping five people alive. Every week, the gap between what was needed and what was available grew wider. Rent on the apartment was due on March 11th, 2003. There was nothing set aside to pay it.

Rubio went to his brother first. He explained the situation and asked whether the family could move in temporarily—just enough time to stabilize, to find another option, to get through the immediate crisis. His brother said no. Rubio then went to his brother’s girlfriend and asked for a loan. She also said no.

The two people closest to him in terms of family geography had both turned him away, and there was nowhere else in that direction to go. Then approximately $175 in cash disappeared from the apartment. Rubio believed someone had stolen it—someone who had been in the building, someone who had come and gone and taken the money with them.

Whether it was truly stolen or simply lost in the disorganization of a household with no surfaces that were not cluttered, no routines that were consistent, the money was gone. That $175 represented what the family had been accumulating toward the rent. Its disappearance removed the last buffer they had. On top of the missing money and the approaching eviction, a formal notice arrived informing the family that Julissa’s food stamp benefits were being terminated.

The reason was a paperwork mismatch. Julissa’s Social Security number did not match her birth certificate, and the government system could not reconcile the two records. Until the discrepancy was resolved with official documentation, the benefits would stop. The food stamp program was not supplemental income for this household. It was one of the primary means by which the young ones were fed.

Losing it meant the charitable organization down the street became the only reliable source of meals. To fix the problem, the family needed official records from the hospital where Julissa had been born. On March 10th, 2003, one day before the rent was due, Rubio and Camacho rode a bus across the city to the hospital. They brought Julissa with them.

They sat and waited. When they were seen, they explained their situation in full: the notice, the mismatch, what they needed the records for. The hospital reviewed the request carefully and gave them its answer. It could not produce the records through the channels available to the family. Whatever administrative barrier was in place, the hospital could not clear it that day.

Rubio and Camacho left the hospital with nothing in their hands. No records, no resolution. The food stamp problem remained exactly as it had been when they walked in. The rent was still due the following morning. The $175 was still gone. The apartment on 8th and Tyler was still dark and waterless, and five people still needed to eat and sleep inside it.

They got back on the bus to go home. On the ride back, something shifted inside Rubio. He began to speak. He told Camacho that the people on the bus around them wanted to hurt them. Camacho looked around at the other passengers, ordinary people on an ordinary city bus at the end of an ordinary afternoon, and she saw nothing that suggested any threat.

She told him the area was fine. He insisted it was not. He pointed to a woman standing at a bus stop they passed and told Camacho that the woman was trying to steal his money. A young girl sitting nearby on the bus reached over and offered a piece of candy to John. It was a small, ordinary gesture, a child offering a sweet to another child the way children do.

Rubio pulled John back. He told Camacho the candy was poisoned. He would not let John accept it. When they got off the bus and were walking the final stretch home, a woman with dark marks on her forehead passed them on the street and made a gesture in Camacho’s direction. Rubio stopped. He identified the gesture immediately and without hesitation.

He said it was the devil’s sign, a deliberate mark directed at their household placed by someone who knew what they were doing. Camacho did not see what he saw, but she heard what he said. They walked faster. They went inside and closed the door behind them. Back inside the apartment on the evening of March 10th, 2003, Rubio did not settle.

The bus ride had accelerated something in him that was already moving, and he moved through the apartment with the focused urgency of a person who believed he was running out of time. He took an egg and swept it over Julissa’s body, a practice called limpiar con huevo, a traditional form of spiritual diagnosis used throughout the Rio Grande Valley and across Mexico.

The egg, moved over a person believed to be afflicted, was then cracked into a glass of water. The way the yolk settled in the water was read as a sign. If the yolk floated abnormally, something had been done to the person—a curse, an evil eye, a spiritual intrusion. Rubio cracked the egg and studied the glass. He told Camacho that someone had done something evil to Julissa.

The egg had confirmed it. The woman on the bus, the gesture with the dark marks, the candy offered to John—all of it formed a pattern in his mind that pointed to the same conclusion. His household was under attack. He and Camacho talked about leaving for a motel that night, getting the young ones out of the apartment, finding a safer space for the evening.

But Rubio could not find his wallet. He searched the apartment and it was gone. He concluded it had been stolen, that the same forces working against them had also taken the wallet and with it whatever money remained. Whether the wallet had truly been stolen or simply misplaced was not resolved that night. The three young ones—Julissa, John, and Mary Jane—had been sick with fever for three days.

At approximately 2:00 in the morning, Rubio’s mother returned to the apartment. Rubio asked her for her share of the rent. She told him she had no money. He then made a different request. He believed his mother was a witch, not in a figurative sense, but in the literal sense that she possessed spiritual power and had used it throughout her life.

He asked her to use that power on behalf of the household. He asked her to fight off the spirits he believed were attacking his family. She declined to do that. Instead, she told him something before she left. She told him that he already had the power to address the spirits himself. That the ability was inside him.

That he would need to use it. She left the apartment at 3:00 in the morning. Rubio stood in the dark apartment with no electricity, no running water, three feverish young ones, a woman who had given birth two months earlier, and the instruction from his mother ringing in his head. He believed the forces pressing in on the family were real.

He believed they could be confronted. He believed the power to do it was his. He went to the back door of the apartment and nailed it shut. He said, when asked later, that he did this to keep bad spirits from entering. After nailing the back door shut, Rubio turned to the family’s pet hamsters. He killed them with a hammer and bleach.

He believed the animals were possessed. That the same forces he believed had entered his household had taken hold of them as well. He did not hesitate over it. The hamsters were a threat, and he removed them the way a person removes any threat they believe to be real. With the door sealed and the animals dead, the apartment became something different in his mind.

It was no longer just a place where the family lived. It was a sealed space in which something was about to happen. Something that Rubio believed had been building for days and had finally arrived at its moment. He began speaking about the Antichrist. He spoke about a confrontation between good and evil that was not a distant or abstract idea to him, but a present and physical reality unfolding inside the walls of that one-bedroom apartment.

He placed himself at the center of it. He was not a bystander. He was the person whose role it was to act, the one chosen to confront what had entered his household and drive it out. Camacho sat inside that apartment and listened to him speak. She heard the words about the Antichrist. She watched him move through the space with the focused energy of someone who believed what he was saying completely.

She had spent years living alongside Rubio’s belief system, and she had absorbed enough of its framework to understand the logic he was operating inside, even if she did not share the full intensity of his conviction. In the days leading up to that night, she and Rubio had pulled back from the neighborhood entirely.

They stopped going out. They kept the young ones inside. They poured bleach through the apartment. They sealed it off. Rubio’s state had been building gradually over those days. Not the product of a single evening’s drug use, but something that had been accumulating and tightening with each new pressure the household faced.

The failed hospital visit, the stolen money, the approaching eviction, the notice about the food stamps. Each one had added to the weight pressing down on a mind that was already fragile and already operating inside a framework that treated spiritual attack as a literal possibility. At some point in the very early hours of March 11th, 2003, Rubio noticed Julissa.

She was near an electrical outlet, one that Rubio himself had covered with tape to keep the young ones from inserting objects into the live current. In the dim and lightless apartment, he watched her. In his account, she appeared to be pulling at the tape, working it loose with a pair of scissors. And then, in his account, she appeared to be holding the scissors out toward John, offering them, directing him toward the socket.

What another person would have seen was a young girl near a wall outlet in the middle of the night. What Rubio saw was his grandmother. The spirit of his deceased grandmother, which he believed had taken full possession of Julissa’s body, was using Julissa’s hands to try to kill John. The grandmother had entered Julissa.

She was operating Julissa’s body from the inside, and she was trying to use it to cause harm to another one of the young ones. Rubio moved toward Julissa. He shook her. He blew air forcefully into her face, a traditional method in the folk healing practice he had grown up inside for driving out a possessing spirit.

He put John back in his crib, away from whatever he believed the grandmother was trying to do to him. Then he wrapped his hands around Julissa’s throat. Rubio choked Julissa with his hands. She lost consciousness, or she stopped breathing entirely, and then she came back. She revived. When she opened her eyes and began to respond, Rubio spoke to her.

He asked her who she was. She answered him. She said she was his grandmother. He asked his grandmother what she had done with Julissa. With the real Julissa. The soul that had lived inside this body. The voice coming from Julissa told him that Julissa’s soul was no longer in Julissa’s body. It had been moved.

It was now inside Mary Jane. The grandmother’s spirit occupied Julissa, and Julissa’s displaced soul had been pressed into the two-month-old newborn across the room. Rubio quoted the words back to police in Spanish. They translated roughly as, “I am her, and she is me.” The two had become one. The bodies and the souls had been rearranged by the spirit he believed was controlling the room.

He stood in the dark apartment and accepted what he was hearing as the truth. He called out to Camacho. He told her to go to the kitchen and bring him a knife. She went. She returned with two. He stabbed Julissa in the chest. He stabbed her more than once. He turned her over and stabbed her in the back of the head.

Then he used the kitchen knife to decapitate her. The act took several minutes. When it was done, he looked at what remained and saw that her lips were still moving, still forming words, still attempting to communicate. In his framework, this meant the spirit had not yet left. The movement of her lips confirmed to him that his grandmother was still present, still trying to speak through the body.

He separated the head fully from the body and placed Julissa’s body in the kitchen sink. Camacho was in the room throughout. She held Julissa’s legs during part of what took place. She turned her face away from what she was seeing. When it was over, Rubio looked across the apartment. Mary Jane was awake. She was looking at him from where she lay.

She was awake in the dark and her eyes were open and on him. He told Camacho, “She is next.” He believed the possession was not isolated inside Julissa. He believed all three of the young ones were connected. That whatever had entered his household had taken hold of all of them and that what he had done to Julissa had to be done to Mary Jane and to John as well.

He told Camacho to go into the bathroom and stay there. He choked Mary Jane. She went still more quickly than Julissa had. Then she also revived. When she came back, she laughed. A small, soft laugh in the dark of the apartment. Rubio began to laugh with her, an instinctive response, the way a person sometimes mirrors an expression before they have time to think about it.

Then he stopped. The laughter registered in his mind not as the sound of a baby, but as confirmation that the spirit inside her was present and aware. He decapitated Mary Jane. Afterward, he carried her body to the kitchen. He poured water into the wound at her neck. He described this act to police as a cleansing, a final ritual step drawn from the spiritual tradition he had been raised inside, intended to purify what remained.

He put both bodies into trash bags. He placed the heads of both into a bucket in the kitchen. He told Camacho to come out of the bathroom and clean the carpet where Julissa had been. Camacho took one of Julissa’s dresses from the floor and used it to wipe the blood from the carpet. Then the two of them sat down together in the apartment.

The sealed, dark, lightless apartment where they had lived with three young ones, and now the young ones were in bags and in a bucket. They sat and they talked about John. John was still alive. He was in his crib. And now Rubio told Camacho that John still had evil energy, that the possession had not passed over him, that he could feel it in the boy, and that what had been done to the girls had to be done to John as well.

Rubio told Camacho that John still had evil energy. He said the boy carried the same possession that had been inside the girls. He said it had to be addressed the same way. They sat with that for a moment. Then they agreed. They went together to where John was. John was…