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

Thank you for joining us at 10. I’m Christine Galvan.  And I’m Javier Guerra. John Allen Rubio is one of the Valley’s most infamous killers. He’s set for execution in November. Channel 5 News spoke exclusively with Rubio. It’s the first time he has talked on camera. Channel 5’s Stephanie Rosales joins us in the studio with what he said about his scheduled execution. Stephanie.

 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 an 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 they would 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 2 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 There 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 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 3 to 4 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 [music] 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 3 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, not 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 believed 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, [clears throat] 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 2-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 in his crib through everything that had happened in the apartment around him.

 They took him out of the crib and restrained him together. By that point, both Rubio and Camacho were physically spent. The hours of what they had done had drained them, and what they did to John took the last of what they had. Camacho said afterward that they stopped at one point and rested before finishing. When it was done, they placed John’s body on the bed.

The apartment was quiet. Rubio turned to Camacho. He told her they were going to have sex. He did not present it as a choice. He told her that if she refused, he would have other men force themselves on her. She did not refuse. They had sex in the apartment where the three young ones lay dead around them. Afterward, they showered together, washing themselves clean under whatever water pressure the building’s pipes could still provide, despite having no running utilities of their own.

When they were done, they sat down and worked through what needed to happen next. The bodies could not stay where they were. They needed to be moved and buried. Rubio had a specific plan. They would find a shopping cart, load the trash bags into it, and wheel it to the city cemetery. His grandmother was buried there.

Her plot was the right place. She had been a witch, he said, and her ground carried the power to hold and contain the spirits that had been inside the young ones. Once the burial was done, they would cross the Rio Grande into Mexico and not return. They did not move. The plan sat between them and neither of them acted on it.

 The night stretched on and they remained inside the sealed apartment with the nailed back door and no electricity and no light. The two girls were in trash bags. John was on the bed. The bucket was in the kitchen. Rubio and Camacho stayed where they were through the rest of the night and through the following day, the hours passing inside an apartment that held all of it, the bodies, the bucket, the bleach smell, the silence.

On the evening of March 11th, footsteps approached the apartment door. Rubio’s brother had not been able to reach the family. He came to the door himself, accompanied by a woman who was a friend of Camacho’s. They knocked. Someone let them in. They stepped inside the apartment and saw what was there.

 Both of them turned and left within seconds. They did not stop in the hallway. They ran out of the building and onto the street. A patrol car was moving down the block. They ran toward it and flagged it down. The officers who responded to the call from Rubio’s brother on the evening of March 11th, 2003, arrived at the Imperial Apartments on 8th and Tyler and stepped into one of the worst crime scenes the Brownsville Police Department had ever processed.

Detective Chris Ortiz was the first officer through the door. He entered the one-bedroom unit and found one of the babies lying on the bed, naked and still. The body was so clean that Ortiz touched it to confirm it was real. He stood there in a filthy apartment, clothes on the floor, the smell of bleach and blood, the nailed back door, and he took in what was in front of him.

Detective Sam Lucio arrived shortly after. He described what he found in the kitchen, a significant amount of blood, signs of what had been done there. The bathroom had large pools of blood as well. A kitchen knife sat on the table. The two girls were in a trash bag. John was on the bed. Both detectives had spent years working homicides in Brownsville.

Both said afterward that nothing in their careers had come close to this scene. Years later, at public memorial events, they would still be referenced as men permanently marked by what they had walked into that night. Outside the building, John Allen Rubio was on the street. He had not run. He was standing there when officers approached him.

 He spoke before they could ask anything. “Just arrest me,” he said. “I know I did something bad, but I’d rather my children be dead than be possessed. He extended his wrists. Officers placed him in handcuffs. Angela Camacho was also taken into custody. Both were transported to separate Cameron County Jail facilities. Rubio went to the Carrizales-Rucker Detention Center in Olmito.

Camacho went to the county’s women’s facility. Both were placed in solitary cells and checked every 15 minutes to ensure they did not harm themselves. Justice of the Peace Tony Torres announced the autopsy results. Three causes of death, three names on three certificates. The bodies of Julissa Quesada, John Esteban Rubio, and Mary Jane Rubio were taken to Guerra Funeral Home in Brownsville.

A public viewing was held the following Saturday. Families from the neighborhood came. People who had seen the young ones on the street came. On Sunday, funeral services were held in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit. Pink and blue flowers were stacked in front of the building. Stuffed animals accumulated through the day.

The Brownsville Police Department opened its homicide investigation into the deaths of the three young ones at the Imperial Apartments. It was the most serious case the department had handled in living memory. At the police station on the night of March 11th, Detective Sam Lucio sat down with John Allen Rubio and recorded his statement.

Rubio did not deny what he had done. He said he had killed the young ones. He told Lucio they were possessed. He used the words witches and witchcraft. He described his grandmother’s spirit taking possession of Julissa and the exchange he believed he had with her through Julissa’s voice. He described the egg ritual from the night before, the conversation with his mother at 2:00 in the morning, the nailing of the door, the hamsters, and the events that followed.

He also told Lucio about the plan he and Camacho had made for the bodies. They had intended to use a shopping cart to carry the bags to the city cemetery and bury the young ones in his grandmother’s plot. After that, they had planned to cross into Mexico. They had not carried out the plan. Lucio noted in his documentation that the couple never claimed evil spirits had directly influenced them or compelled them to act against their will.

They said the young ones were possessed. They described a decision they made, a decision they understood themselves to have made, to address the possession by ending the lives of the three young ones. That same evening, Detective Chris Ortiz took a first statement from Camacho. Her account broadly matched Rubio’s.

She described the family’s financial situation, the bus ride home from the hospital, the candy offered to John, the egg in the water, Rubio’s mother’s late-night visit, the conversation about witchcraft, and the events that followed. Her first statement placed the killings within the same framework Rubio had described, possession, spiritual threat, and a response to it.

 In the morning of March 12th, Camacho gave a second statement. This one was to Detective Thomas Clipper, and it was different in its framing. She told Clipper she wanted to give the real reason for what had happened. She said the story she had told the night before about witchcraft and possession was not the truth.

 She said the real reason was money. The family had no money. They were about to be evicted. The food stamp benefits were being cut off. They could not support the three young ones. That, she said, was why it had happened. Both statements, Rubio’s account of possession and Camacho’s retraction in favor of financial desperation, existed in the record side by side.

Neither fully canceled the other. Camacho gave a third statement, this one recorded on video. In it, she described the suffering of the young ones in the days before the murders. She said they could not sleep at night. She said they woke up frightened. She said they could not eat properly. She spoke about the way they behaved in those final days, restless, unwell, not themselves.

 And she used a word that ran through all three of her statements in different forms, suffering. The young ones were suffering. What she and Rubio had done, she said in the third statement, was meant to end that suffering. Whether the suffering she described was physical, the product of fever, poverty, and an apartment with no heat or running water, or spiritual, as Rubio’s framework insisted, was not something the video statement resolved.

She described suffering. She described a decision. The reasons assigned to that decision shifted depending on which statement was being read. On March 12th, Brownsville Police Chief Carlos Garcia addressed the media outside the department. He said what had been discovered inside the apartment at 8th and Tyler was the most gruesome crime his department had encountered.

 He said justice had been placed in the hands of the courts, where it belonged. On March 13th, both Rubio and Camacho were brought before Judge Menton Murray for a bond hearing. They arrived in chains and were seated on opposite sides of the courtroom. Camacho kept her hair hanging forward, covering her face.

 Their court-appointed attorney, Bruce Tharp, requested DNA analysis, toxicology screening, and independent medical examinations for both defendants. He noted that one of the two was already on prescribed medication inside the jail and had not been receiving it. Judge Murray denied bail for both. Camacho was identified in the proceeding as a native of Matamoros living in the United States without legal documentation.

 Rubio had no prior criminal record. That same day, both were formally charged. Each faced three counts of capital murder, one for each of the three young ones, plus a fourth charge for killing multiple people in the same transaction. Under Texas law, capital murder carried either the death penalty or a life sentence with parole eligibility after 40 years.

 On April 17th, 2003, a grand jury formally indicted both Rubio and Camacho on those charges. In May 2003, state district judge Benjamin Yuresti granted a defense motion for separate trials. John Allen Rubio would be tried first. The most serious legal proceedings in Cameron County history had formally begun. In the months between the indictment and the first trial, Rubio’s attorneys built the foundation for an insanity defense.

The legal standard in Texas for that defense was specific. To succeed, the defense had to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that, at the time of the offense, Rubio suffered from a severe mental disease or defect that caused him not to know that his conduct was wrong. The defense team gathered records and retained expert witnesses. Dr.

 William Mark Valverde, a psychiatrist, examined Rubio in April 2003, within weeks of the arrest. He reviewed school records, psychological test results, and the videotaped confession. He evaluated Rubio in person, observing his demeanor, his speech, his responses to questions about the events of March 11th. Valverde reached a clear conclusion.

Rubio had been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. His beliefs about possession were not strategic fabrications. They were genuine psychotic delusions, fixed and immune to contradiction. At the time he acted, Valverde concluded Rubio had not known his conduct was wrong. The prosecution had its own strategy.

 It was built on the facts as recorded, the confession, the physical evidence, and the behavior Rubio had exhibited in the aftermath of the killings. Washing the bodies, wrapping them, planning an escape, having sex with Camacho while the three young ones were dead in the same apartment. These were the actions, the prosecution argued, of someone who understood consequences, someone who was trying to manage the situation, not someone lost inside a psychotic break.

 The prosecution also had access to Angela Camacho’s three statements, and they intended to use them. Camacho was a co-defendant. She had not yet been tried. She invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify at Rubio’s trial. But her statements, the two written accounts given to Detectives Ortiz and Clipper, and the videotaped third statement, were in the possession of the police, and the prosecution moved to have all three admitted as evidence.

 Rubio’s attorneys objected. The statements had been made during police interrogations. Camacho was the best positioned witness in the entire case to address Rubio’s state of mind. She had been in the room with him. Admitting her statements without allowing the defense to cross-examine her gave the jury one side of her account, untested and unchallenged.

 The objection was overruled. The trial judge admitted all three statements. Detectives read the written ones to the jury. The videotaped statement was played in the courtroom. Jury selection began in September 2003. The trial opened in October. The trial of John Allen Rubio took place in Brownsville, Cameron County, in the autumn of 2003, just blocks from the apartment where Julissa, John, and Mary Jane had died.

 The prosecution presented its case methodically. It began with the confessions, Rubio’s own words given to police on the night of his arrest, and again on video on March 13th. He had described everything. The egg ritual, the grandmother, the knives, the sequence of what he had done to each of the young ones, the plan to flee to Mexico.

His own statement was the prosecution’s most powerful piece of evidence, and they walked the jury through it in detail. The detectives followed. Ortiz described what he found when he entered the apartment, the body on the bed, the state of the rooms, the knife on the table. Lucio described the blood in the kitchen and the bathroom.

 Clipper described the statement Camacho had given him on the morning of March 12th, in which she had said the real reason was money. Camacho’s three statements were read aloud and played for the jury. Through them, the jury heard her voice describing what she had witnessed, not from the stand where she could have been questioned, but through the accounts she had given to police in the hours after her arrest.

The defense had no way to probe those accounts, no opportunity to test them or challenge them. The jury received them as they were. The defense called Dr. Valverde. He told the jury about paranoid schizophrenia. He described the documented history of hallucinations going back to Rubio’s childhood, the prenatal alcohol exposure, the decades of substance abuse, and the specific content of the psychotic delusion that had driven [clears throat] the events of March 11.

He told the jury that in his professional opinion, Rubio had not known his conduct was wrong. The jury deliberated and returned on November 7th, 2003. Guilty on all four counts of capital murder. The penalty phase followed. Before it concluded, Rubio made a statement that was unusual enough to be noted by everyone in the courtroom.

 He told the court he wanted the death penalty. He asked for it. The jury delivered it. On November 8th, 2003, Judge Robert Garza sentenced John Allen Rubio to death by lethal injection. All 12 members of the jury had voted for it. Rubio was transferred to the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, the state’s death row facility, and began serving his time there.

He had been 22 years old when the murders occurred. He was 23 when he arrived on death row. With Rubio on death row and his first appeal moving through the courts, the prosecution’s attention shifted to Angela Camacho. Camacho had been in custody since her arrest on March 11th, 2003. Her case had moved slowly because questions about her mental fitness had been raised early and required formal resolution before any trial could proceed.

 The defense argued that she was not mentally capable of understanding the charges against her or assisting in her own defense. The defense also argued that she had an intellectual disability that placed her categorically beyond the reach of the death penalty under the US Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, which had held that executing persons with intellectual disabilities violated the 8th Amendment.

 A competency hearing was held. On May 16th, 2004, the court determined that Camacho was competent to stand trial. The court also rejected the intellectual disability argument, finding that she did not meet the standard that would have exempted her from capital punishment. The prosecution announced its intention to seek the death penalty.

 Had the jury found Camacho guilty and sentenced her to death, she would have been the first woman with Mexican citizenship placed on Texas death row. The case moved toward trial. Then the parties reached a resolution. On June 29th, 2005, Angela Camacho entered a plea agreement with the prosecution.

 She pleaded guilty to three counts of capital murder. Under the terms of the agreement, the death penalty was removed from consideration. State District Judge Benjamin Uresti accepted the plea. In open court, Uresti conducted the formal proceeding. He asked the required questions. Camacho answered in Spanish. “Culpable,” she said, “guilty.

” Uresti addressed her directly before entering the sentence. “I hope that God will touch your heart and that you ask for forgiveness. Good luck to you.” He sentenced her to three concurrent life sentences with the possibility of parole after 40 years. Her attorney noted that she wanted to remain in the United States, but that upon any eventual release, she would almost certainly face deportation to Mexico.

She was transferred to the Christina Melton Crane Unit in Gatesville, Texas, where she began serving her sentence. The Brownsville police chief at the time of the plea said that justice had been served. The DA’s office noted that Camacho’s status as a person who had killed young ones would place her in a difficult position within the general prison population and that she would likely need protective isolation.

 In 2004, while Rubio sat on death row, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case called Crawford v. Washington that changed the legal framework governing out-of-court statements in criminal trials. Under the previous standard, out-of-court statements could be admitted as evidence if they carried adequate signs of reliability.

Under Crawford, that was no longer sufficient. When a statement was testimonial, made during a police interrogation, the defendant had a Sixth Amendment right to confront the person who made it. If that person was unavailable to testify, the statement could not be admitted. The ruling applied retroactively to cases still on direct appeal.

Rubio’s case was on direct appeal when Crawford was decided. His attorneys pressed the argument to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Camacho’s three statements had been made during police interrogations. She had refused to testify. Rubio had never been given any opportunity to cross-examine her. Under Crawford, admitting those statements had violated his constitutional rights.

 On September 12th, 2007, the court agreed by a vote of five to four. The majority held that Camacho, as both an accomplice and the only direct witness to Rubio’s state of mind, had occupied a uniquely powerful position in the case. Her statements had been the prosecution’s primary tool for rebutting the insanity defense, and the jury had received them without any challenge.

The error was not harmless. The four dissenting judges, led by presiding Judge Sharon Keller, disagreed. They said the jury had heard enough independent evidence to reject the insanity defense, regardless of Camacho’s statements. The majority prevailed. All four convictions were vacated. The death sentence was set aside.

Rubio had been on death row for four years. The reversal did not free Rubio. He remained at the Polunsky Unit, still charged with four counts of capital murder, while preparations for a second trial took shape. New defense attorneys Ed Stapleton and Nat C. Perez, Jr., took over the case. They spent years pulling together medical records, school records, psychiatric evaluations, and institutional documentation from Rubio’s years in custody.

As early as April 2003, within weeks of his arrest, he had been placed on antipsychotic medication. In 2004, he had been transferred to Jester 4, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s inpatient psychiatric facility, before returning to the Polunsky Unit. The records painted a picture of a man whose mental condition had required serious ongoing intervention from the earliest days of his incarceration.

The case was moved from Cameron County to Hidalgo County because the pre-trial publicity in Brownsville made selecting a neutral jury there impossible. Before the guilt phase could begin, the court first had to determine whether Rubio was mentally competent to stand trial. The defense argued his psychological condition had deteriorated to the point where he could not meaningfully participate in his own defense.

The prosecution called jail staff who described a man who communicated clearly, kept his cell orderly, and functioned within the demands of daily prison life. Psychiatric experts testified on both sides. The jury found him competent. The guilt phase opened in June 2010. The second trial of John Allen Rubio opened in a Hidalgo County courtroom in the summer of 2010, 7 years after the murders at the Imperial Apartments.

The courtroom was in Edinburg, the county seat, and the jury seated before the court had no prior connection to the original proceedings. Rubio entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The prosecution presented the same foundational evidence it had used at the first trial. The confession, the physical evidence from the crime scene, and the testimony of the detectives who had processed the apartment on March 11th, 2003.

The facts of what had occurred were not disputed by anyone in the courtroom. The question before the jury was a single, narrowly framed legal one. Had Rubio, at the moment he acted, been so severely mentally ill that he had not known his conduct was wrong? Angela Camacho took the stand at the second trial. She had already been convicted and sentenced in 2005, and with no remaining Fifth Amendment exposure of her own, she was available to testify.

 Her account of the events of March 11th broadly matched what Rubio had told police. The same sequence, the same cast of elements, with some variation in the order of events. She also testified to something she had not included in any of her earlier statements. Before March 2003, Rubio had asked her what she would do if he killed the young ones.

She had dismissed it as a joke. She testified that Rubio only ever acted abnormally when he was using inhalants. She said he had not used spray paint in the five days immediately before the murders. Whatever condition he was in on the night of March 10th and the early morning of March 11th, she said it was not the product of a recent inhalation.

The defense presented its case. Rubio’s mother testified under oath about her daily alcohol consumption during her pregnancy. She confirmed that she had used her son as a prostitute when he was 8 years old. She confirmed that she had introduced him to drugs. She said it plainly, without apparent distress, as a statement of fact. Dr.

William Mark Valverde, who had first examined Rubio in April 2003, returned to the stand. He testified again that Rubio had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, that the psychotic beliefs driving his actions were genuine, and that he had not known his conduct was wrong. Dr. Rafael Morris, a forensic psychiatrist, joined him in that assessment, adding diagnoses of substance abuse dependence and confirming the schizophrenia findings from his own independent evaluation.

 The jury received the case. The prosecution’s rebuttal rested on two tracks, expert testimony and inmate testimony. The expert was Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist from New York, whom the prosecution paid over $100,000. Welner had interviewed Rubio for 14 hours over two days in June 2010, 1 month before trial, and had reviewed police statements, trial transcripts, mental health evaluations, and institutional records from Rubio’s years in custody.

His conclusion was that Rubio had not suffered from a severe mental disease at the time of the offense. He pointed to specific behaviors inconsistent with genuine psychotic detachment. Rubio had told officers shortly after his arrest that he had considered calling the police himself, suggesting awareness of wrongdoing.

He had initially deflected blame toward Camacho. During the killings, he had told Camacho that the sex that followed was likely their last chance together. A comment that demonstrated, Welner argued, a clear understanding of the legal consequences bearing down on him. Welner also noted that Rubio’s descriptions of his delusional beliefs had evolved over the years in ways that corresponded to his growing understanding of what the insanity defense required.

The prosecution then called two inmates. Jose Luis Gutierrez testified that Rubio had told him directly he planned to fake symptoms and plead insanity. When Gutierrez told him he did not seem crazy, Rubio gestured for him to be quiet and said they didn’t know that. A second inmate, Rolando Garza, said he had overheard the same conversation.

 The prosecution also presented testimony that before his arrest, Rubio had told a friend he knew how to commit the perfect crime. Just say you were insane. Rubio did not testify. He showed almost no emotion throughout the trial. During closing arguments, he reddened visibly. When his attorney asked him to stand and face the jury, he stood but kept his eyes away from them.

On July 26th, 2010, the jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all four counts. On July 29th, Judge Noe Gonzalez asked Rubio if he had anything to say before sentencing. Rubio spoke quietly. “I’m sorry it all had to come to this. I thank the jury for giving me a chance to show what I could.” Gonzalez acknowledged Rubio’s childhood and said many people had endured terrible things.

 He said it did not change what the jury had found. “I don’t know what happened,” he said, “but I know what this jury found. I have never seen a crime like this.” Rubio was taken from the courtroom in handcuffs and returned to the Polunsky Unit. His second death sentence was on the record. After the second conviction, the appeals process began its long progression through the courts.

 On direct appeal, in October 2012, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction. The court reviewed the defense’s four points of error and rejected each one. The insanity determination stood. In October 2013, Rubio filed a state habeas petition raising broader claims, including how his attorneys had represented him and how the prosecution had conducted itself.

An evidentiary hearing was held in August 2016. During it, defense attorney Nat Perez, seated in the gallery rather than on the stand, called out that the team had provided Rubio with ineffective assistance. The judge acknowledged the moment, but found the attorneys had worked with what was available to them.

In April 2017, the habeas judge recommended the TCCA deny relief. A supplemental petition filed in 2016 was dismissed as an abuse of the writ. In September 2019, Rubio filed a federal habeas petition. Because many of its claims had not been exhausted in state court first, the federal court stayed the case and sent him back to the TCCA.

The TCCA dismissed the resulting petition as a further abuse of the writ. Rubio returned to federal court. As the federal case developed, a significant piece of background came into full view. The district attorney who had prosecuted Rubio’s second trial, Armando Villalobos, had been running a criminal operation while simultaneously seeking Rubio’s death.

Federal investigators wiretapped a sitting Cameron County district judge beginning in November 2007 and intercepted approximately 40,000 calls over 14 months. The investigation exposed a network of bribery reaching from the bench into elected office. Villalobos was convicted by a jury in February 2014 of soliciting and accepting over $100,000 in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for favorable prosecutorial decisions.

 He received 13 years in federal prison. Rubio’s habeas attorneys argued that Villalobos’ corruption had directly affected the prosecution. That he had interfered with defense funding, allowed false testimony, and pursued Rubio’s death while profiting from the same system he was supposed to operate impartially. The petition also challenged Dr.

Wellner’s trial testimony. Wellner had told the jury Rubio had not been on antipsychotic medication for the great majority of the 7 years before the retrial. Rubio’s attorneys pointed to institutional records showing continuous anti-psychotic prescriptions dating back to April 2003 and noted that those medications were discontinued on the same day Wellner arrived at the prison to evaluate him.

They also challenged the testimony of prosecution expert AP Merillat alleging he had misled the jury about how dangerous inmates were managed within the Texas prison system as he had allegedly done in other capital cases. In April 2024, US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. denied all habeas relief in a ruling of nearly 100 pages describing the crime as especially harrowing.

 He denied the certificate of appealability on the same day. Rubio’s attorneys appealed to the Fifth Circuit. In May 2025, a three-judge panel denied the certificate of appealability. The court addressed each claim. On Wellner’s testimony, it found the evidence of falsity insufficient. Rubio’s own records showed periods where he had refused medication or was taking only an antidepressant rather than an anti-psychotic.

On the ineffective assistance claims, the court applied the deferential standard required under Strickland v. Washington and found no basis for relief. The attorneys had retained multiple experts, investigated the relevant medical theories, and made professional judgments under difficult conditions. With the Fifth Circuit closed, Rubio’s attorneys filed a petition for certiorari with the United States Supreme Court.

Jeremy Sheepers of the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Dallas and Lee Kovarsky of Phillips Black prepared and submitted the petition centering it on the Wellner testimony issue and whether the lower courts had applied the correct legal standard in reviewing it. On December 11th, 2025, the Supreme Court reviewed the petition.

On January 12th, 2026, it denied certiorari without explanation. Every court that had reviewed John Allen Rubio’s conviction, state and federal, trial level through the Supreme Court, had upheld it. On the morning of January 13th, 2026, 1 day after the Supreme Court denied certiorari, Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz filed a motion in the District Court requesting that an execution date be set for John Allen Rubio.

Saenz had not been the District Attorney during either of Rubio’s trials. He had inherited the post-conviction process and had pressed the case through every stage it moved through on his watch. He had attended hearings. He had issued statements after each court ruling. He had described Rubio’s legal efforts consistently as manipulation of the system, as deliberate delay tactics designed to avoid accountability rather than legitimate pursuit of justice.

 On February 26th, 2026, a judge signed the warrant. The execution of John Allen Rubio was scheduled for November 12th, 2026, at the Huntsville Unit, where Texas carried out its executions by lethal injection. Saenz confirmed the date publicly. He said he had formally requested to be allowed to witness the execution.

 “I want to come back and tell the community it’s done. Justice has been served.” He said Brownsville could not fully heal until the sentence was carried out. He said that Rubio was still eating three meals a day and still receiving medical care, and that after more than 20 years, the community found this unacceptable.

In December 2025, weeks before the execution date was set, Brownsville had held its 22nd annual memorial ceremony at Tres Angeles Park, the small public space that stood on the corner of 8th and Tyler streets where the Imperial apartments used to be. The building had been demolished in 2016. In December 2017, the city had planted three trees on the cleared ground, one for each of the three young ones who had died inside it.

Each tree was decorated with a single ribbon. At the 2025 ceremony, local leaders and long-time residents gathered around those three trees in the fading afternoon. Jose Serna, who had lived near 8th and Tyler for 50 years, attended as he did every year. He said he had seen the family in the days before the murders, the parents coming and going, the young ones on the street outside, and had noticed nothing.

He said the memory of coming back from HEB to find the block sealed off and news cameras on the rooftops had never left him. Sanz spoke at the ceremony. He said that even the most experienced officers who had entered the apartment that night in 2003 were still carrying what they had seen inside it. He said the community was still waiting for what justice was supposed to feel like when it arrived.

With the execution date now on the calendar, Rubio’s defense team had until April 30th, 2026 to file a challenge on the grounds of mental competency to be executed. On May 1st, 2026, 2 hours before the April 30th deadline, Rubio’s attorneys filed a 44-page motion arguing he was not mentally competent to be executed.

The legal basis was an a 1986 Supreme Court ruling in Ford v. Wainwright, which held that the 8th Amendment prohibited executing a person who could not rationally understand why they were being put to death. The motion described Rubio’s current mental state in specific terms. He believed God and Satan were actively battling for control of the world.

He believed his execution was Satan’s attempt to destroy him for aligning with God. Not a legal sentence for three murders, but a supernatural attack on him personally. Two independent psychiatric experts had evaluated him and found a substantial showing of incompetency, the threshold required to trigger further court-ordered evaluation.

Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz responded within hours. He called the motion a tactical delay. He said Rubio knew exactly what he had done and was counting the days to November. The state had 60 days to formally respond. A hearing would be scheduled for any time after July 1st, 2026. That same week, Channel 5 News announced a documentary, Echoes from Brownsville, The Rubio Murders, featuring a first on-camera interview Rubio had ever given, recorded at the Polunsky Unit where he had lived since November 2003.

He said he had always wanted to tell his side of the story. He said everyone saw him as a monster. He said the young ones had been possessed and he had been the one to act on it. He said, “If God can spare me this, that would be great. I don’t want to bring sadness to my family members, those few that love me and care about me.

” At Tres Angeles Park, on the corner of 8th and Tyler Streets, three trees stood where the Imperial Apartments once stood. Three ribbons, three names, Julissa Quesada, John Estefan Rubio, Mary Jane Rubio. The hearing had not been scheduled. The state had not yet responded. But every court that had examined this case, from the trial courts of Cameron and Hidalgo Counties, all the way to the United States Supreme Court, had reached the same conclusion.

 The competency motion was the last mechanism available to Rubio’s attorneys. The legal road that had stretched across 23 years had narrowed to a single remaining question. And if the courts found the motion insufficient to halt the process, there was nothing left after it. If everything proceeds as the state of Texas intends, John Allen Rubio will be strapped to a gurney at the Huntsville unit on November 12th, 2026, and executed by lethal injection.

 23 years after he stood on the street outside the Imperial Apartments, extended his wrists, and told the first officer who reached him that he would rather his young ones be dead than possessed.