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

John Allen Rubio is one of the Rio Grande Valley’s most infamous killers, scheduled for execution in November. Channel 5 News spoke exclusively with Rubio in what is his first time talking on camera. Channel 5’s Stephanie Rosales shared details of his scheduled execution:

Rubio stated that the decision of whether he is executed or spared is now up to God. He spoke exclusively for a special report set to air in May. Here’s a portion of the conversation:

Rubio: “I’ve been here since November 2003.”

John Allen Rubio is currently being held at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, north of Houston. He has spent nearly half his life—23 years—on death row. During that time, he had never spoken on camera until he agreed to sit down with Channel 5 News.

Interviewer: “John, why did you agree to talk to me?” Rubio: “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 occurred in March 2003. Investigators found 3-year-old Julissa, 1-year-old John, and 2-month-old Mary Jane dead. All the children were beheaded.

Rubio: “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 is scheduled to 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 was not yet old enough for school; the youngest was 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, no running water, and 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.

The Background of John Allen Rubio

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. 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, regulate his impulses, and distinguish between what was real and what was not.

Prenatal alcohol exposure of the kind Rubio experienced produced effects that ranged widely. 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; it was the condition he was born into.

His mother had a criminal record involving drugs. She did not hold steady work and was not a woman who maintained schedules or stable living arrangements. The household she created around her son shifted constantly. From an early age, Rubio experienced hallucinations. He heard things that no one else heard and saw things that were not visible to the people around him. These experiences were woven into his daily life from the time he was young. The adults around him did not seek help for it. There were no referrals to mental health professionals, no evaluations, no medications, and 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 folklore, but as a literal description of her role and 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 and modern medicine.

What made Rubio’s household particular was the intensity with which these beliefs were held and the degree to which they were treated as the primary lens through which events were interpreted. Rubio grew up inside that lens. Spiritual possession was a reality explained to him by the woman his family treated as the spiritual authority of the household. She taught him that the dead lingered, could enter the bodies of the living, and could be cast out by someone who knew the methods. She held that knowledge, which gave her enormous authority in Rubio’s understanding of how the world was structured.

He attended school in Brownsville and enrolled at Porter High School, joining the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program. ROTC operated on a set of rules and routines that were entirely absent from his home life, offering structure and physical discipline. From the outside, he was an ordinary young man moving through the stages of adolescence in a border city where many families struggled.

But 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, introduced him to the customers, and collected the money afterward. She also introduced him to drugs during the same years. The drug exposure and sexual exploitation ran together and reinforced each other. The substances dulled the parts of his developing mind that might have offered some resistance, while the exploitation stripped away any sense that his body or experiences were his own.

By the time he reached the end of his adolescence, he carried all of it: the prenatal damage, hallucinations, belief in possession, narcotics, exploitation, and the complete absence of any adult who had ever shown him what a stable life looked like.

Angela Camacho and the Descent into Chaos

Angela Camacho was born in 1979 in Matamoros. She grew up on the Mexican side of the border and eventually settled in Brownsville without legal documentation. Before meeting Rubio, her life had already carried its share of difficulty. She had been in an abusive relationship with the father of her first daughter, Julissa Quesada. When she left, she walked away with her young daughter and very little else. She moved into an apartment complex in Brownsville, a young woman managing an infant alone.

Around 2000, she met John Allen Rubio. They lived in the same complex, began to talk, and a relationship developed. Camacho was pregnant at the time with John Estefan Rubio. Rubio accepted both Julissa and the unborn John as his own, giving the boy his surname. Rubio seemed to offer Camacho a different kind of life—he was present and not aggressive. However, what she could not fully assess was the world she had stepped into.

Rubio used spray paint and other drugs regularly. He maintained a relationship with a man named Jose Luis Moreno, who provided money, groceries, and spray paint. The spray paint was the substance Rubio returned to most consistently, further eroding the boundary between reality and delusion. Camacho held the practical side of the household together, managing food stamp enrollment and ensuring the children were fed.

Child Protective Services (CPS) intervened at some point due to Rubio’s spray paint use in front of the children. They removed Julissa and John, placing them with Camacho’s mother. The couple completed parenting classes, Rubio submitted to drug testing and found employment, and the children were returned after three to four months. However, Rubio lost his job in December 2002 and quickly returned to substance use. In January 2003, Camacho gave birth to Mary Jane Rubio.

By the time Mary Jane was born, the household at 8th and Tyler had collapsed. The apartment had no electricity and no running water. Five people lived in a one-bedroom unit: Rubio, Camacho, Julissa, John, Mary Jane, and Rubio’s mother. On top of a missing $175 meant for rent, a formal notice arrived informing the family that Julissa’s food stamp benefits were being terminated due to a paperwork mismatch.

On March 10th, 2003, one day before the rent was due, Rubio and Camacho took Julissa to the hospital to get the necessary records to fix the food stamp issue. The hospital could not provide the records that day. They left with nothing. On the bus ride home, something shifted inside Rubio. He told Camacho that people on the bus wanted to hurt them. He believed a woman at a bus stop was trying to steal his money and that a young girl offering candy to John was poisoning him. He saw a woman make what he believed was the “devil’s sign” toward Camacho.

Back inside the apartment, Rubio performed a traditional spiritual diagnosis on Julissa using an egg and a glass of water. He concluded that someone had done something evil to her. The children had been sick with a fever for three days. At approximately 2:00 a.m. on March 11th, Rubio’s mother returned. He asked her to use her spiritual power to fight off the spirits attacking the family. She declined, telling him that the power to address the spirits was already inside him.

Rubio nailed the back door shut to keep bad spirits from entering. He then killed the family’s pet hamsters with a hammer and bleach, believing they were possessed. He began speaking about the Antichrist and a confrontation between good and evil, placing himself at the center of it as the one chosen to drive out the possessing spirits.

The Tragic Night

At some point in the early hours of March 11th, Rubio noticed Julissa near an electrical outlet. He believed the spirit of his deceased grandmother had taken full possession of Julissa’s body and was trying to use her hands to kill John. He choked Julissa until she lost consciousness. When she revived, he asked her who she was, and the voice coming from her told him that Julissa’s soul had been moved into the 2-month-old newborn, Mary Jane.

Rubio told Camacho to bring him a knife. He stabbed Julissa and then used the kitchen knife to decapitate her. He noticed her lips were still moving, which he interpreted as the spirit still trying to speak. He then told Camacho that Mary Jane was next. He choked Mary Jane, and when she revived and let out a small laugh, he interpreted it as confirmation of the spirit’s presence. He decapitated her as well.

He and Camacho then turned to John, believing he carried the same evil energy. They restrained him and killed him. Afterward, Rubio told Camacho they were going to have sex, threatening her if she refused. They had sex in the apartment surrounded by the dead children. They planned to move the bodies in a shopping cart to the city cemetery and bury them in his grandmother’s plot before fleeing to Mexico, but they never acted on the plan.

On the evening of March 11th, Rubio’s brother and a friend came to the apartment, saw the horrifying scene, and immediately flagged down a patrol car.

The Aftermath and Legal Proceedings

Detective Chris Ortiz was the first officer through the door, encountering one of the worst crime scenes the Brownsville Police Department had ever processed. Outside, Rubio surrendered to officers, stating he would rather his children be dead than possessed. Both Rubio and Camacho were arrested and charged with capital murder.

In the days following, Rubio provided a full confession detailing his belief in the possession and the actions he took to “cleanse” the children. Camacho initially corroborated the possession story but later claimed the real reason was financial desperation. She eventually pleaded guilty in 2005 to avoid the death penalty, receiving three life sentences.

Rubio’s first trial in 2003 resulted in a conviction and a death sentence. However, in 2007, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction because Camacho’s statements had been admitted without the defense having the opportunity to cross-examine her, a violation of the Sixth Amendment under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Crawford v. Washington.

A second trial took place in 2010. Despite expert testimony supporting his insanity plea due to paranoid schizophrenia, the prosecution argued his actions showed a clear understanding of right and wrong. The jury again found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

Over the next 16 years, his case moved through the appeals process. His defense team highlighted the severe mental illness he suffered from, his tragic upbringing, and alleged misconduct by the prosecuting District Attorney, Armando Villalobos, who was later convicted of corruption. Nevertheless, every court, up to the United States Supreme Court in 2026, upheld the conviction.

With the execution scheduled for November 12, 2026, Rubio’s attorneys filed a final motion arguing he is not mentally competent to be executed, citing his belief that his execution is a supernatural attack by Satan rather than a legal sentence. As of May 2026, that motion is pending, leaving his fate in the hands of the courts one last time.