Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (28 page)

Neither Quinton nor Jenifer Stockdick called detectives to tell them what they’d seen.

E
leven days after her daughter’s murder, Carol called Chuck Leithner. She’d been thinking about all she’d heard and wondered, for the first time, about David’s involvement. “I want to believe it couldn’t be him, but now I’m not so sure,” Carol said. She’d read the newspapers, including details about the physical evidence that raised questions about David’s story. “Things aren’t right,” she said, confiding in the detective something she’d never told anyone before. “Belinda told me that David didn’t want kids. He didn’t want Evan at first when she got pregnant. When David found out the new baby was a girl, it only added fuel to the fire.”

In the days that followed, the investigation throttled up. Time was passing, and many felt the Temple murder investigation had cooled, so detectives started a second surge, another attempt to find the evidence they needed to make an arrest.

Since the day of the murder, David had changed parts of his original statement. At first David said that he’d taken Evan to the park in the subdivision that afternoon, but he’d later said they’d gone instead to Peckham Park, a sprawling Katy recreation area with a pond, an indoor swimming pool, and gym equipment. One afternoon, a squad of detectives and deputies descended on the park with pictures of David and his 1991 blue Chevy pickup, the one he’d driven that day. They stopped moms pushing children in strollers, joggers, walkers, children on bicycles, and lifeguards who’d left the pool at four on the eleventh, about the time David said he’d been at the park with Evan. None remembered seeing either the blue pickup truck or David Temple.

The following day, about the time of the murder, the detectives turned their attention back to the crime scene, arriving on Round Valley en masse. They stopped every car, asking drivers if they’d passed the house on the eleventh. If a driver said yes, the deputies asked if they noticed anything unusual in the neighborhood that afternoon. What they learned was that Creekstone was busy in the late afternoons. School buses circulated and mothers and fathers rushed home, many driving or walking past the Temple house to get to the communal mailbox across the street. Yet no one said they saw anything odd. They saw no unusual cars and no strangers, especially none carrying a shotgun.

Tammey Harlan called Tracy Shipley one afternoon, wanting to talk. The detective saw the petite brunette walk into the Lockwood station with Quinton towering next to her. While her husband, who steadfastly defended David, waited in a hallway, Tammey met privately with Shipley, telling her about the problems in Belinda’s marriage, including the times David called his wife and her family ugly names. Throughout the interview, Tammey appeared visibly upset. “The problems in Belinda and David’s marriage spilled over into ours,” she confessed. “I made a decision not to spend as much time with Belinda. I had to.”

“Was David physically abusive to Belinda?” Shipley asked.

“I think once he threw her against a wall during an argument,” Tammey said. But she wasn’t positive about whether she’d heard that or seen it, and when Shipley wrote up Tammey’s statement, since Tammey was so uncertain, it wasn’t included.

“David was emotionally abusive to Belinda, but in front of most people he was completely different, loving,” said Tammey.

Somehow that afternoon, Shipley revealed in the conversation that Quinton, too, had been carrying on a flirtation with Heather Scott. That disclosure quaked the Harlans’ already shaky relationship. “It was horrible,” Tammey would say later. “It almost ended our marriage.”

Along with the pain of her best friend’s murder, Tammey now had reason to question her husband’s honesty and his love. Although the flirtation had never been more than that, it was a betrayal the Harlan marriage would be lucky to survive.

More time passed without progress toward finding the murder weapon, but as they focused on David Temple, other possibilities opened up, making some people question—despite the mounting circumstantial evidence—if investigators were too focused on David Temple and not looking for other suspects.

The talk of the Creekstone neighborhood, of course, as well as much of the Katy area was Belinda Temple’s murder. Not only adults but also the children seemed consumed by it. Within days of the killing, information reached detectives that the young boys who lived directly behind the Temples might have heard something that could help establish a time of death, a fact the medical examiner had not been able to determine from Belinda’s remains. The children in question, ages six, eight and nine, were Herman, Brian, and Edward Roberts, the sons of a minister and his wife, a teacher.

The Roberts family was well liked in the neighborhood, thought of as good people. As the boys told police, they arrived home on the school bus at approximately four o’clock that Monday afternoon, after which they did a little homework. They popped a Dr. Doolittle movie rented from Hollywood Video into the den VCR and sat down to enjoy it, while their father, who’d taken pain medication, napped. During the movie they heard what all three boys described as a “boom.”

“At first I thought it was a firecracker,” Brian said. “Then a gunshot.”

When had it occurred? Only the oldest of the boys thought he remembered when in the movie he’d heard the shot, at a point where Eddie Murphy, playing the title role, walked down the street talking to a dog. That scene was twenty-seven minutes into the movie, which put the “boom” at 4:30 or later that afternoon. If that were true, David Temple was en route to or at Brookshire Brothers, and couldn’t have murdered Belinda.

Still, there were questions about the boys’ accounts. It seemed likely that all the boys had heard something, but what? And were their memories reliable enough to determine a time? They were so young.

Another factor made their accounts even more questionable, the report of a neighbor who heard and saw a truck backfire around the time the Roberts boys heard the noise. He’d even given a description of the truck to police. Instead of a gunshot, could that have been what they heard?

Other neighbors on Round Valley and the surrounding streets wondered about the time of the shot, too, speculating on why no one else heard anything. Some decided that if the shotgun blast happened between 3:55 and 4:25, when school buses travel down the street, stopping every few blocks and setting their brakes with a loud bang, no one would have paid attention. “We would all have assumed it was just a bus,” says one neighbor. “We wouldn’t even have remembered hearing anything.”

The more interesting alternate theory for detectives involved another of the Temples’ next-door neighbors.

Using information funneled to him from the Temple family, Paul Looney faxed Ted Wilson, offering up ideas for the sheriff’s department to pursue in their investigation of Belinda’s murder, not surprisingly, none of which focused on David. Later, Looney would suggest that at least some of the information came from David’s younger brother, Kevin, who worked as an investigator for an insurance company. “Someone was out there trying to be Dick Tracy,” said Looney.

The most interesting lead was that perhaps the teenager who lived directly next door to the Temples could be angry enough to have resorted to violence. The student was Joe Sanders, a thin, wiry young man who had a reputation on Katy High’s campus of being a pot smoker and a compulsive truant. There were some reasons the detectives were already looking at Sanders. The first was that Belinda had been at his house a couple of times, first to ask him to turn down loud music and the second time to let his parents know he’d cut classes so often he was in danger of being sent to an alternative school. “Belinda liked Joe Sanders. He was kind of this laid-back kid,” said Berger. “She was trying to make sure his parents knew what he was up to.”

On Round Valley, Sanders wasn’t the most popular teenager. When his parents were out of town, he’d had a party that prompted complaints. “But he was a good kid,” said a neighbor who lived a few houses away. “He watched out for the little kids, retrieved balls from the street so the little ones wouldn’t get hurt. He was never a real problem.”

When the Temples brought Sanders up with Looney, they, too, failed to describe the teenager as a serious threat, but as a student Belinda was interested in, one she was holding a mirror up to, saying that if he didn’t change, he wouldn’t succeed in life. “It was in the line of, Joe Sanders didn’t have reason to be this upset with Belinda, but we didn’t know how troubled he was,” said the attorney. “If he was troubled enough, he might have retaliated against her.”

The detectives were interested primarily because they discovered Sanders had lied about where he was during the time of the murder. When questioned by Shipley with his parents beside him, the teenager insisted he’d been in school on January 11. When the detectives checked his attendance record, however, they discovered he cut nearly all his afternoon classes. Then something else happened to shine a light on Joe Sanders.

While Belinda and Erin were being laid to rest that Friday, a report came in from the Katy Police Department about a .12-gauge shotgun found in a culvert across from Katy’s VFW hall on George Bush Drive. Leithner and his lieutenant drove to Katy P. D. and arrived at 5:50 that after noon. The weapon was an L. C. Smith double-barreled shotgun. It was rusty, as if it had been outside in the rain, and it was recovered with a brown jewelry box. On the lid were the initials
HRG
. Inside, the detectives found men’s cuff links.

Since none of the jewelry matched the description of anything David reported as stolen from the house, Leithner never took custody of the jewelry box. But he did sign for the shotgun and took it for testing for the presence of glass, either from Belinda’s broken glasses or the shattered back door, and blood and brain matter.

The .12-gauge, it was soon discovered, was registered to a Howard Robert Gullet, and after further investigation, detectives learned that Gullet was the boyfriend of Corey Reed’s mother. Reed, in turn, was one of a group of teenagers who attended Katy High School and ran around with Belinda and David Temple’s next-door neighbor, Joe Sanders. “It all looked pretty interesting,” said one of the detectives. “Like maybe David Temple wasn’t our guy and there were possibilities there.”

When interviewed, Gullet said Reed had stolen the shotgun along with the jewelry box. When Leithner learned that Gullet had a second shotgun, another .12-gauge like the first, he took that in to evidence and submitted it to the lab. Meanwhile, Leithner and Schmidt returned their focus to Sanders, and in the coming days the sixteen-year-old high-school student had questions to answer, principally: why he was lying, where he really was on January 11 and whether or not he was involved in Belinda Temple’s murder.

On the twentieth, nine days after Belinda’s murder, Mark Schmidt went to talk to Joe Sanders, at the home where he lived directly next door to the Temples on Round Valley. The detectives now knew that Sanders’s whereabouts were in question the afternoon Belinda died and that his friend Corey Reed had access to a stolen .12-gauge shotgun. By then, the detectives also knew that both of the shotguns Leithner processed from Gullet had tested negative for blood and glass, but the detectives still wondered about the boys, especially Sanders.

Schmidt sat with Sanders in his unmarked car, questioning what the teen had done and where he’d been the afternoon of Belinda’s murder. Sanders answered, but didn’t appear forthcoming. He admitted having skipped most of his afternoon classes, and said he’d spent much of the day driving around with friends. Schmidt wasn’t satisfied, and the name Joe Sanders began to be mentioned more often in connection with the Temple murder case.

On January 28, detectives sat down with the teenager again, this time writing up an official statement detailing his whereabouts on the day of Belinda’s murder. In it, Sanders said he left school at seventh period, at about two that afternoon, when Sanders said his friend Corey Reed drove him home. They picked up Sanders’s stash of pot and took off in Reed’s car smoking it, only to return about 3:30. After a snack, they called a friend named Ed, who drove over with another teenager, this one named John.

Searching for pot, they drove to yet another teenager’s house, but when Sanders and his cronies didn’t have the money to buy it, they left disappointed. On the street, Sanders argued with the other teenagers when they wouldn’t let him “ride shotgun.” Angry, Sanders walked home alone, and the other boys met him there about 4:20 to 4:30. They made up and drove to a Quick Mart to buy Ed cigarettes, and then, about 4:40 that afternoon, Sanders said his friends dropped him off at his house, where he laid down on the couch and fell asleep.

“At six my dad woke me up and said something happened at the Temples’,” Sanders said. The teenager and his father walked outside and saw the squad cars and crime-scene tape.

The boy’s statement ended: “I knew that Mrs. Temple once came to my house and told my parents that I had 131 unexplained absences [classes cut]. I didn’t appreciate Mrs. Temple telling my parents about my absences, but I was not angry about it, nor did I hold a grudge against her. I have no knowledge of anyone who would want to hurt Mrs. Temple, nor have I heard anyone talk bad about Mrs. Temple. Mrs. Temple was liked by everyone, including me.”

Yet the statement opened up as many questions as it answered. In it, Sanders also admitted that a week before the murder he’d taken one of his father’s shotguns, a .12-gauge Remington single shot, without permission, to go shooting with Reed and his other friends in the woods.

From the beginning, Sanders and his parents were cooperative. They agreed to have their home searched and turned over to Leithner two .12-gauge shotguns and shells. The detectives logged them in and submitted them for testing. At the request of the detectives, Sanders also willingly submitted to a polygraph. When the test showed signs of deception, the teenager took another, and then another. So did Sanders’s friends, including the boy who’d allegedly stolen the shotgun, Corey Reed. Over the coming weeks, Leithner brought more of Sanders’s friends in to give statements and take polygraphs. All the tests showed the boys weren’t being completely truthful. The examiner thought it might be because the boys had smoked pot or taken LSD. Since the teenagers were in special classes at Katy High School, Leithner asked one of Sanders’s teachers for help in formulating the questions. The woman broke them down, making them simpler. This time, when he retook the test, Reed passed, backing up what Sanders had told deputies about what he and his friends had done that day.