Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (3 page)

In fact, at one point David’s revenge apparently became even harsher. One night Hillary’s family discovered her pet rabbits were missing. Later, a classmate told her that David Temple had wrung their necks.

The Katy High School football team was known as the army of red, for Katy’s red and white school colors. In the stands, fans painted their faces red and white, some checked or with stripes, and they held out fingers, claiming they were number one. “There’s so much tradition there, but before the mid-eighties the team was really dormant,” says Dexter Clay, who wrote
KatyNation
, a book on the history of the team. “The program started in 1939, with six-man football, by recruiting kids off tractors. Their first winning season was in 1959, and then they were dormant again until the mid-eighties, when Mike Johnston took over as coach.” One of the players who’d lead Johnston’s charge was David Temple.

“People don’t understand how intense football is and how violent it is. And David was brutal on the field. You got scared when you had to go up against David, even in practice,” says Fleener, who describes David at the time as like a big brother to him. “David was so tough, he’d go through two or three helmets a year. He literally wore them out.”

By high school, David approached his adult height of five feet, eleven inches, and weighed nearly 210 pounds. Before games, he and his teammates got “into the zone,” concentrating on the task ahead. Some called it “skull time,” because it meant clearing their minds of everything but the game. Among the most intense players, some would remember how David paid attention to strategy, coaching the others on how to win. At times, he put on his pads and rammed into the lockers, building a formidable bravado. When the team walked out on the field, “David was ready,” says Fleener.

As the middle linebacker, David wore a red jersey with his number, 83, in white. He led the defense, and it was his job to shut down the other team’s attack, to call the plays and do whatever possible to stop the opposing players from advancing the football. “Middle linebackers have to be aggressive,” says Mike Johnston, Katy High School’s head football coach during those years. “David was one of the most intense players I ever coached. On the field, he was one of the meanest. The other team’s offense didn’t like to see David bearing down on them.”

One of the girls on Katy’s sidelines during those years would grow up to have more than a little notoriety of her own. Slightly built, with long blond hair, a pretty face and a scratchy voice, Renée Zellweger worked her pom-poms and led the cheers for David and his teammates. Considered something of a “nerd” in high school, Zellweger would later become an Academy Award-winning actress, performing in movies such as
Cinderella Man, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Cold Mountain,
and the musical
Chicago
. But at the time, fewer students were aware of Zellweger than of David Temple. Another of David’s coaches, Ken Bruno, would say what he saw in the young football player was someone who was “determined and calculating. One strong son-of-a-gun.”

In many ways, David was the same off the field. Always tight with his teammates, he had close friends. He could be charismatic and caring. When Mike Fleener broke his arm playing football, David went with him to the hospital and stayed throughout the surgery, late into the night. “David was the last person I saw before they put me out, and the first one there when I woke up,” Fleener says.

Yet the words
rude
,
mean
and
intimidating
were used more often in connection with David, not by those in his inner circle, the upper echelon of the school’s jocks, but by the average kids, the ones not held in high enough athletic esteem to earn his respect. “David Temple was always ready for a fight, and he acted like he thought he was better than the other kids. He was a bully,” says one classmate. “He treated ninety percent of us like we were a step down from him, ignoring us unless he singled us out for some kind of abuse.”

“Kids walked on pins and needles around David because he had a bad temper, and they were never sure what would set him off,” says a high-school friend. “Everyone, even his friends, knew they didn’t want to be on the receiving side when David got pissed.”

Always meticulous about planning events, the way he dressed and setting strategy on the football field, when it came to pickup games or any activity, David pulled the particulars together, setting up the teams and making all the arrangements. Even as a teenager, he seemed obsessed with being in control. Sometimes, when his friends didn’t go along, David became peeved. “He’d call us momma’s boys when we didn’t do what he wanted,” says a friend. “David ridiculed us. We didn’t say anything. Most of the time, we just let it go, hoping he’d stop.”

Still, when he was playing so well on the football field, others were willing to cut David a considerable amount of slack. “Katy is all about football. It’s all Katy is,” says one resident. “Players like to talk about winning with heart and seeing through the eye of the Tiger.”

There was little doubt that David had more than his share of courage. Once, while running the bleachers, he slipped and sliced his leg open, cutting it nearly to the bone. One teammate looked at the wound and felt like throwing up, it was so bloody and angry-looking. To his astonishment, David laughed. Although taken aback, his friend wasn’t completely surprised; he’d once seen David fall on a piece of plywood with nails hammered through it. That day David suffered puncture wounds but never shed a tear.

In the stands on Friday nights, David’s family cheered him on. Despite their deep roots, “the Temples were just another family in the rice fields of Katy, Texas,” says one resident. “What they had going for them was a son who was a star football player.”

Off the field, David talked confidently of the future. He speculated about college at a big-name university, followed by a career in the pros. “David was very physical, built for the game,” says the team’s defensive coach, Don Clayton. “And he was aggressive. That’s what you want to see. He understood that getting hit was part of the game.”

“Getting hit by David, even at practice, was like getting hit by a freight train,” says Tommy Raglin, one of David’s close friends and a teammate. “On the field, we sometimes used David as a kicker. He was good, and it faked the other team out. They didn’t guess that a kicker would be able to tackle and run the ball.”

Then disaster. In his sophomore year during the first scrimmage, David, who’d been elevated to the varsity team, hurt his knee, so badly he required not one surgery but two. It could have been a football-ending injury. David was out the entire season. But he was determined not to end his career on the field. “I’ve never seen anybody work harder at rehab than David,” says Clayton. “He was in the gym constantly, working that knee. He worked his upper body and developed incredible strength.”

Once the knee heeled, David came back tougher than ever. Friends say that he could bench-press 430 pounds, and stories circulated on the high-school campus. The gossip suggested that David wasn’t just working in the gym to build those muscles. Some said he’d begun taking anabolic steroids.

During the eighties, the drugs spread from professional sports onto high school and college campuses. The word
anabolic
is from the Greek, translating as “to build up,” and the drugs increase the production of proteins and thwart the breakdown of muscle. Although outlawed in all major sports, they can give athletes a competitive edge. At times, they also have psychological or emotional side effects, including angry outbursts, called roid rage. By increasing testosterone levels in the body, it’s thought that aggression is accentuated and, in extreme cases, paranoia and anger.

Coach Clayton maintains that he saw no evidence that David was on steroids, and that he viewed the muscle building David did his senior year as simply the well-earned product of hard work. “We’d see the players walk around after showers, and I never saw David’s back break out or any of the other telltale signs of steroid use.”

Yet one of David’s fellow players who admitted using the drugs during his junior and senior year at Katy High School was told by his supplier the names of others who were customers. “David was huge. He bulked way up and could out weight-lift everybody else on the team. The guy who sold me steroids said he was selling to David,” says the Katy player. “I never asked David about it, but I also never questioned that it was true.”

When David made his return, he dominated on the field and became even more feared on the campus. “The football team had a sense of owning the school,” says Fleener. “We had our own table at lunch, and it always seemed like we could get away with things. The football players and the cheerleaders were on the A-list. David was cocky, but so was the whole team. Since David was a star, he was cockier than the rest of us.”

Players would remember seeing David get into heated arguments with the coaches, especially Mike Johnston. When David thought he or any of his fellow defensive players was being unfairly treated, he became insistent and his size made him frightening. One player recalled how David screamed at the coach, his face inches from Johnston’s. Both of them were furious. “David crossed a line and possibly I did, too,” Johnston would say years later. “When I’d see him get out of control, I’d intervene. Sometimes I talked to him about keeping the aggression on the field, where it belonged. David could be explosive, and he didn’t always know how to turn it off.”

By then, David Temple had a bad reputation at Katy High School. “It was common knowledge among the teachers that David was a problem at school,” says one of his teachers. “He tried to intimidate the teachers, and sometimes he succeeded. He was a big kid, and a lot of people were afraid of him.”

A close friend would say that Maureen and Kenny Temple weren’t heard to raise their voices to David, and that they were perpetually patient and soft-spoken with him. But then David was a different kind of kid than his brothers. “Wound tighter,” the friend maintains. “He needed constant stimulation.”

One Katy High teacher would say, “We got really tired of David Temple’s mother coming up to school to get him out of trouble.”

It was sometime about then that an incident was whispered about, one some of David’s classmates gossiped about but never knew if it was true. Years later, it would take on a frightening forbearing.

At the time, Cindi Thompson dated David’s older brother, Darren. They’d been together for a year or more, and their relationship would take her through high school. She always enjoyed the entire Temple family, and found David to be fun. But she’d heard rumors in school that he was getting into trouble. That fall, Cindi says there’d been turmoil in the Temple family. Ken Temple was out of work, and David worsened the situation by getting into trouble at school.

One night, Darren showed up at Thompson’s house, shaking and upset. He said that David and their mother had been arguing about David’s behavior. “Darren said David got disrespectful to Maureen, and then Darren said that he stepped in between them, ordering David to stop talking to his mother that way,” Cindi says. From that point on, Darren said David turned his anger on him. The argument between the brothers escalated, and David grabbed a shotgun and held it in Darren’s face, backing him into a corner. Darren told Cindi that he’d had to beg his brother for his life, and their mother begged, too, pleading with David to put the shotgun down.

“Darren said David’s whole demeanor changed,” Cindi says. “His eyes got big and he stared at them with a blank look. Finally, David put the shotgun down and left the room.”

As Darren told her about what had just transpired, Cindi said she was shocked. “I’d never seen Darren like this before. He was angry and hurt,” she says. “He’d cry, then he’d be angry again.”

That evening, Cindi’s father flashed the porch lights, signaling her to come inside. When she did, she told her dad what Darren had just described. “And I never forgot,” Cindi said. Yet, looking back, she didn’t find the episode completely shocking. “It was David being David.”

By his junior year, David Temple was garnering interest from colleges watching his performance on the football field. “He had a collection of letters from all the big-name schools,” says a friend. “Oklahoma, Nebraska, the University of Texas. David had so many, he made a collage and pasted them onto his bedroom wall.”

On the Katy High campus, as well, David Temple’s legend grew. The Rebels were born that year as part of an intramural volleyball game. David and his friends decided they needed a name for their team. They chose the Rebels because of a popular song at the time, British rocker Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” with lyrics that depict an insatiable girl who screams, “More, more, more.” In the song, the lyrics say the man would “sell his soul” to have the girl he calls his “little angel.”

“One of the guys had a rebel flag, and we liked the lyrics,” says one of the group. The cheerleaders and the boys’ girlfriends became known as the Rebel Women.

“There were a lot of people jealous. We were the athletes,” says Tommy Raglin, one of David’s close friends. “That was just the way it was. A lot of people in high school said David was crazy and fearless. It was just boys being boys.”

Teenage years are a time when many feel indestructible, but David, as he did with so much in life, took his boldness to the extreme. Once he dove from a high dive trying to hit the shallow end of a pool. Another time, when the team was staying at a hotel, David jumped into a swimming pool from a second-floor balcony. And whenever the possibility of a fight opened up, David appeared ready. “Everyone wanted to fight David because he was huge,” says Raglin. David’s celebrity grew, based, at times, on no more than gossip, like the time rumors circulated that he’d beaten up three guys at a mall. “It never happened,” says Raglin. “When David heard the story, he laughed.”