Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (40 page)

“You didn’t want a baby daughter, did you, Mr. Temple?” Siegler asked.

“That’s a lie,” DeGuerin shouted, jumping out of his seat. “I object.”

“Explain to us how it could be that you can leave the garage so fast, fast enough for a burglar to get in the house, past the dog, break the glass, get upstairs and find Belinda, shoot her in the back of the head, with her shoes and her glasses still on,” Siegler said.

“It’s not my job to explain,” David said, staring at her. “I don’t know.”

“You’re the one who says it was a burglar, Mr. Temple,” Siegler said.

As to Shaka being in the garage, David said, “It wasn’t something I dreamed up.”

“No,” Siegler responded. “It’s lied about.”

When Siegler asked why he didn’t have blood on his clothes from kneeling at his dead wife’s side, David claimed that he braced himself with a hand on Belinda’s back, and that he’d felt her neck on the right side, to see if he could find a pulse at her carotid artery.

“When you saw her like that, didn’t you grab her, hug her, and love her, and say, ‘Belinda, what happened?’” Siegler demanded, her voice dramatic and her eyes focused solidly on David. Dick DeGuerin objected, it was sustained, and David never answered.

Siegler looked at Temple skeptically, and asked why he owned shotgun shells: “You didn’t own a shotgun?” she asked.

“I don’t know exactly where the shotgun shells came from,” he said. “They were from previous use is what I said.”

David claimed there was no Mossberg .12-gauge, as Clint Stockdick described, and Siegler asked if the real discussion inside the house that day when the Temple men held their meeting was to decide what they would jointly say about David owning a shotgun.

“No,” David said.

“Where’s the Mossberg? Where is the sawed-off shotgun?” Siegler demanded.

He threw it away, David said, because the gun didn’t work, but it wasn’t a Mossberg and it wasn’t a .12-gauge.

Why was he passing messages through Quinton to Heather two days after Belinda’s murder? “Because, Mr. Temple, you were in love with Heather?”

“I’ve already stated that I was not in love with her, did not pledge my love for her to her at any stretch of the imagination, that I ever loved her, ever.”

“Ever?” Siegler asked.

“At that time,” he answered.

Siegler smiled. “But you married her?”

During a bench conference before he finished his questions for David, DeGuerin again asked the judge to allow in the information on Joe Sanders’s failed polygraphs. Again the judge ruled against him. Then the defense attorney asked his client about the alternate suspect, the teenager who’d lived next door. “What is your conclusion from these things?” DeGuerin asked, referring to Sanders having had access to two .12-gauge shotguns and reloaded double-ought buckshot.

“I would not like anybody to be falsely accused, because I know how that feels,” David said. “But that needs to be totally investigated.”

Along with David loving Belinda, there were perhaps two other lynchpins of the defense’s view on the case, one being that the glass was in the living room because when the door swung open it hit the hutch, spewing shards of glass to the left instead of straight ahead. The other was that a more reasonable suspect in the case was the teenager next door, Joe Sanders.

To testify about Sanders, DeGuerin recalled Detective Dean Holtke, who again testified that yes, two .12-gauges were found in the Sanders household along with the same size shells as the one used in the murder. After DeGuerin turned over the witness to Siegler, she pointed out that no glass or blood was found inside Sanders’s shotguns and that the reloaded shells didn’t match. She then asked Holtke to help bring two pieces of evidence into the courtroom. Minutes later, Holtke and a bailiff returned with the back door from the Round Valley house and something else, the hutch DeGuerin said had caused the dent in the lower part of the door. The weekend before his testimony, Holtke had traveled to Nacogdoches to claim it from Tom and Carol’s home. After the murder, it was one of the few things of Belinda’s David had given to her family.

As the jurors watched, with a crime scene photo displayed on the courtroom screen of the hutch in place behind the door, Holtke lined up the door and hutch as they were that day in the house. The door was raised slightly to match the thickness of a standard threshold, and then Holtke swung it open. The dent didn’t match anything on the hutch.

Looking disappointed, DeGuerin rose and approached the door, and on re-direct tried to line it up again. “It’s not even close to where the dent is,” Holtke said, stating what was obvious to everyone in the courtroom.

DeGuerin then said that maybe it was the doorstop at the top of the door that caused the glass pattern. “What scenario are we going with here?” Holtke asked.

“I don’t know,” DeGuerin snapped. “I wasn’t there.”

Then, as the detective looked up at the picture of the hutch from the crime scene, with knickknacks carefully arranged, he asked, “If there was something violent that hit this furniture, don’t you think the stuff on the shelves would have moved?”

“No, I don’t,” DeGuerin snapped. “But you’re not supposed to ask me questions.”

The defense rested, and the prosecutors called one final witness, in rebuttal.

After all that had been said about Joe Sanders, when he walked in the room and got up on the witness stand, he looked like a young, clean-cut man in his twenties, with buzz-cut dark blond hair and a crooked frown. Siegler led him through the events of the day of the murder, how he’d cut classes and spent much of the day hoping to score pot. He’d been grounded after Belinda told his parents that he’d been truant, yet in mounds of school records entered into evidence, there were no mentions of Sanders being aggressive. In fact, it would appear the young man was too laid-back, so much so, he often fell asleep in class. On the stand, he was polite, saying that he’d seen Belinda almost daily at Katy High School, “Whenever I needed help.”

When he did see her, he said, Belinda joked with him, urging him through the halls to class. “She was a very nice lady,” Sanders said. “A good teacher.”

Yet Belinda had inserted herself into his life. She told his parents he’d cut 131 classes and was in danger of being reassigned to an alternative school. Sanders’s parents took away his truck. Sanders insisted he wasn’t angry, instead he simply returned home from school over lunch, when his parents were at work, and took the truck.

As Siegler asked questions, Sanders described cooperating with detectives, repeatedly giving statements, even voluntarily talking to the grand jury. Until the grand-jury appearance, Sanders never hired an attorney. “I didn’t try to hide,” he said.

“Why did you agree to talk to the detectives?” Siegler asked.

“Because I wanted to,” he said, describing his treatment by the detectives as “good.”

“Mr. Sanders, did you have anything to do with the murder of Belinda Temple?” Siegler asked, after getting in the record that Sanders had come to the trial voluntarily from Arkansas, not under a subpoena.

“No, ma’am,” he answered.

For his first question, DeGuerin asked, “Have you been told you wouldn’t be prosecuted for your testimony?”

Incensed, Siegler objected to any insinuation that Sanders had immunity on the murder, and an argument broke out at the bench. The judge hurriedly cleared the jury from the courtroom, and the lawyers snapped at each other in the most heated exchange of the long trial, as DeGuerin said that he’d read as much in Sanders’s grand-jury testimony.

“Judge, that’s about smoking dope [not the murder],” Siegler charged back.

“That’s not true,” DeGuerin countered. “It doesn’t say anything about limiting it to smoking.”

As the attorneys waited, Judge Shaver reviewed Sanders’s grand-jury testimony, and then peered down at DeGuerin. “Yes, I have read this before, and if you continue reading, Mr. DeGuerin, it goes on where Mr. Wilson explains they are talking about marijuana.”

“But it doesn’t,” DeGuerin protested.

Appearing furious with the defense attorney, Judge Shaver concluded, “Your question is absolutely trying to mislead the jury.”

That line of questioning ended, but once the jury returned, DeGuerin shot rapid-fire questions at Sanders. Yet David’s old neighbor didn’t seem disturbed, instead admitting every offense the defense attorney charged against him. Yes, Sanders smoked pot. He had skipped 131 classes. “It did make me angry,” Sanders admitted when Belinda told his parents about his problems at school. The day Belinda died, Sanders was smoking pot with friends, and the week before, he’d been out shooting shotguns. His friends had once knocked down the Temples’ Christmas decorations, although Sanders said he’d told the other boys to put them back up.

DeGuerin went at Sanders, but on the stand, the young man never became angry, never argued. Would the jurors believe he was the real killer?

Five weeks after it began, the testimony in David Temple’s trial, nine years in the making, came to an end. Closing arguments began the morning of Wednesday, November 14, 2007. Siegler had been up the night before, considering what she would say. Crowds filled every available seat as Craig Goodhart stood to address the jurors.

“That man executed Belinda and his unborn child, a cold-blooded murder,” he said, pointing at David at the defense table. “There is no doubt about it.”

Goodhart was methodical, contending that although the evidence was circumstantial, there was evidence. Temple had motive and opportunity. The defense, he said, had tried to mislead the jury, telling them that David and Belinda had a perfect marriage, when other witnesses and the jurors’ common sense told them it wasn’t true.

Goodhart paced through the courtroom, proposing, “Did the sheriff’s department make mistakes? They probably did.” But that didn’t mean that David wasn’t guilty. Not one of the shotguns the defense pointed to, including those at the disposal of Joe Sanders, tested positive for glass, blood or brain matter. And there was no evidence against Joe Sanders. “What does your gut tell you?” Goodhart asked. “David Temple is the only human…who had motive, opportunity, and the desire to kill his wife.”

“There is more circumstantial evidence against Joe Sanders than against David Temple,” DeGuerin countered. “Do I think the evidence against Sanders is enough for a conviction? No. But there is stronger evidence against him than against David.”

As he proceeded, much of DeGuerin’s argument became a prosecution of Sanders for Belinda’s murder, as the defense attorney laid out everything from the teenager’s potential motives to what DeGuerin saw as evidence against Sanders. When he turned his attention to David, DeGuerin insisted his client couldn’t have committed the murder, because David was at the grocery store when the Roberts boys heard the “bang” the defense pegged as the sound of the gunshot that shattered Belinda Temple’s skull.

Measured yet impassioned, the defense attorney railed against Sanders, as at the defense table, David, his solid jaw locked firm, watched DeGuerin wage war.

“No one says David had a twelve-gauge shotgun anytime near the murder,” DeGuerin insisted. Clint Stockdick hunted with the Temple brothers years earlier, while David was in high school and college. And again, DeGuerin insisted that the affair with Heather was a flirtation, not a motive for murder, and that David loved Belinda.

When it came to the Temple family’s denial to the grand jury that they knew David was involved in an affair, DeGuerin asked, “How many of you would remember the exact words you used nine years ago?”

At the end of his time before the jury, DeGuerin again played the 911 tape of David’s call for help the afternoon of the murder. “Listen to his words when he describes his beautiful wife and baby, gone,” DeGuerin urged.

The courtroom once again filled with David Temple’s voice, sounding as if he was crying while he said his wife was dead. But something was different this time around. It was the fourth time the tape had been played, and at each playing, David had appeared less emotional. This time there were few tears. “The man on the tape did not murder his wife,” DeGuerin contended. “David Temple is not guilty. The state has not proved their case.”

“No matter how much you want to deceive…No one can do it perfectly,” Siegler then said. When it came to David and the Temple family, she charged, “You know they lied to you and insulted your intelligence.

“The Temple family denied everything, acted like it never happened,” she said. “Why? Because that family knows him. Because that family knows what happened.”

Throughout her argument, Siegler circled the room, walking toward the defense table, standing behind David Temple as if on cue to point at and accuse him, pointing at the Temple family in the gallery. “They are going to forget about it, and deny that he executed his wife and baby girl.”

Siegler, however, said the jurors shouldn’t do the same. Of course, she didn’t have everything she wanted to show them. “Why don’t we have the murder weapon?” she asked, then answered her own question. “Because he got rid of it.”

Pointing at Mark Schmidt, Dean Holtke, Tracy Shipley, David Rossi and Chuck Leithner in the courtroom, she said, “For nine years these people right here have been waiting for a courtroom.”

Laying out the series of events for the jury, she reminded them that while David was saying he was deeply in love with Belinda, he was making love to Heather and bringing her gifts. Just three days before the murder, David told Heather he loved her. “Do you really think he said that on Friday and a burglar broke into his house, shot Belinda on Monday, and forgot to take anything?”

In the front rows, as in opening arguments, the two families sat directly next to each other, and the tension in the courtroom felt nearly overwhelming. So much was at stake; for the Lucases, the only opportunity for closure for Belinda and Erin; for the Temples, a guilty verdict could put David in prison for most of the rest of his life.