Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (41 page)

Had David ever attempted to prolong Belinda’s life to save Erin? He had no blood on his body or his clothes, nothing to indicate he’d made any attempt to keep his wife breathing long enough to deliver the infant. Why was Belinda executed in the closet? Because David the planner, Siegler said, realized it was the most protected room in the house, without windows and surrounded by clothes to muffle the sound of the gunshot.

“Joe Sanders? You know what you learn from Joe Sanders? He came here from Arkansas without a subpoena and what did he tell you? ‘I smoked weed.’

“You know with all your heart that David Temple is guilty,” Siegler said.

After deliberating for two hours, the jurors left that evening without a verdict. No one appeared surprised. A decision in such a long and complicated murder case could take days—even weeks. But the next afternoon, November 15, 2007, as reporters and spectators talked in the corridor, Siegler and DeGuerin rushed back into the courtroom, and David Temple and his family were seen hurrying to their seats. In the gallery, Heather appeared frantic, painfully gaunt with black circles under her eyes and surrounded by her friends. She sat behind and not with the Temple family, as the Lucases claimed the right side of the courtroom. Before long the jury was led in.

Behind the defense table, David Temple stood with his attorneys. Later he’d say that he and his family expected a not-guilty verdict, and that they were so confident of it they’d already decided where to go to celebrate. That the verdict was so quick, little more than eight hours, made Kelly Siegler suspect the Temples were about to be disappointed.

As the verdict was read, the word
guilty
hit David harder than a physical blow. His knees buckled, and he threw his head back and looked at the ceiling and cried. Once the jury was removed, Maureen Temple collapsed on the wooden bench, her family rushing to aid her. Her husband and two other sons sobbed into their hands, as deputies moved forward to take David into custody to await sentencing. As he was led away, David Temple looked toward his family and mouthed, “Oh, shit,” with a look of utter surprise, as if to say,
This wasn’t supposed to happen.

From that point on, it would seem, there would be little more drama. The attorneys argued the following day over sentencing. A defiant Dick DeGuerin told the jurors that they’d made a terrible mistake and that his client was innocent. All over again, the defense attorney argued that Joe Sanders was the murderer, not David Temple. DeGuerin reached out to those jurors who were uncertain of the verdict, asking them to refuse any sentence but probation. Siegler, on the other hand, told the jurors not to be dissuaded, that they had done the right thing, and that David Temple was indeed guilty of murder.

The decision came quickly, as if the jurors wanted to tell the defense attorney that they had no such qualms. In the end, with the death penalty not on the table, only one sentence fit such a horrendous crime, a husband’s murder of his young pregnant wife: life in prison.

On the witness stand, giving his family’s elocution, Brian Lucas talked about Belinda, the youngest in the family, professing how much they all missed and loved her, and, looking directly at David said, “Divorce was an option.”

When Brian finished, David Temple was led away.

The courtroom slowly cleared, many languishing behind as if stunned by all that had happened. On the courthouse steps, Dick DeGuerin fumed before the cameras and reporters. “Kelly Siegler has finally done it,” he snapped. “She’s convicted an innocent man.”

Moments later, he was replaced by the Lucas family. Tom Lucas hugged his wife, and the Lucases cried. “It’s senseless to put a shotgun to my baby’s head and blow her brains out,” he told reporters. “It’s not right. I’m so glad justice has been done.”

“We never gave up hope,” Carol said.

Later, Kelly Siegler agreed, giving credit to Mark Schmidt and Brian and Tom Lucas for keeping the case alive throughout the investigation’s long drought. “Without them, it could have slipped through the cracks,” she’d say.

The verdict had taken nine years, and none of those who worked on the case took it lightly. “But we still had a dead woman and child,” says Schmidt. “David Temple was going to prison, but we had no reason to celebrate.”

T
his case is stuck in my craw and I will never give up on it. Never,” DeGuerin seethed, two months after the verdict. We were in his office in an old brick building with a creaking elevator, not far from the courthouse. The office was cramped and bustling with activity as secretaries and his partners and associates worked on cases, but DeGuerin couldn’t forget the one that got away, the case so many thought he’d win. David Temple’s conviction filled him with rage. He blamed Kelly Siegler, saying she’d played “dirty tricks,” and Tammey and Quinton Harlan for disparaging a man who had once been their friend. “They lied,” he insisted. “Absolute lies.”

He stared at me and shook his head, as if still in disbelief at the jury’s decision. “There’s just no evidence,” he contended. “Kelly Siegler tried David on emotion, not evidence. He should never have been convicted.”

Among those DeGuerin blamed, he blamed himself.

“I’ve thought about it,” the defense attorney said. “I should have rested after Kelly finished. She hadn’t proved the case. But I didn’t know she was going to ambush all my witnesses.”

Weeks earlier, Siegler and I had talked, and she’d agreed, saying DeGuerin’s tactics had backfired. “I knew once I heard his opening argument that it was a stroke of luck for our case. The jury wouldn’t believe a man having an affair, pledging love to another woman, loved his wife. When we got the Temple family on the stand, I knew the jury would see that they were lying. They’re not bad people, but they’d been covering up for David for years.”

Saying she often learned from the cases, she maintained the lesson from the Temple case was to trust juries. “We got so caught up thinking it was all circumstantial, we forgot that a jury would be able to piece it all together,” said Siegler. “We forgot that the jury would see what we did and be able to figure it out. Maybe it’s time to quit thinking we need a perfect case when we’re so sure someone is guilty.”

After pausing for a moment, Siegler went on: “I bet every day of David Temple’s life he thinks to himself,
Why did I do it?
I bet he looks back and wishes he was with Belinda, Evan and Erin, living in that house in Round Valley.”

With the case that had haunted him for nearly a decade behind him, many said the old Mark Schmidt was back. “The Temple case was a three-hundred-pound gorilla on his back for all those years, eating away at him,” says Tracy Shipley, with a satisfied grin. “The first day he walked in here after the verdict, I said, ‘How’s it feel to get that monkey off your back?’ Mark laughed, something we hadn’t seen much of in a very long time.”

At Lockwood in the homicide division, I met with Schmidt. “I’ll remember this case the rest of my life,” he said, explaining that for the first time since 1999 the three binders that made up the Temple murder book weren’t sitting on his desk, crying for attention. “I feel as if I’ve lived it.’”

That first Christmas after his former son-in-law’s conviction, Tom Lucas worked as Santa Claus at the Walmart in Nacogdoches. When I went to visit him and Carol, they invited Brenda over, and we spent much of a day talking and looking at photos of Belinda. In the twenty years I’d been writing about murders, the Lucases’ daughter was a rarity. All of us are human beings, flawed. We nearly always have enemies, or at least someone we’ve unintentionally alienated. In more than a year’s work on the Temple case, I never heard a bad word about Belinda. The only criticism came from those who said she tried too hard to please David. Along with Erin, Belinda truly was innocent blood.

All Tom and Carol had left of their daughter was their grandson. Nearly a year after his father’s conviction, Evan finally met with them. His grandparents were so delighted they took photos of the youngster, by then thirteen, showing a handsome, smiling teenager with Brenda’s mop of dark hair and Belinda’s eyes. He was a polite, well-mannered boy. Brenda hadn’t yet been reintroduced to her nephew, but she hoped that would happen soon. She thought about him often, wondering if he thought about her. She and Belinda had been so close, at times she still felt her twin was with her. One night, in a dream, Brenda saw herself in a car. When she looked over, David sat beside her, but behind the wheel was Belinda. “I didn’t know what it meant,” Brenda says. “Maybe Belinda was telling me that it was all right now.”

Debbie Berger and Cindy O’Brien, too, were waiting to talk to Evan. Debbie still had the “Evan Book” she put together after the murder, filled with tributes to Belinda from coworkers, friends, students and family. “I’ll have it when he’s ready to look at it,” she says. “I’m keeping it safe until that day.”

Many saw it as an odd twist that Heather was raising the teenager. “It’s hard on Evan,” Heather’s mother, Sandy, told me. “Everything is hard now with David gone. Thank God that Evan and Heather are so close, like two peas in a pod.”

One could only wonder what Evan would think years later, when he was old enough to understand all that happened. Would he believe his father had murdered his mother to be with Heather, the woman he’d grown up calling Mom? Or would he believe David’s family and the others who still stood behind David?

For some, it seemed, no amount of evidence would be sufficient. “I don’t believe David murdered Belinda,” his old college roommate, Reno Moore, told me. “David would have to tell me he did it before I’d believe it.”

Along with Belinda and his baby sister, Evan was an innocent victim, his life forever scarred by events over which he had no control. First he’d lost his mother and sister, then his father. David wouldn’t be eligible for parole until age sixty-nine, in 2037. By then, Evan would be forty-one.

Nine years after the murder, the house on Round Valley had changed little. I drove up and parked. I walked up and down the block, talking to the neighbors who remembered the Temples, hearing their stories. Some had testified in the trial, and most believed David was guilty.

Was it possible that someday evidence would materialize exonerating him? Juries are human beings with the foibles and limitations that entails, and, of course, they are sometimes wrong. DNA has freed many who have been wrongly convicted, and it’s now impossible to deny that tragic mistakes are made. Yet, as Kelly Siegler said, the bits and pieces of the Temple case formed a damning picture. Two pieces of evidence struck me as particularly compelling. On the surface, they seemed insignificant items: a container of soup and Belinda’s keys.

That day, Ken Temple said Belinda had gone to his house and picked up a container of Maureen’s homemade soup just before driving home. Belinda left quickly, in a hurry to check on Evan and to get ready for Bunco that evening. As she got out of the red Isuzu at the house, she would have carried her car keys and the container of soup into the house. In the crime scene photos, the soup sits on a kitchen counter. The keys? Remember, they were found dropped on the seventh step of the staircase.

What mother brings home soup for her family and doesn’t put it in the refrigerator? What mother of a toddler drops her keys on the stairs instead of putting them where the child won’t pick them up and lose or hide them? Perhaps a mother who is met at the door by a man with a shotgun, who marches her upstairs and executes her?

Why do I believe that man was David Temple?

In addition to all the other evidence—including his motive: the affair with Heather—it boils down to opportunity. From the evidence as we know it, David Temple, by his own admission, was the only one who had opportunity to murder Belinda.

In his statement, he says that Belinda arrived home and then, “while she was resting,” he took Evan to the park and the store. “While she was resting” says that he was home when she walked in the door, and that he was still there when she walked upstairs to lie down and rest. If that were the case, wouldn’t she have refrigerated the soup? Wouldn’t Belinda have put her keys on the plate where she normally kept them? That she didn’t have time to do either suggests that the attack was immediate, when she walked in the door, while David was still home.

David could have easily staged the burglary, during the hours he was home alone. Where was Evan? The child was ill and taking Motrin. It’s not a stretch to believe he could have been in bed, sleeping, while his father waited for his mother with the shotgun. When Belinda walked in the door, David may have ordered her to put the soup down and then led her upstairs. On the way, she dropped her keys on the stairs. In the closet, she crouched, turned away from him, hoping to protect the baby she carried. It was then that I believe David pulled the trigger.

If more evidence is needed, consider the cordless phone found next to her body. If Belinda had time to grab it and run to the closet, wouldn’t she have touched 911? The last call on that telephone was to the Ruggiero household, not the police. We don’t even know if Belinda was the one who brought the phone into the closet. It wasn’t found in her hand or under her but on the bloody carpet near her body. Perhaps David, staging the burglary, threw the phone into the closet, to make it look as if she were running from an intruder and trying to call for help.

Of course, it’s those photos of Belinda inside that closet that few of those involved will ever forget.

One of the hardest things about being a crime writer is that we see horrific images, terrible crime-scene photos of real murders. There’s a vast difference between make-believe violence, like that in the movies and on television, and the real thing. I’ve spent more than two decades covering real killings, but the murder of Belinda Temple is the most cold-blooded I’ve ever investigated. I won’t forget this case, and I’ll always remember the photos of Belinda alive, with her eyes sparkling and her broad engaging smile, and murdered, her face ripped apart by the force of the explosion from that shotgun shell, and her round, firm belly, with little Erin inside, cold and still.

I hope, after so many years, that Belinda and Erin are now finally at peace.