Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (16 page)

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t the same time David cried into the telephone and listened to Shannon Tuttoilmondo-Buell urge him to give CPR to his dead wife to save his unborn child, in the side yard, Mike Ruggiero wrestled with the gate, fighting to keep Shaka from breaking through, fearing for his own safety.

Other neighbors began to notice that something odd was going on. Natalie Scott drove by, wondering why Mike was at the Temples’ gate. She stopped, lowered the window and shouted, “What’s going on?”

“Someone broke in,” Mike said. “I’m trying to keep Shaka from getting out.”

“Where are Belinda and David?” Scott asked, instantly concerned. “Are they okay?”

“I don’t know about Belinda, but David’s inside the house,” Ruggiero answered. “Evan’s at my house.”

When Ruggiero told her Peggy was calling 911, Natalie continued on to her own home, a house away, to see if she could find a leash to help Mike control Shaka.

A few minutes later, Peggy ran across the street, wanting to help her husband. She’d left Evan coloring with their twelve-year-old son, and she had a cordless phone in her hand. She’d just hung up with 911, reporting a burglary at 22502 Round Valley Drive.

“Call David’s house and see if he answers,” Mike instructed his wife. Peggy did and the phone rang, but no one picked up. Since Shaka had always been better with her than with Mike, Peggy offered to take over the gate. Mike agreed, and Peggy held the gate and began talking to Shaka, attempting to calm the dog. It worked, and Mike ran around the front of the house to see if he could see David. Just then, a squad car pulled up in front of the Temples’ redbrick colonial. Sam Gonsoulin, a sergeant with Precinct Five, the local constable’s office, got out of his squad car with his revolver in his hand. Seconds later, another squad car arrived, this one with Deputy Kathleen Johnson inside. She walked briskly from the car to join Gonsoulin. They’d been on a call five minutes away and the time Johnson recorded as their arrival was 5:49, eleven minutes after the 911 operator answered David’s call. The initial report was a burglary, but on the brief drive to the house, Gonsoulin had been notified that the incident had been upgraded to a shooting. According to the dispatcher, someone inside the house had a gunshot wound to the head.

“Who’s inside?” Gonsoulin asked Ruggiero.

“The guy who lives here, David Temple. He’s a big guy, a football coach,” Ruggiero explained, then giving more details, including the broken glass in the door.

Ruggiero shadowed Gonsoulin and Johnson as they made their way around the house to where Peggy held the gate. When they told her to, Peggy let go and stepped back, and Gonsoulin and Johnson approached. Almost as a reflex, they slammed it shut as Shaka once again charged the gate, baring his teeth.

“A chow,” Johnson said, knowing the breed to be fierce. Yet she and Gonsoulin had been told someone inside the house was injured, and they knew that they had to move quickly. Shaka snarled and barked, protecting his territory from the intruders, as they discussed what to do. All the while, the dog pummeled himself against the gate, the latch so loose the deputies pushed to hold it shut.

Shouting above the shrill barking of the dog, Johnson and Gonsoulin discussed alternatives. Quickly they agreed they had no other options. Someone was injured, and there might be an intruder. If the chow wouldn’t let them pass, they had to shoot it. Gonsoulin gave her the nod and Johnson raised her gun, preparing to enter the yard. If the dog attacked, Johnson would shoot the chow in self-defense. Then, as the gate opened, a large, muscular man in a yellow T-shirt and black shorts opened the back door with the broken glass and walked out of the house.

“That’s David,” Ruggiero said. “He lives there.”

“Secure your dog,” Gonsoulin shouted.

As ordered, David called the dog, then grabbed Shaka’s collar in a thick hand and walked it to the garage, opened the door and released it inside, closing the door after it. With the chow finally secured, Johnson and Gonsoulin entered the backyard.

The first thing David said was, “My wife’s dead.”

With that he hung his head, as if deeply troubled.

“Where is she?” the sergeant asked.

“Upstairs,” David said, explaining that Belinda’s body was in the master bedroom’s closet. Gonsoulin instructed him to wait with Deputy Johnson while he went inside. For the next few minutes Johnson stood on the patio outside the back door with David Temple, waiting for Gonsoulin to return. Later, she’d say what struck her as odd was something Gonsoulin would also notice: that David Temple didn’t look as upset as she would have expected. His wife was dead, but Johnson didn’t see any tears in David’s eyes.

An ambulance arrived as Sergeant Gonsoulin exited the back door. Dispatch had told those on board that there was an injured pregnant woman, and paramedic Maria Meijida and her fellow EMT rushed from the ambulance loaded with gear, but Gonsoulin stopped them before they reached the door. Meijida listened as the officer explained the situation. There was a pregnant woman inside, apparently deceased. They didn’t yet know what had happened to her, and Gonsoulin instructed that only one of the medics could go inside. Meijida volunteered, and Gonsoulin ordered her to put her hands behind her back. As they entered, Gonsoulin put his hand on her shoulder and led her to the right, through the kitchen, to the front of the house, and upstairs.

On the second floor, they walked past the nursery Belinda had so lovingly decorated, Evan’s room with his name on the door, and the bathroom with the lively jungle decorations. They continued into the master bedroom, with Evan’s truck pillow and the quilt on the bed, past the dresser and into the master bath, until they stood at the open closet door.

“Don’t touch anything,” Gonsoulin cautioned. “And be careful where you walk.”

On the right, inside the closet’s sliding door, lay what remained of Belinda Lucas Temple, on her stomach, turned slightly to the side, just enough so the sergeant and the paramedic could see she was well into a pregnancy. Belinda’s left hand was crooked awkwardly beside her, the top of her head beneath a low-hanging rack of slacks and blue jeans, in a corner next to a rack filled with tennis shoes, flip-flops and boots. Her right arm was hidden from view beneath her.

There was no need for Meijida to bend down to take Belinda’s pulse, no longer any chance that either she or little Erin could be saved. Brain matter covered the floor next to Belinda’s head and her left hand, and Meijida could see that the blood had already begun to congeal. Unborn babies had been known to survive up to half an hour inside a dead mother’s womb, but Meijida realized from the condition of the body and blood that more time than that had elapsed between the 911 call and her arrival on the scene.

Belinda Temple and her unborn child were dead.

Gonsoulin and the paramedic stood at the closet only long enough for Meijida to be certain Belinda and Erin were beyond hope. Then the would-be rescuers retraced their steps, down the stairs, to the door and out to the backyard. Sadness surrounded them as they talked, and Meijida asked Gonsoulin if the dead woman’s husband was on the scene. He nodded at David Temple sitting on a bench. As the others had before her, Meijida assessed the bulky young man with the clear blue eyes and didn’t see a single tear.

As Meijida left, Deputy Johnson strung yellow tape across the front of the Temples’ house. Once that was done, she took her post, guarding the door. Sam Gonsoulin did the same at the back door. He’d already asked dispatch to notify Harris County Homicide that detectives would be needed at the Temple house, ASAP.

About that time, 6
P.M
., down the block on Round Valley, Barbara Watt was cooking dinner when her children ran in from playing to tell her that there were police at the Temple house. At first she didn’t believe them, but they all walked outside and Barbara saw the yellow tape and the squad cars. Natalie Scott was also on the street. She watched the ambulance arrive and then leave without taking anyone. Natalie thought about what that meant. She saw David in the backyard. She knew Evan was at the Ruggieros’ house. “That left Belinda unaccounted for,” says Scott. “I knew it had to be Belinda inside the house, and that the ambulance left without her…that wasn’t good news.”

The call came into the Harris County Sheriff’s Office homicide division on Lockwood Drive at 5:50. Precinct Five constables were on the scene of a suspicious death in a quiet neighborhood off I-10, near Katy. Which of the stable of detectives was sent out to a scene was the luck of the draw, influenced by what time a call came in and who was on duty. On the night Belinda Temple died, the evening shift supervisor sized up his roster of detectives and chose two who were in the office, Chuck Leithner and his partner, Mark Schmidt. They quickly left for the scene in individual cars.

Minutes later, another call went out, this one to Dean Holtke, a crime-scene investigator who lived in the Katy area. Leithner and Schmidt had an hour’s drive ahead of them, while Holtke was at home, just minutes away. In his county car, Holtke arrived at the scene at 6:35, just under an hour after David Temple dialed 911.

A tall, muscular man with an olive complexion and dark hair slicked back, Holtke has a wide, white smile surrounded by deeply etched dimples and a well-trimmed mustache. He’d grown up wanting to be a cop. When he applied, the sheriff’s office needed crime-scene investigators. “I figured, what the heck,” he says. Holtke signed on and found he enjoyed the work, piecing together the evidence. On this night, he arrived on Round Valley and found Sgt. Gonsoulin, who filled him in on what he knew about the woman dead inside the house. Holtke asked where the husband was. Gonsoulin pointed at Temple, who was sitting on a bench near the garage. David had his head in his hands, but, like the others before him, Holtke noticed that the victim’s husband wasn’t crying.

“Put him in a squad and keep him there,” Holtke instructed. By then, other deputies had arrived, and Gonsoulin ordered one to escort David to a squad car. Then Gonsoulin and Holtke began a walk-through of the scene. Entering the house, Holtke wasn’t sure what waited inside. All he knew was that there was a dead pregnant woman in the master bedroom closet, and his job would be to collect and catalogue the evidence, to help determine how she died.

At the closet door, Holtke looked down at Belinda’s corpse, so obviously pregnant, and the blood. Not wanting to disturb the scene, he and Gonsoulin quickly left. On the way downstairs, Holtke wondered if the death could be a suicide, and if the woman’s body was lying on top of the gun.

David Rossi, a senior crime-scene specialist, was the next to arrive. An affable man, he’d grown up in the central Pennsylvania city of Hillsdale. He’d seemed to be destined for police work when, as a young boy, he discovered three dead bodies, one a woman with a pigeon jammed into her mouth, presumably the victim of a mob killing. Holtke and Gonsoulin explained the situation to him, and Rossi, an average-sized man with short dark hair and expressive brown eyes, thought about David Temple in the squad car.

“Do an absorption test on the husband,” ordered Rossi, the lead CSI officer on the scene. Holtke nodded, and, while they waited for the homicide detectives to arrive, he walked across the street to where David Temple sat in the backseat of a Precinct Five squad car to do an atomic absorption test for gunshot residue, to determine if he fired a weapon. Holtke explained what he was doing, and David quickly agreed, putting out his hands to be swabbed.

“Sorry for your loss,” Holtke said, wondering again if the woman upstairs, perhaps in the throes of the hormonal ups and downs of pregnancy, had taken her own life.

“Yeah,” David said.

While he worked, Holtke realized he knew who David Temple was, remembering him from his days as a star player at Katy High School. “My ex-wife went to Katy High with you,” Dean mentioned.

After Dean mentioned her name, David nodded, saying, “I think I remember her.”

With that, Dean walked away thinking the same thing that Gonsoulin and the others on the scene had, that for a man who’d just lost his wife and unborn child, David Temple looked remarkably calm.

“Could be a suicide,” Holtke told Leithner, when he arrived. The street was filling with county vehicles, from squads to unmarked cars, as deputies and detectives arrived to assist in the investigation. The clock was ticking. Statistics show that homicide cases not cracked within the first forty-eight hours have a high probability of never being solved. They didn’t yet know what they had, but until they were sure, they would treat the case like a murder, flooding it with personnel. Chuck Leithner had already been assigned as the lead investigator on the case. One of the sergeants on the scene took a position on the street to direct the deputies arriving to set up a perimeter and to handle traffic.

A cocky man with a round chest and thinning hair, Leithner had a mixed reputation in homicide. Some viewed him as overly confrontational with suspects, more likely to try to bully instead of finesse a confession. Yet he was also seen as “a stand-up guy,” says one coworker. “He’ll tell you when he thinks you’re doing something wrong.”

As he was being brought up to date on what was known so far, Leithner looked out to the street and saw a muscular young man talking to two people, an older man and woman. Early on Ruggiero had asked Gonsoulin if he should call David’s family. Gonsoulin had told him no. Ruggiero, however, ignored the order and decided to notify Ken Temple, telling him something had happened at David and Belinda’s house. Ken and Maureen rushed to the scene, screeching to a stop in the middle of the street, across from David’s garage. Running up to their son, they embraced him. Later, the deputy standing nearby would say that he heard Maureen ask her son, “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” David replied. “Belinda’s dead.”

Ken asked about baby Erin, and David shook his head.

Hysterical and screaming, Maureen held David.