Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (17 page)

After Gonsoulin pointed out David as the dead woman’s husband, Leithner suggested that the sergeant ask Temple to sign a COS, a consent to search form that gave police permission to enter the scene and collect evidence. Then, the detective explained, he wanted David kept segregated, in a squad car, until they were ready to talk to him. While Gonsoulin did as requested, Leithner turned his attention to Mike Ruggiero, to hear firsthand what David’s neighbor witnessed.

Leithner heard from Ruggiero about the knock on the door and the barking chow, while out on the street, Gonsoulin explained the COS form to David. At 6:46, a little more than an hour after calling 911, he signed it. Minutes later, Leithner’s partner, Mark Schmidt, arrived.

While Leithner had been in homicide for thirteen years, Schmidt was a new addition. A nineteen-year veteran with the sheriff’s office, including stints in narcotics and child abuse, Schmidt had been promoted to homicide only nine months earlier. With a dark brown flattop, blue eyes with the hint of a twinkle, and a slight slouch to his walk, Schmidt had the appearance of a favorite uncle. Yet looks could be deceiving. Schmidt was so methodical and determined that one coworker called him the “Boy Scout.” On the job, the detective had a quiet, shy manner, but somehow it worked. “People liked to talk to Mark,” says one coworker. One night on patrol, when Schmidt stopped a truck for a moving violation, the driver blurted out: “I’ve got stolen car parts in the back.”

That night Schmidt recovered three cut-up Suburbans, but rather than reveling in the collar, Schmidt would simply shrug and say, “just at the right place at the right time.”

In anticipation of entering the scene, Schmidt returned to his car to get a pair of gloves. While he was there, one of the deputies approached him, saying that David wanted to talk to someone in charge. Schmidt walked over and bent down to talk to David in the backseat of the squad car. The sun had set, and the streetlights had come on. The evening was cool, and Schmidt had put on a jacket.

“How long am I going to have to sit here?” David asked the detective.

Schmidt looked at the man, thinking he seemed only vaguely interested in what was unfolding around him. “My partner may want to talk to you, to take a statement,” Schmidt explained. “You’ll have to wait here, maybe go downtown with him.”

“Why would he need to take a statement?” David asked, appearing agitated.

Schmidt again thought that David didn’t appear to grasp the seriousness of the situation. “We need to know what your wife did today, to figure out what happened,” he said. With that, Schmidt turned and left.

On the patio, Schmidt joined Rossi, Holtke and Leithner, listening as Gonsoulin, who had the signed COS in hand, described the scene that awaited, preparing for what they’d find once they entered the Round Valley house. Then Gonsoulin led the way, giving his third tour of the evening, this time to the men who’d be in charge of the investigation.

Through the back door, Gonsoulin led the detectives to the right, into the kitchen instead of left toward the den. “We had to be careful,” Holtke would later recount. “There was some glass inside the house in front of the door, but not as much as we expected. Most of it was off to the left, scattered on the den carpet. So we avoided it, didn’t want to disturb it, and walked to the right, to the stairs, and then up to the bedroom.”

As they walked through, it appeared to be a typical, middle-class home, albeit unusually immaculately kept. Photos were scattered throughout, including on the refrigerator, depicting David, the woman who lay dead upstairs, and their three-year-old toddler, all smiling for the camera, looking like any other attractive, happy young family.

Upstairs, the four men followed Gonsoulin into the master bedroom. At the walk-in closet, they peered in at Belinda Temple’s body, lying facedown on the carpeting. It was Holtke who decided to investigate. At one point, while considering the possibility of suicide, he wanted a closer look. Wondering where the entrance wound was, he leaned down beside the body. If it were a suicide, the most likely scenario was that the entrance wound would be in the front or sides. With a gloved hand, Holtke parted Belinda’s hair, starting at the side and moving slowly toward the back. There the thick strands fell open to reveal a gaping wound, bloody and angry. Meanwhile, Rossi spotted lead pellets mixed into the brain matter on the carpeting. Someone, it appeared, had held a shotgun to the back of Belinda Temple’s head and pulled the trigger.

No longer was there a question of suicide. Belinda Temple was murdered.

A
t Bunco, the women were beginning to wonder. Belinda loved the game so much she was habitually one of the first to arrive. When she wasn’t there by 6:30, half an hour after the start time, Tammey wondered if her friend had gone into an early labor. The phone rang when Tammey called the Temple house, but no one answered. They ate the enchiladas Belinda had so looked forward to, and waited, but she still wasn’t there. Belinda’s friends sat down at the tables spread across the living and dining rooms. As the time neared seven, Tammey and one of the other women decided to drive to Belinda and David’s house to see if all was well.

For some unknown reason, Tammey felt panicked. On the drive to Round Valley, she prattled nervously on, describing herself as a “terrible friend to Belinda,” for pulling away in the previous months. When they arrived, she felt sick as she took in the scene: the yellow tape, the crush of neighbors and police officers, and David in the squad car.

“Oh, my God,” Tammey whispered to her friend. “David killed Belinda.”

Fearing to know but needing to understand, Tammey spotted David’s parents in the crowd and ran up to Ken. “Belinda’s gone,” he said. Releasing a small scream, Tammey threw her hands up to her face and sobbed. Kevin and his wife, Becky, had already arrived, and Tammey walked over to Becky and leaned on a tree. Becky and Belinda had been closer than sisters-in-law, truly good friends, and Becky cried as hard as Tammey.

“But David was home,” Tammey said.

“What?” Becky asked.

“David was home. Evan was sick,” Tammey said.

Becky ran and Tammey heard her tell Kevin what she’d just said.

After Holtke discovered the entrance wound in the back of Belinda’s head, headquarters was called and the investigation officially became Harris County Sheriff’s Office case number 99-0111-2596. From that point forward, everything collected, every note taken would be labeled with that designation. The detectives now knew they had a homicide scene to process. Starting in the master bedroom and bath, they went slowly through the house, assessing the overall picture.

The broken back-door glass suggested a burglary, but much of what they saw upstairs challenged that assumption. One of the first things Schmidt noticed was Belinda’s jewelry box, sitting in plain view on her dresser. Through the glass top, he could plainly see money and jewelry. They saw no evidence the box had been disturbed. On top of the five-drawer chest was a television. Next to it, Rossi spotted a dish with David’s watch, wedding ring, a gold necklace, and his heavy, carved gold championship ring. If a burglar broke in, if one was in the bedroom, why didn’t he take the jewelry?

Holtke noticed something else, the duck design on the dish holding the jewelry. There were more duck decorations on the lamp, and downstairs there was a sign with ducks that read “David’s Roost.” It seemed obvious that David Temple enjoyed bird hunting; if so, it wasn’t a stretch to think that Belinda’s husband owned a shotgun.

Leaving the bedroom, the investigators deliberately and slowly retraced their steps through the house. On a stair, Rossi pointed out a set of keys. It seemed odd. Who would leave keys discarded on a step halfway up a staircase? Especially in a house with a toddler, who might find them, play with and lose them? Rossi made a mental note to photograph the keys on the step, and they continued their way down the stairs.

In the dining room, drawers gaped in a buffet, but on closer inspection nothing inside appeared in disarray. Someone had apparently opened the drawers but hadn’t rifled through them, looking for valuables. Why not? Wouldn’t a burglar have wanted to see what was hidden beneath the linens?

“Look at that,” Schmidt said.

In the den, the detective stood, hands in his pockets, looking at a bulky, black fifty-pound television. The TV was on its side on the floor, in front of the stand. Why? Had someone attempted to move it? What seemed strange was that the television was still plugged into the power and the cable outlets. Wouldn’t a burglar have pulled out the plugs before attempting to carry it off?

On closer inspection, Holtke noticed scrapes on the front of the TV stand, where wood had been knocked off. Crouched down, he spotted splinters on the carpet, as if the damage was fresh. To Holtke it didn’t look like someone had tried to pick up the television but rather wanted to slide it down to the floor. “It looked like someone used the stand as leverage while the TV was going down,” Leithner would say.

This wasn’t a scene any of them expected to see at an attempted burglary. Burglars ransack houses, wanting to get in and out quickly, before anyone walks in and surprises them. They don’t usually open drawers and leave the contents undisturbed, and carefully set televisions down. They don’t leave behind easily seen jewelry.

Then there was the back-door glass.

“If the door was closed when the window was broken, shouldn’t the glass be in front of the door, not off to the left in the den?” Holtke asked.

Schmidt looked at Leithner and all the investigators understood what the others were thinking. The entire scene seemed off-kilter. Even the time of day was odd. Burglars rarely struck in late afternoon, when neighborhoods were busy with families returning from work and school. They also didn’t usually carry shotguns. The weapons were bulky, hard to conceal, and carrying such a large weapon made it difficult to lug out valuables.

“We were looking around thinking the scene looked staged,” Schmidt would say years later. “Between all of us, we’d seen hundreds of burglaries, and this one didn’t look the way a burglary scene was supposed to look.”

The night yawned before them, one filled with tension. They had Belinda Temple’s husband outside in the squad car. What pieces of the puzzle could he supply? The detective in charge, Leithner, told Schmidt to stay on the scene, to supervise while Holtke and Rossi documented and collected the evidence. “Chuck said he’d take David Temple in for questioning,” Schmidt said. “They needed to have a talk.”

Out on the street, Leithner asked David to accompany him to the Clay Road Substation to make a statement, filling in what he knew about Belinda’s activities that day. David agreed. Moments later, Leithner was on his way to Clay Road, following the squad car that transported David Temple. His parents drove behind them in their own car, and Detective Tracy Shipley, who’d been asked to interview David’s parents, followed in hers.

Later, some would see this decision of Leithner’s as a mistake. At Lockwood, homicide’s headquarters southeast of downtown Houston, waited special interview rooms, eight-by-eight white-walled quarters, each equipped with only a table and a few chairs. The prevailing theory of the best way to conduct an interview was to get a drink and use the restroom before starting, then keep the witness or suspect for as long as necessary, up to hours at a time, answering questions. To avoid all distractions, the optimum setting was a bare, blank room, with nothing to distract.

Instead, Leithner had chosen to conduct the interviews at one of the outlying substations, closer to Katy, on Houston’s west side, where phones rang and people walked through the hallways. Years later, some would say that night might have ended differently had that one decision been different.

At Bunco, Tammey had returned and told the other women what they’d witnessed, that Belinda was dead and that police had David in a squad car.

“He did it, didn’t he?” another of the coaches’ wives asked Tammey.

“Yeah,” she said. “David killed her.”

From Bunco, Tammey called Quinton, who was feeding the younger girls in their high chairs. Weeping, Tammey told him what happened and then said, “That S.O.B. murdered her. David murdered Belinda. I know he did it!”

For a moment, Quinton thought it was possible, but almost immediately dismissed the possibility. “No,” he said. “David wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.”

“Yes, he would. I know he did it,” Tammey insisted. “David murdered Belinda.”

After they’d arrived on the scene, Ken Temple attempted to call Belinda’s parents in Nacogdoches. He didn’t know about Tom Lucas’s father, or that Tom and Carol were on their way to Tyler for another family emergency. When no one answered, he waited and tried again. When there was still no answer, he dialed Brenda’s number. He hated to tell anyone what had happened, but especially Brenda, knowing she’d be alone in Kansas City. The phone rang and Brenda answered.

“Brenda, I have some really bad news,” Ken began. “It’s about Belinda.”

When she heard, Brenda screamed so loud neighbors in the surrounding apartments ran to find out what was wrong. She sobbed out that her sister had died, and then she thought about whom to call. She knew her parents were in Tyler, at the hospital with her grandfather, but she couldn’t bear to tell them, so she dialed her oldest brother’s phone number, and Brian answered.

“Belinda’s dead,” Brenda said. “Someone shot her.”

Brian threw back his head in agony, and the first thought that entered his mind was,
David did it
.

David Temple would later describe those first hours after his wife died as being “in total shock. When you have something that traumatic…it’s incapable of putting it into words how you feel…Sometimes it felt like an eternity and sometimes it went quick. I can remember having trouble walking.”

Yet at the Clay Road Substation, others thought the victim’s husband appeared less than disturbed. Once they arrived, Chuck Leithner took David to the main reception area for the sheriff’s department, off to the side of the main corridor, and told him to wait on a bench. A husky young deputy was seated nearby in his uniform, working in a cubicle. The man said little to him, not wanting to do anything to jeopardize the interview that was about to take place. By then, he’d asked and been told that the man on the bench was the victim’s husband. Like others, the young deputy was struck by how “unemotional” David Temple appeared. As he waited, David looked about the room with a sullen expression, when he suddenly turned to the deputy.

“Hey, did you play high-school football?” he asked.

The deputy shook his head, no, he hadn’t. He said nothing.

David shrugged at him, and then stared back down at his hands.

In Tyler, the doctor gathered the Lucas family and told them that he didn’t know if Tom’s father would make it through the night. The blow to his head had been severe and he’d had seizures.

“Can we see him?” Tom asked.

Tom still hadn’t heard about the horror unfolding in Katy. Brian had called twice trying to tell his father about Belinda, but couldn’t find the words. When Tom got on the telephone, Brian instead asked about his grandfather. But now, as Tom walked toward the ICU to see his father for what he believed might be the last time, a nurse rushed forward and said, “You have an emergency phone call.”

Tom picked up the telephone, and heard a familiar voice. “Tom, Belinda’s been murdered,” his sister from Houston said.

For a moment Tom Lucas went silent, unable to speak. Then he fell to his knees and cried. Carol ran toward him, and for moments couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell her.