Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (18 page)

D
etectives are taught the circle theory, that in a homicide the most likely suspects are those closest to the victim. When they work a case, unless evidence or circumstances suggest otherwise, the most common approach is to first look within a victim’s inner circle, at family and close friends. Then, if no solid suspects emerge, they widen the circle, expanding it to include neighbors and coworkers. If there are still no viable suspects, the circle gets even bigger, including acquaintances and strangers.

To eliminate individuals from a list of suspects, investigators weigh multiple factors: physical evidence, possible motives, truthfulness, if an individual is cooperative, and alibis.

Late that evening Kevin and Becky reclaimed Evan from the Ruggieros and drove the toddler and Shaka to Maureen and Ken Temples’ home on Katy Hockley. Meanwhile, at the Clay Road Substation, Chuck Leithner explained to Tracy Shipley that he wanted statements taken from both of David’s parents. An affable woman who doesn’t have the air of a hardened detective, Shipley understood. Although she, like Mark Schmidt, had only been in homicide for a matter of months, Shipley had been in law enforcement for thirteen years. She’d begun as a civilian employee, a dispatcher, and then took the test and hired on as a deputy, working in narcotics and vice. With long brown hair and expressive eyes, for a time Shipley had worked as a prostitute decoy, propositioning men while her fellow deputies caught the evidence on videotape.

“I had to learn not to react when a man said they wanted me to perform some pretty bizarre acts,” she says.

On one such night, a man told her, “I like girls. I won’t hurt you. I just want you to pee on me.”

Although stunned, Shipley simply smiled and said, “Okay. I can do that.”

As the others left for Clay Road, Mark Schmidt and the crime-scene officers, Holtke and Rossi, stayed at the scene. Schmidt began by conducting a preliminary search of David Temple’s garage, inspecting the blue truck and the red Isuzu. He noted the close quarters between the vehicles, so tight he had to turn to walk between them, and saw a bag of cat food inside the truck. Evan’s car seat was in the Isuzu, along with a Home Depot bag containing a receipt and brackets, the kind used to hold up a shelf. Those items didn’t strike Schmidt as odd at the time, but later, after he and Leithner were able to pull the threads of David’s activities that night together, they would take on added meaning.

Inside the house, Holtke and Rossi mounted a methodical search, starting on the first floor and working their way up. They first shot a video, preserving the scene the way it was that night on film. Even rooms where nothing appeared out of place, such as the nursery and Evan’s room, were videotaped. The sheriff’s department would only have control of the scene for so long before it would be released to David’s custody. Once that happened, there would be no possibility of reconstructing what they found inside 22502 Round Valley on the night of the murder.

Before they’d left for Clay Road, Gonsoulin had asked David if there were any weapons in the house. He told them about two rifles, a 30.06 and a .22, both in the master bedroom closet. When the time came, Rossi laid them on the bed, taking them out of their cases. It seemed unlikely that either one was the murder weapon, since the pellets found in the closet suggested the fatal shot had been fired by a shotgun, not a rifle, but both weapons were dusted for fingerprints and photographed.

Her sister-in-law called Debbie Berger that night at home, to tell her that she’d heard that Belinda Temple had been murdered. Debbie immediately dialed Cindy O’Brien, who listened politely but then said, “I don’t believe it.” That would be the first reaction for many of Belinda’s friends, that it was inconceivable that anyone would kill Belinda.

After Cindy hung up the telephone, she called Stacy Nissley, who knew nothing about the night’s events but offered to run over to the Temple house and check on her. Half an hour later, Stacy called Cindy back, crying. “It’s true,” she said. “Belinda is dead.”

“It was impossible. I just couldn’t believe it,” Cindy would say later. For all three of the teachers, their first thoughts were of David.

“I knew he did it,” says Debbie. “Absolutely knew.”

At 8:35 that evening at Clay Road, Leithner and Gonsoulin escorted David Temple to an area used by traffic officers, not an interrogation room where David would have nothing to look at but bare beige walls. “It was a mistake,” says a longtime homicide investigator. “When you’re interrogating, you want no distractions, no ringing phone, nothing but your questions and God in the room.”

Leithner offered David a drink and the use of a restroom, but David turned him down. The veteran detective began by removing a blue card from his pocket and reading David his Miranda rights, saying he was entitled to an attorney and warning him that anything he said could potentially be used against him in a court of law. On his written report, the detective noted what David wore: tennis shoes and white socks, black shorts and a yellow T-shirt. Leithner then explained to David the circle theory, where investigators begin by looking at close family and friends. The reason he was talking to David, Leithner said, was to collect information, and in the process, perhaps, eliminate him as a suspect.

When the investigators asked questions, David described the history of his marriage, explaining that he met Belinda in college and that they had one child, Evan. That morning, David said that he’d left the house before Belinda and gone to work at Hastings. He told how Belinda had called around noon, and said he’d gone home early to care for Evan while Belinda finished out her day at Katy High School. Around 3:30 she’d called him on her way home and arrived at the house on Round Valley at 3:45.

As David Temple talked, Leithner looked him over for cuts or scratches. With the broken glass in the back door, it was possible the killer had been injured. Or Belinda could have fought her killer and left scratches behind to help identify him. But Leithner found nothing on David resembling a fresh wound. “I decided to take my son to the park for a while,” David said. Afterward, he said that he’d taken Evan to a grocery store to buy drinks and cat litter, and then to the Home Depot. When they arrived back at Round Valley, he left Evan “to play on his bicycle” in the garage. The first time he realized something was wrong, he told the detective, was when he saw the broken window.

After David talked, Leithner typed David’s account into an official form on his computer called “a statement from a person not in custody.” Finished, he ran off a copy and asked David to review it. David found two details he asked to change. The first: Leithner had typed that Belinda and David married as teachers, when it should have said while they were in college. The second: David asked to change the passage describing what Belinda was doing when he and Evan left the house that afternoon. Leithner had typed that Belinda was sleeping. As David requested, Leithner retyped the report to read that Belinda “was resting.”

After he saw the broken glass and brought Evan to the Ruggieros, David said he’d returned to the house. When he found her in the closet, he said he “walked up to her and shook her briefly, but she didn’t move.” David said he’d checked for a pulse, as the 911 operator asked him to, but didn’t find one. Belinda was “all balled up,” David said, and he pulled on her legs to straighten her out.

“The operator also told me to try to give her CPR. I tried to move Belinda, but only succeeded in rolling her on her side…” The statement ended: “I know of no one who would want to cause harm to me, my wife or my son. We moved to the neighborhood as we felt it was a good and quiet neighborhood. We felt safe in the neighborhood.”

While David read the statement over, Leithner left the traffic room to find Tracy Shipley. He needed to know how she’d fared with David’s parents.

On Round Valley, as the video of each room was completed, Dean Holtke moved in with a still camera. Before the age of digital photography, Holtke used a standard 35 mm to shoot multiple angles of each room, getting close-ups of anything that appeared potentially important. Only when that was done did he and Rossi turn their attention to Belinda’s body. At about 8:25 that evening, they’d progressed far enough to call an assistant medical examiner. The woman arrived on the scene a little more than an hour later to inspect and transport the body. As Holtke shot photos before the body was moved, he wondered where the blood spatter had gone. There didn’t seem to be enough on the slacks that hung above Belinda’s head for such a large wound.

When Holtke had enough photographs of the body, still clothed in the black-and-white-checked pants and black top Belinda had worn to school that day, still wearing her shoes with the elastic bands, the medical examiner laid out the red body bag, and Rossi and Holtke helped roll Belinda over. Strands of her long hair caught in the clothes hangers above her, and they had to untangle them. Once she was on her back, they could see that the carpet underneath her upper body was soaked in blood, and for the first time, get a look at the full injury to her face. The shotgun blast had entered her head left back and exited in the front, on the right side of her face. The damage was catastrophic. Much of the right side of Belinda’s face, including her eye, had been utterly blown away, leaving a bloody crater. Shattering her skull, the shotgun blast left Belinda’s face distorted, elongated and narrowed, and her mouth open, as if perpetually screaming in agony.

As they would throughout the night, Rossi and Holtke bantered back and forth about the burglary theory. They’d already documented Belinda’s apparently undisturbed jewelry box on the bedroom dresser and David’s jewelry, including his heavy gold ring, sitting out in plain view. On Belinda’s corpse, they found more jewelry. The assistant M.E. removed a silver bracelet and necklace, and put them in an envelope. From Belinda’s left hand, the physician slid the beautiful diamond engagement ring David had given Belinda seven years earlier on the fifty-yard line.

The red body bag was closed with Belinda’s cold, lifeless body inside. Traveling with it to the Harris County morgue would be other evidence. One red plastic bag held brain matter collected from the floor. Another contained shotgun pellets and wadding found near the body, and Belinda’s broken glasses. She still had them on when the shot was fired.

As they assessed the scene, Holtke and Rossi were puzzled. Once they’d been able to take a good look, they realized that the shotgun blast had virtually emptied Belinda’s skull. Why wasn’t there more blood splatter near the body? Holtke thought again that there should have been more debris on the slacks hanging over Belinda’s head. At his side, Rossi had the same thoughts. “It didn’t look right,” he says.

Rossi looked around the closet and didn’t see any blowback, blood spatter on the opposite wall caused by the vacuum created by the gunshot. “I figured we were looking at a contact wound and her hair had absorbed the little there was,” he says. “Otherwise, with a shotgun, we should have seen something.”

With the body removed, Holtke was finally free to take a closer look at the closet. Using a gloved hand, he pushed back the slacks hanging on the rod. Once he did, the wall behind them was exposed. It was there that he found what he’d been looking for: the missing brain matter. The lower closet wall was covered in blood and tissue.

As Holtke considered the position of the brain matter, he had only one explanation. At the time of the gunshot, the slacks must have hung off to the side, exposing the wall. Later, someone, presumably the killer, rearranged the hangers, hiding the brain matter and blood that covered the wall.

With this new evidence to consider, Holtke and Rossi discussed the angle of the shotgun blast and what they observed on Belinda’s body. They’d seen lividity, purplish areas under the skin where blood had settled after death, on Belinda’s knees and shins. That, coupled with the blood and brain matter splattered low on the wall led them to conclusions about her position at the time of the fatal shot. “Because all the blood spatter was low on the wall, she had to have been on her knees, facing the closet wall, when the shot was fired,” says Rossi.

Why would a burglar take the time to rearrange the hangers? “It smacked of someone who was ashamed of what they’d done,” says Holtke. “It was like they were trying to cover it up.”

At ten that night, the local news came on television, and teasers at the beginning of the broadcast urged viewers to stay tuned to see a segment on a crime in Katy, the murder of a pregnant high-school teacher. In her living room, Staci Rios saw the brief mention and turned to her husband and said, “Belinda is dead.”

A minute later, she called her mother and told her what she’d just heard and that she was sure the dead woman was her college roommate. Staci’s mother protested, saying Staci couldn’t be sure.

“It’s Belinda,” Staci said, thinking back to those college years and her first impressions of David, mostly bad. She wanted to be wrong, but she couldn’t fight back the certainty that her friend was dead, and that David Temple was responsible. As Staci talked to her mother, she continued watching the broadcast, and soon saw footage of Belinda’s house and David in a squad car.

“Oh, my God, it is her,” Staci told her mother. “Belinda is dead.”

Ginny Wiley, Evan’s babysitter, saw the news that night, too. Just that day, she’d sent Belinda a card, wishing her good luck with the baby and telling her to call after Erin was born. Now she thought it couldn’t be true. Belinda couldn’t be dead. But she was. That night she slept fitfully, waking repeatedly, crying and wishing that it were “all a horrible nightmare I’d wake up from.”

Leithner’s decision to interview David and his parents at Clay Road, a brown brick, flat-roofed building across from a Sonic Drive-in that housed a justice of the peace court and a smattering of county offices, wasn’t proving beneficial. When Tracy Shipley arrived, she searched around for a place to question David’s parents. The only place she found was a secretary’s desk on the west side of the building, one without privacy. Having no other options, she showed Ken to a nearby chair and seated Maureen at a desk across from her. Shipley then opened up a laptop computer Leithner had given her to use, to type up Maureen’s statement.