Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (19 page)

From the beginning, the lack of seclusion proved to be a problem. “We were in an environment we couldn’t control,” Shipley would say later. “We needed to be on our own turf, even if it meant a longer drive downtown.”

That night, Shipley asked Maureen questions. The matronly woman with the helmet of precisely arranged pale blond hair answered, only to have her husband periodically rush to her side to correct her. It seemed that from his perch, David’s father listened to every word, apparently concerned about what his wife might say. “Every time Maureen said something, Ken Temple jumped up like a jack-in-a-box and came around and answered for her,” Shipley would say later. “It was frustrating.”

That night, Shipley tried to stop the interference. “Please don’t interrupt,” she asked David’s father. “This is your wife’s statement, and it needs to be in her words. You’ll have your opportunity to say what you want in your statement.”

But only moments later, it happened again; Ken rushed through the door, contradicting Maureen and insisting Shipley change his wife’s words. Throughout the lurching process, Shipley felt the older man didn’t understand that in this situation, she was the one in charge, not him. In Shipley’s estimation, the older man was condescending, treating her “like a disrespectful youngster.”

By then, Ken Temple had worked for more than a decade for the county government, as a supervisor in the computer department, setting up classes for county personnel. That night while she took Maureen’s statement, Detective Shipley ran into minor problems using the borrowed computer, and more than once Ken Temple snapped, “You need to take some classes.”

The fitful situation staggered on, Shipley asking questions, Mrs. Temple answering, and Mr. Temple sporadically barging in. Unaware that at the scene suicide had been ruled out, Shipley asked if Belinda had been depressed or experienced hormonal problems, if her death could have been a suicide.

“Oh, no, that’s not possible,” Maureen said, clutching a tissue in her hand, one Shipley never saw the older woman use. “Belinda was a happy person, and she was excited about the baby.”

“Did your daughter-in-law have any enemies?” the detective asked.

“No, Belinda was liked by everyone,” Mrs. Temple said. Then something extraordinary happened. Maureen Temple buried her face in her hands, and Tracy Shipley heard the older woman say in a troubled, mournful voice, “I just could not have raised a son who would kill his wife.”

Ah, now there it is,
Shipley thought.

Yet she said nothing. As she had with johns interested in kinky sex more than a decade earlier, Shipley consciously made her expression noncommittal, and said, “Mrs. Temple, I didn’t mention anything about your son.” She started to ask a question: “Why would you think he might have killed his wife?” But Shipley never got the chance.

Before she could form the words, Ken Temple charged toward the desk, furious, chastising Shipley like a superior correcting an errant teenager and insisting, “My wife didn’t mean that.” From that point on, Ken refused to leave the room, standing at attention next to his wife. When Tracy went to talk to Leithner, to tell him about the problems segregating David’s parents, Leithner came out briefly to talk to Ken Temple.

“She asked if David killed Belinda!” Ken charged, indicating Shipley.

“I never said that,” Tracy responded.

At the house on Round Valley, after the video and photos were finished, Holtke again started on the first floor and worked his way upstairs. He drew a sketch of the crime scene, marking
X
’s where the broken glass lay, a small amount in front of the back door but most of it on the carpeting in the den. There wasn’t any on the blue couch positioned just feet in front of the door. Instead, the glass had scattered to the left of the doorway into the den. Holtke and Rossi inspected the door, not finding any signs that it was damaged except for the glass. “Simple physics said the glass shouldn’t have been where it was if the door was closed when the glass was broken,” says Rossi. “It just wouldn’t work that way.”

Once Holtke finished his diagram, he and Rossi bagged evidence, including Belinda’s keys found lying on the step. Holtke collected the sheets off David and Belinda’s bed, and then picked up a blue towel he found in the master bathroom, near the bathtub. It was damp, as if recently used. On the rug in front of it were some of Evan’s superhero figures, toys he played with in the bathtub.

As Holtke and Rossi made their way through the bedroom, they found three jewelry boxes, none appearing to have been disturbed. Rossi had already discovered Belinda’s purse in a first-floor closet, under the stairs. It seemed an odd place for it, and they’d bagged it and taken it in as evidence. Before turning it in to the lab, he pulled out an address book and set it aside for the detectives. It would have the names and phone numbers of Belinda’s friends and coworkers, potential witnesses.

When the crime scene officers finished in the bedroom, Mark Schmidt entered wearing latex gloves, taking in the scene. He turned his attention to a black cordless telephone found lying near the body. Had Belinda grabbed it off the cradle on the dresser, as she ran to the closet, to call for help? After the telephone was photographed and tested for fingerprints, Schmidt pressed the
REDIAL
button. The last call on that particular telephone, it would turn out, had been to the Ruggiero residence, the neighbors David had run to with Evan. Why would Belinda call a neighbor rather than 911 if she were fleeing a burglar?

Schmidt then picked up the telephone next to the bed, one with a cord anchored into the wall. He hit redial on this phone as well, and this time 911 answered. Since he knew David had called 911 and there was no record of Belinda calling, that phone, he surmised, was the one David used. As he looked about the bedroom, Schmidt, like Rossi and Holtke had before him, thought about the undisturbed jewelry boxes and the glass scattered across the den. He and the others had examined and reexamined the door and the glass. The only way they could envision that glass pattern was if the door was already open when the windowpane was shattered.

“A whole lot of what we were seeing didn’t make a whole lot of sense,” says Schmidt.

Lastly, Schmidt checked the answering machine, pressing the
PLAY
button. He listened to the messages David’s father and Brenda had left early the prior evening. When finished, he popped the top of the machine open and removed the micro cassette, then slipped it into an evidence envelope, numbered and sealed it.

As the investigators worked in the house, it seemed odd. They were in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood processing what appeared, from the photos scattered throughout, to be a happy home. Upstairs, hidden in the master bedroom, was the horror of what had transpired that afternoon, the puzzle that had to be pieced together to find Belinda Temple’s murderer. Yet much of the house appeared undisturbed.

In the kitchen, Maureen’s homemade soup sat in a container on the counter, as if Belinda hadn’t had time to put it in the refrigerator. Next to it were Post-it notes. The first lay next to a digital thermometer and recorded the time Evan received medication for his fever: “1½ tsp of Motrin @ 12:15.” Next to that were notes asking Belinda to call her aunt in Houston. As if he’d just walked in from day care, Evan’s backpack hung over the back of a kitchen chair. About eleven that night, Rossi finally went home to sleep for a few hours. He’d be back in the morning.

On Clay Road, after midnight, tensions were rising.

When Leithner returned to the traffic room, he asked David for more information about his activities that afternoon. David had said that when he left the house, he took Evan to the small park in his neighborhood. But this time, David changed his account, instead saying that they had gone to Mary Jo Peckham, a large park with a lake, near the Katy police station. He then gave Leithner the name of a grocery store he said he’d gone to, Brookshire Brothers, on Franz Road, about seven miles from the house.

After they finished filling in the holes, Leithner began pointing out inconsistencies between David’s statement and the physical evidence, from the glass in the den indicating the door was open when the window was broken to the staged look of the crime scene. One big problem with David’s story, as the detectives saw it, was Shaka. The chow was ferocious when defending its yard. Although he knew the animal, Mike Ruggiero had been afraid to enter the yard, and the dog snapped and barked, flailing itself against the gate, to get at the first officers on the scene. Deputy Johnson and Sgt. Gonsoulin had been so fearful of the dog they were ready to shoot it.

“It’s odd that an officer couldn’t get past that dog but [a burglar] could go in there, just walk by that dog,” Leithner remarked.

David didn’t respond, and the detective would later note that the victim’s husband looked “irritated.” Throughout the interview, Leithner would later say, David never looked him in the eye. Instead, he fidgeted in the chair. David was hesitant in his answers and, Leithner judged, uncooperative.

During a break in the interview, Leithner talked with another detective, Bill Valerio. Leithner mentioned that David Temple had said he didn’t own a shotgun and that there weren’t any found in the house. It seemed odd for someone who grew up bird hunting in Katy, a man who had duck decoys and plates, plaques and boxes with ducks on them scattered throughout the house.

“Did you ask his father about that?” Valerio asked.

Leithner said he hadn’t, and Valerio said he’d go and ask Ken Temple.

A short time later, Valerio returned and talked to Leithner again, this time telling him that Ken said he’d bought each of his three sons a shotgun while they were in high school. Yet, what the officers didn’t get from Ken Temple was something that would prove important as the investigation progressed: the gauge of the shotgun.

Perhaps more than anything, David’s demeanor seemed off to those who saw him that night. Throughout the interview, David never shed a tear. His eyes weren’t red. Leithner would later write in his report that at times David bowed his head as if trying to look upset, but there were none of the usual physical signs of sorrow. As the interview became increasingly confrontational, David Temple stopped talking. He didn’t ask how the investigation would proceed and never expressed any urgency for the detectives to find the man who’d killed Belinda.

As the interview drew to a close, Leithner again told David that he was trying to rule him out, take him off the list of suspects. If David wasn’t involved in the murder, a quick way to take the spotlight off of him was to take a polygraph. While not admissible in a courtroom, they were used routinely by investigators, who believed the tests to be useful in gauging cooperation and truthfulness.

It was then that David became openly defensive, Leithner would later say. Refusing to take a lie detector test “under any circumstances,” David announced, “I want a lawyer.”

Before they parted company, Leithner said again that David’s account of the events didn’t match the physical evidence. “I’ll have to consider you a suspect,” Leithner said.

After finishing with David, Leithner checked in with Shipley, and then took Ken’s statement himself. David’s father said that his son and daughter-in-law had a good marriage, and he recounted Belinda’s stopping at the house that afternoon to pick up Maureen’s homemade soup. “She was in a hurry,” he said. “Evan had been ill.”

By then, others had arrived at Clay Road, including the pastor of the church the Temples attended and family—Maureen’s brother and sister and their spouses and children. The main entry filled with people, and Shipley would remember the night as being “out of control.”

After he had the statements recorded, Leithner, along with Shipley, talked to Maureen and Ken about the situation as it stood that morning, less than ten hours after Belinda’s murder. Their son’s version of the events didn’t match the evidence, the detective explained, and David wasn’t cooperating. He’d refused the polygraph test.

The Temples appeared upset, but seemed to take in the information, when Leithner told them, “We cannot eliminate your son as a suspect.”

Ken assured Leithner that they would talk to David that night, and that the following day, David would take the lie detector test, that he would do whatever he needed to do to prove his innocence.

At that point, Maureen left for home, and Leithner went into an office to call the district attorney’s office. On intake that night was a man many considered to be one of the Harris County District Attorney’s top prosecutors, Ted Wilson, chief of the special crimes unit. Tall and scholarly, Wilson was known as a man who enjoyed mentoring young prosecutors. He’d started at the D.A.’s office in 1974, because he enjoyed being in courtrooms. He stayed on because he found the cases exciting. “When you get up in the morning and watch the six-
A.M
. news, a lot of times you’ve already consulted on the case with the police the night before. It’s fun being on the inside.”

Some of his cases were legendary. Wilson had successfully prosecuted Woody Harrelson’s father, Chuck Harrelson, for the 1979 murder of U.S. District Judge John Wood, and tried a murder case without a body and gotten a conviction.

On the phone, well after midnight, Leithner explained the Temple crime scene, the evidence and the events that had unfolded that night. Wilson listened, asking questions.

“Can we arrest him?” Leithner asked when the prosecutor had all the facts.

“No,” Wilson replied. “We need more.”

“What do I need to do?” Leithner asked.

Wilson replied, “Find the murder weapon.”

Minutes later, Shipley and Leithner watched as David walked out of the Clay Road substation with his father. There was nothing the detectives could do to stop him.

Finished at Clay Road, Leithner returned to Round Valley and the crime scene. Rossi had left, but Holtke and Schmidt were there, sifting through evidence. They discussed what had happened at the substation, including David Temple’s statement. Much of it didn’t make sense, including that he’d left Evan in the garage to ride his bicycle. The two men stood and looked at the Temple garage, where there was barely enough room to walk between the cars, making it all but impossible for the toddler to have ridden a bike.