Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (2 page)

Nacogdoches High School’s class of 1987, the one that included Brenda and Belinda Lucas, had 345 members, and chose as their school song the ballad “Lean on Me.” That year, Belinda Lucas was voted Most School Spirit, and the girls’ basketball team she played on went all-district.

When she talked to a friend about what she eventually wanted, there was no doubt what Belinda saw as most important. While she groused about her father, describing him as domineering, she loved her parents and her brothers and sister. Family was paramount to Belinda, and she wanted one of her own. “For Belinda not having a family was not in the cards,” says Luna. “She wanted the right guy and a team of little athletes to raise.”

The day of their high-school graduation, Belinda, Brenda and a friend spent time talking about the future—all that lay ahead—while riding around Nacogdoches with all the windows down in a brown Chevy pickup belonging to the third Lucas brother, Brent. We “bebopped to the music with the radio turned up all the way,” says the friend.

The next year, Brenda followed her interests to Stephen F. Austin University, working toward a major in animal science with a minor in biology. On a Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo scholarship, she moved into a room on the university farm, a 400-acre spread outside Nacogdoches. Meanwhile, Belinda stayed at home, living with Tom and Carol, while she picked up credits at Angelina College, a small junior college in nearby Lufkin. Before long, however, Belinda and Tom clashed. “Our dad was always laying down the law, things like early curfews. Belinda was tired of being under his supervision,” says Brian. “Belinda wasn’t a bad kid. She wasn’t going to get in any trouble. She just wanted a little freedom, to enjoy her college years.”

The sticking point seemed to Jill to have been Tom’s mandates. “He’d say, ‘If you’re going to live under my roof,’ then tell her what she had to do,” says Jill. “Belinda wasn’t going to do anything crazy. She just wanted to be a normal college student.”

That fall, Belinda paid for school by working at a Brookshire Brothers grocery store. In a weight-lifting class, she met Staci Rios. From the beginning they hit it off. “Belinda was easy to be with and fun,” says Staci in her thick East Texas drawl. “Belinda told jokes all the time and loved to go out dancing. She was just really full of life, someone people just naturally wanted to get to know.”

Before long, Staci was working at the grocery store with Belinda, who’d picked up a second job as an aerobics instructor at Ultrafit, a small women’s gym. With a third friend, Belinda and Staci moved into a modest two-bedroom apartment. At the time, Belinda dated a guy she’d gone to high school with and they talked of marriage. But then, something happened. After they became engaged, she found out that her fiancé had been unfaithful. Hurt, Belinda didn’t hesitate to end the relationship. “Belinda didn’t want him anymore,” says Brenda. “He wanted her back, but she wasn’t interested. Once he was unfaithful, she was done with him.”

As her family and friends would remember her, Belinda wasn’t the kind of girl to hold on to a dying relationship. Once the trust was broken, she didn’t need any prodding to pick up her life and move on.

The following year, Belinda left junior college and enrolled at Stephen F. Austin, to work on her teaching degree. She continued to share the two-bedroom apartment with Rios, their roommate, and a yellow cat named Tigger. Belinda didn’t have a lot of extra time. In addition to classes and studying, by then she was working three jobs, still at the grocery store, at Ultrafit teaching aerobics, and at the SFA farm, where Brenda lived, helping with the stock. That Halloween, Belinda dressed up in a black-and-white Holstein cow costume and wore it to work at the grocery store, udder and all.

Years later, Staci laughed recalling the fun they had together, sharing the apartment, living on macaroni and cheese and beanie weenies. No matter what happened, it seemed that Belinda always saw the good side of the situation, and rarely got angry. She had a small blue Toyota Cressida she drove with the gas gauge habitually hovering near empty. Belinda loved flea markets, and one Sunday when she and Staci were driving to one outside the city, the Toyota ran out of gas. Furious, Staci wondered how her friend could be so careless, but Belinda smiled as they walked down the highway with the gas can. “What a pretty day,” she said. “I’m glad we’re outside and we’re not missing this!”

Sometimes, they stayed up late in the apartment, talking. As she had with Angie Luna, Belinda left no doubt in Staci’s mind where she wanted her life to take her. Belinda’s dreams were solid, the kind lives are built on. She wasn’t dreaming of becoming a celebrity or living in a mansion. Instead, she wanted to teach, to help special-needs kids, and to have a husband and children to love.

Yet there were years ahead to get serious, and Belinda enjoyed being in college, having the freedom of being single and young. After they finished for the night at Brookshire Brothers, she and Staci drove to one of the local clubs where the college kids congregated. “We talked and danced and just had a great time,” says Rios. “We laughed and had fun.”

Some nights, after the clubs closed, they drove to Ultrafit, where Belinda, still not tired, worked out her aerobics routines for the coming week, setting exercise moves to music. As Belinda demonstrated the moves, Rios was in charge of writing down the exercises. The problems popped up the next day. “I’d have them all messed up,” Rios would say with a laugh. “Belinda would get so mad. She’d done a turn and a kick, and I’d written down a kick and a turn.”

The long days and nights working out, both at Ultrafit and her daily workouts at SFA, where she was a physical education and special education major, had toned her body perfectly. At nineteen, Belinda was beautiful. She’d curled her long, golden-brown hair, her skin had a rich, suntanned sheen, and her green eyes sparkled. When she walked into a room, Rios says, “No one missed her. She truly stood out in a crowd.”

Still, there was something else special about Belinda that many would later say drew them to her. “She had so much love and happiness inside,” says Rios. “You couldn’t be around Belinda and not feel good. If you weren’t happy when you met up with her, pretty soon, you’d be grinning, ear-to-ear.”

It was at Stephen F. Austin that Belinda Tracie Lucas would meet David Mark Temple. In hindsight, it would have been remarkable if Belinda attended SFA during those years and wasn’t at least aware of him. Posters displaying his picture in his Lumberjack football uniform hung in stores, restaurants and businesses throughout Nacogdoches, promoting the SFA team. In this East Texas town, where, like much of the Lone Star State, football rules, David Temple was a star.

“I guess you’d say that back then David was kind of a hero in town. Everybody knew who he was,” says Tom sadly. “I have to admit that I was impressed with him, at least at first. He seemed like a fine young man.”

R
ailroad tracks run through the center of Katy, Texas, the town half an hour west of Houston, where David Temple grew up. Off and on through the day, traffic bunched at intersections, gates came down, and the quiet was pierced by a locomotive’s shrill horn. The majority of the town’s nearly 12,000 residents were middle income and white, and for more than a century, the fields surrounding Katy had been regularly flooded by rice farmers, who shipped their crops via those same railroad tracks. The terrain in this part of Texas is coastal prairie, and many of the street names in Katy are as monotonous as the landscape, numbers and letters: Avenues A, B, C and D, First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Streets. But Katy was a good place to live. The locals were friendly and hardworking, and there was a palpable sense of pride in family, faith and football.

“Football is king in Katy, Texas,” says one local resident. “In the fall, folks live by the record of the high-school football team.”

Where Katy got its name was something of a controversy. Some say it came from the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (M
KT
) railroad, others that the city was named after Katy Mares, a popular pre-Prohibition saloonkeeper. Along with rice, other crops have been harvested in the area, including cotton and citrus. And in 1934, Humble Oil drilled west of town and struck black gold, to help supply Allied forces during WWII.

At the rice industry’s height, there were more than 300 rice farmers in the Katy area, with fields stretching out as far as the eye could see. By the late nineties, there would be less than twenty, as the developers gobbled up the rice fields and built subdivisions. Yet the city never shed its image. The rice silos remained in downtown, and after the fall harvest, the city celebrated the Rice Festival, with music, cook-offs and craft shows, symbolized by Riceman, a caricature of a rice kernel riding a tractor and holding an American flag.

Follow Interstate 10 east thirty miles from Katy and the road slices into the heart of Houston, Texas’s largest city, and its glittery skyscrapers. Many of those who have moved to the Katy area commute to work in Houston’s high-rise offices. Yet, the link between the two cities, at least in the minds of those who live in Katy, is tenuous. “Houston is Houston, and Katy is Katy,” says one longtime resident. “Folks need to keep that straight, because there’s not much except I-10 that really connects us.”

Over the decades, expansive subdivisions have sprung up, fanning out from I-10 toward Houston, and many of the residents commute to the big city to work. While considered part of the Katy area, the new developments are thought of by those who grew up in Katy as suburbs of Houston, not really part and parcel of their town. Katy proper, or Old Katy, is strictly the 15.5 square miles north of the freeway that make up the incorporated city. For natives, driving that half hour into Houston for even an afternoon is akin to taking a trip.

Such folks, those from families who’ve settled for generations in Katy, view the new high schools the district built to educate the children of the recently arrived suburbanites as pretenders. For them,
the
local football team that counts is the original one, the team that plays for Katy High, with its mascot, the Bengal Tiger.

It’s not just the high school that backs the team, but also the entire town. During the season, signs in the windows of local businesses urge,
Go Tigers!
On Friday game days, businesses close early and there’s an air of excitement as cars arrive at Jack Rhodes Memorial Stadium, capable of seating 9,600 fans, more than three quarters of Katy’s residents. During a winning season, open seats are scarce on the home team’s side, and tickets are at a premium.

“This is
Friday Night Lights
taken to the nth degree,” says a former player. “This is small-town Texas football at its best.”

David Temple’s mother, the former Maureen Evans, was part and parcel of this world. “Her family is interwoven in the fabric of Katy,” says a longtime resident.

Maureen Temple’s family lineage extended back generations in Katy, to her maternal grandfather, who settled in the area in the late 1800s, and her Uncle Albert, who spent his life farming rice north of the town. Although Maureen, a woman with an erect bearing, was born in Houston, the daughter of a police officer, her roots ran deep in Katy, and when her parents retired, they bought land, carved from Uncle Albert’s rice fields, to build a home. In 1961, Maureen married Ken Temple, who was born in Kentwood, Louisiana. His family had moved to Houston when he was ten, and Ken or “Kenny Temple,” as Maureen called him, worked in computers, for companies like British Petroleum. He was also an ordained Baptist minister. They lived in Houston, and Ken and Maureen, who did office work, had three sons, born three years apart: Darren in 1965, David Mark Temple born on July 19, 1968, and Kevin in 1971.

Four years after David’s birth, Maureen and Ken purchased land down the road from her parents. Before long, her brother, Bill, and sister, Nancy, and their families did the same, and by the seventies the entire extended family lived on lots cut out of Uncle Albert’s rice fields along Katy-Hockley Road. Some who met them saw Ken and Maureen as rather aloof, conservative, “old timey,” says one neighbor. But others who knew the family described them as salt of the earth, and more than one would liken Maureen to Aunt Bee from television’s sixties classic
The Andy Griffith Show
. “She was the kind of woman who had a slice of pie to go with the cup of coffee she offered,” says a friend. “A good Christian woman.”

Of the two, friends describe Maureen, a heavyset woman with dark arched eyebrows and a cap of short hair, as the more gregarious, and Ken Temple as a tall, thin, quiet man who enjoyed throwing a ball around with his brood of boys. They weren’t wealthy people, but the Temples were well known, not just in the community but also at the First Baptist Church of Katy. “They were the kind of family that kept up appearances,” says a friend. “They weren’t the kind to air their dirty laundry.”

On Sundays the entire extended family congregated at one house or another. On such days, Maureen often set up lunch starting after church, about three most afternoons. She called it “coming for coffee,” and her parents, her brother, her sister and their spouses and children would join them. Over the years, as the children had children, the crowd grew, and the Temples’ home buzzed with the conversation of a close-knit family.

“Family was it,” says Cindi Thompson, a distant cousin. “The gatherings were large, boisterous, fun.”

A single-story unpretentious house set back off the road, Maureen and Kenny’s home sat on an acre-and-a-half that backed up to the rice fields. It was a tranquil place to live, one surrounded by nature. Since much of Katy is on a central flyway, a main migratory route for waterfowl, throughout the year flocks of birds flew overhead. Not surprisingly, Katy was known for its bird hunting. Ken Temple wasn’t a hunter, and it was Maureen’s father, the Houston policeman, who taught her three boys to shoot.

“The Temple brothers went dove hunting all the time, most of the kids in the area did,” says Mike Fleener, a close friend of David’s, who’d estimate that 75 percent of boys who grew up in Katy had a shotgun. “It was a blast out behind the Temples’ house, hunting in the rice fields.”

“Shotguns and bird hunting were synonymous with growing up male in Katy, Texas,” says another of David’s friends. “Every boy got a shotgun for a birthday or Christmas, and everyone learned how to shoot them.”

In September, snows, blues, and Canada geese flew overhead. November to March, it was pheasant, and in mid-December, the prey became long-necked sandhill cranes. Many times over the years, David would brag to friends about how he hunted as a boy. His parents, he said, bought him and his two brothers shotguns for Christmases. “Dove hunting was a big deal for the whole family,” remembers Thompson. “Some of the family had leases outside town, farther in the country.”

While all three of the Temple sons were hunters, it was the youngest, Kevin, who seemed to enjoy it the most. Meanwhile, friends describe Darren, the oldest, as the most business-minded and ambitious of the three. All the Temple sons were active in athletics, playing Little League. Their parents went in different directions on weekends, to cover all three of their games. While David, the middle son, enjoyed baseball, from the beginning he was better suited to another game, the one that held a special place in Katy’s heart. Football would make David Temple a local star and shape his life. In fact, his exploits between the goalposts would make his entire family feel even more special. Not only were the Temples a founding family in Katy, they spawned a local celebrity.

“It was a lot of fun to be a parent of a star athlete,” Maureen would say. “To be able to say, ‘That’s my son out there on the football field, making all the tackles.’”

Physically, David Temple was born to play football. From a young age, he was a thickly built boy, one with a powerful body and a keen enthusiasm for the game. His brow was heavy and his eyes deep set and intense. At the age of eight, David played with Katy Youth Football, a league that trains boys from age four and up. “He loved it from the beginning,” his mother would say. Yet, it wasn’t practicing out in the open air, getting in some exercise, that he found appealing. Instead David liked the rough-and-tumble action that took place on the field. “He wanted to play the game every day,” his mother says. “He didn’t want to go to practice, he wanted to play a game.”

Opposing a competing team, David was fast and agile, and, perhaps most impressive, he showed no fear. Even in those early years, friends would remember how tough David played and his command of the game. “The rest of us were just having fun, but it was different with David,” says a teammate and friend. “He was out there to win.”

When it came to personality, David was the entertainer. Husky and good-looking, with a wide smile and a wicked sense of humor, he loved to tell jokes and seemed to find pleasure in making others laugh. All three of the Temple sons were “charmers,” says a family friend, but David went out of his way, even as a child, to win people over. Perhaps that was another reason why his parents treated him as if he was special.

“From an early age on, Kenny and Maureen were different with David. Someone would come to them and say David did something bad, and they’d ask David about it. Then they’d go to the person and say, ‘David said he didn’t do that.’ As far as Maureen and Kenny were concerned, the issue was closed,” says Thompson. “It was as if David was untouchable. I don’t ever remember him being held accountable.”

In grade school, David was held back a year, which only helped when it came to football, making him older, bigger and stronger than the other kids on the field. Although few believed that he needed any more advantages. “He was just so much better than the other kids,” says the father of one teammate. “David, from the beginning, was a standout.”

By junior high, David was one of the starters on the team. He’d continued to bulk up and grow stronger every year. “We used to make fun of how big David’s head was,” says a friend. Off the field, he continued to be a contradiction. He had the ability to be funny and even charismatic. One afternoon, at the home of a friend whose dad was a deputy sheriff, David donned the man’s uniform and paraded through the house, mimicking a tough cop, and eliciting squeals of laughter from his amused friends, who turned to him when they wanted someone to fight their battles. “When we needed someone taken care of, we told David,” says a friend. “He’d wait for the kid when school let out. Most of the time, the kid took one look at David and ran.”

Another friend puts it this way: “David had a gentle side about him, but there was absolutely a dark side. There was this egotistical side, the part of him that thinks the world revolves around him.”

In Katy, there was no reason for David Temple to think anything other than that he was exceptional. As junior high passed and his exploits on the football field were bantered about in town, many viewed him as a hope for the future, one of those who might help turn around the fortune of the Katy High School football team. Despite the town’s support and the impressive stadium on a hill off Katyland Drive with the U.S. and Texas flags flying overhead, the Tigers had gone through a long dry spell. And many were hopeful that David Temple would help lead the local kids to victory.

When it came to girls, David had the advantage every star athlete enjoys, of being considered special and therefore wanted. By junior high, he’d found himself attracted to girls much like him, young athletes. Yet part of David didn’t appear to believe that cute and athletic was enough. “He always fit better with the tomboys,” says Thompson. “But he always thought he was supposed to be with a bombshell.”

In junior high and early in high school, David dated a perky, energetic young woman with dark hair whose father worked for the Katy School District. Hillary Brooks was enthusiastic and fun, she played basketball, and she appeared to adore him. But as much as, at times, he seemed dedicated to her, David often pushed her to the side in favor of another girl, a pretty blond named Jimi Barlow. Friends would recall how, going into ninth grade, David fluctuated between the two girls, getting serious with Hillary only to suddenly disappear from her life and return to Jimi. “I remember this going on for years,” says a friend.

Finally, Hillary had had enough, planting her feet and holding her ground. She refused to take David back when he asked. No matter how he pleaded, Hillary was finished, even though her own father idolized David. It was one of the few times David’s friends would remember when he became openly emotional. “I saw him cry when she broke up with him,” says a friend. “I was so amazed. I actually saw David Temple cry.”

Although he’d professed his affection, that wouldn’t protect Hillary from Temple’s temper. Once she rebuffed him, he attacked, jeering at her and calling her names, including “horse head,” because she had a slightly long face. David urged his friends to join in and do the same, and before long, Hillary was greeted with catcalls as she walked across the school grounds. Throughout high school, David confronted any young man who asked Hillary on a date. “Guys were scared of David, so they backed off. It was pretty brutal,” says one of David’s friends. “A counselor told David to stop, but he never did.”