Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (27 page)

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fter the funeral, Brenda told the rest of her family about David’s confession the night of the visitation. “We didn’t know how to take it,” Carol says, shaking her head in sadness. “We believed that he loved Belinda, but now we wondered.”

Tom’s father was still in the hospital, and Tom and Carol left for Nacogdoches right after the funeral. They felt confused and angry, but most of all sad. “We never told Dad about Belinda,” says Tom. “A while later, he was transferred into a nursing home, but he didn’t improve and a couple of months passed and he died.”

After the funeral ended, Lenius, the embalmer from the nursing home, filled his truck with the flowers and plants from the church and brought them to David’s parents’ house. He began unloading, when Shaka charged at him. Frightened, Lenius dropped the plants off the truck bed and left.

By the time Kevin and Becky Temple arrived at Dr. Mark Hatfield’s office the following morning, Saturday, January 16, Mark Schmidt and Tracy Shipley had the video equipment in place, and the psychiatrist hired by the prosecutor, Dr. Bruce Perry, was preparing for the session. TV news crews had the building staked out, hoping to catch Evan on tape as he walked toward the psychologist’s office, where he’d be questioned about what he’d heard and seen the afternoon of his mother’s death.

Shipley saw the car pull up and went out to warn Kevin about the news crews. “You may want to cover Evan’s face,” she cautioned.

“We’re not going to cover Evan with anything,” he snapped at her.

But then, after seeing the cameras, Kevin and Becky did just that.

In Hatfield’s office, Evan played with toys. He’d been there before, the day after the murder, when David brought him. While the video camera taped the session with the youngster and the two therapists, Shipley and Schmidt waited in a separate room.

After the session finished, Kevin and Becky left with Evan. While Schmidt and Shipley took down the cameras, Dr. Perry told them he’d seen no indication Evan saw or experienced anything traumatic. In his opinion, the toddler hadn’t been a witness to his mother’s murder. “We went into this without any expectations,” says Ted Wilson. “Let it suffice to say that the interview was of no help to us.”

The psychiatrist told investigators that it was possible Evan, on Motrin and ill, slept through his mother’s murder, unaware of what transpired in his parents’ closet. But the week following Evan’s interview with the therapists, Looney told television stations and newspaper reporters that the fact that the toddler hadn’t experienced any trauma associated with his mother’s death cleared David. “This whole cruel episode should be closed,” the defense attorney charged. “There’s just nothing to indicate that this man murdered his wife, and everything to indicate that he did not.”

“All week, Heather’s friends were kind of buzzing around her,” remembers Hall. “She seemed worried and anxious. She kept saying that David couldn’t have done it.”

In the days after the murder, Heather’s twin, Shannon, talked to their mother, handing her a newspaper article on Belinda’s murder and waiting while Sandy read it. “How horrible,” Sandy said.

“The problem is that Heather was having an affair with this woman’s husband,” Shannon told her mother.

“That’s horrible, but what does that have to do with this woman’s murder?” Sandy asked.

“They’ve already started questioning Heather,” Shannon explained. “The police think David did it.”

Years later, Sandy would say, “That’s when it hit us.”

That same Saturday, five days after the murder, while Evan was being questioned by the therapists, Shannon, Sandy, and Sandy’s husband, Jeff, drove to Houston and to Heather’s town house. When they arrived, girlfriends, who’d come to lend support, surrounded her. “We quizzed all of them, asking if they thought David was capable of this,” said Sandy. “We didn’t know David at all, and it scared us to death.”

That day, not only Heather but also her cadre of supporters insisted that David would never have hurt his wife. “They were like, ‘No way,’” said Sandy.

Upset, Heather described her meeting with police, claiming they treated her badly and screamed at her, “Tell us the truth. He did it and he did it for you!”

“I kept telling them I didn’t know anything,” Heather told her family.

When it came to the affair, Heather described it as only one weekend with David. “They both knew it was wrong and said this can’t be,” said Sandy.

“Momma, the sad thing is that David loved Belinda so much he’d still be married to her,” Heather told her mother. “I mean, what’s the deal? All we did was have an affair.”

A week after the funeral, the phone rang at the Harlans’ house. Tammey answered and talked to David briefly, calling her husband to pick up. Her suspicions mounting about David’s involvement in Belinda’s murder, Tammey listened in as the men talked.

“I’m sorry for dragging you into the whole thing,” David said. “How’s Heather?”

“She’s okay,” Quinton said.

“Please tell Heather for me that I’m sorry she had to go through this,” David said. “I’m sorry I got her in the middle of this.”

Quinton agreed to pass on the message, and the call ended. When Tammey came at him, he knew she was furious. “Why is he asking about another woman when his wife and child are dead?” Tammey screamed. “And why are you the one going back and forth with the messages?”

When Quinton didn’t answer, Tammey called another coach’s wife and asked if she knew why David had asked about Heather Scott. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

“Heather’s that teacher, the ‘Barbie bitch,’” the woman said. “And people are saying that David’s having an affair with her.”

The more people Tracy Shipley talked to, the more the detective heard about the Temple family dog. Teachers at school and neighbors were afraid of Shaka. Belinda warned many to be careful around him. “It was becoming evident that no burglar just walked into that house,” says Shipley.

Around that time, Leithner released the Isuzu to David’s father. When they talked, Ken asked the detective if any other possibilities were being investigated. Leithner said they were. Ken then told the detective about a house similar to David and Belinda’s just blocks away, also on a corner. Leithner followed up, wondering if it could be possible that mistaken identity was behind the murder. But when he arrived, the house wasn’t the same, with a two-story garage and landscaping that didn’t look anything like the Round Valley house. The detective rang the doorbell and talked to a woman. She was friendly and cooperative, but said she didn’t know anything about the murder.

As the days wore on without an arrest, gossip drifted through Katy like hopes and fears on the afternoons before a big football game. Some talked of David’s high-school years, recounting his victories on the field, saying that a hometown hero could never have murdered his wife and baby. But others remembered David Temple’s reputation as a bully. It didn’t seem much of a stretch when there were rumors of David trying to run down an elderly couple along the side of the road.

Cindi Thompson heard the talk about David being responsible for the murder. She didn’t like to think badly of David, but she thought about that evening years earlier, when Darren came to her home crying and shaking, saying that David had held a shotgun on him, pointing it directly at his head. “David had done this before,” says Cindi.

Later, Paul Looney would say that the Temples told him about that same incident, but not as if it were fact. “It was like, there were rumors out there about this having happened, started by some vindictive old girlfriend,” says Looney. Another thing he heard from the family soon after the murder was that Becky, Kevin’s wife, who’d been close to Belinda, believed David was the murderer. “We all knew Becky had those thoughts. We all knew she had doubts that David was innocent.”

The week after the murder, Belinda’s photos were taken down off the walls at Katy High. “The kids were upset,” says Cindy O’Brien. “They cried when they saw them. They missed her. We all did. And some of them were afraid, thinking that it could happen to their mothers or to them. The children didn’t know who murdered Belinda or why.”

Mourning but needing to move on, Debbie and Cindy called the Temple house. They’d heard that David was staying with his parents, instead of moving back in at Round Valley. They left messages saying that they had possessions of Belinda’s in their classroom, things that David might cherish, including family photos. But David didn’t call back. Finally, one afternoon, David and his father walked into the content mastery department, where Belinda had worked.

“We’re so sorry about Belinda,” Debbie said.

His father cried, but David showed no emotion.

The two teachers had Belinda’s possessions carefully gathered, handling them as if they held great value, but David didn’t appear to want any of them. “He didn’t even look interested,” says Debbie. “He only took a few things. I figured the few things he did take, he probably threw out as soon as he left.”

When David returned to work, his mother brought Evan to Tiger Land in the mornings. Many on the staff worried about the boy, hoping the other children wouldn’t say painful things. They didn’t, but Evan, a quiet child, became even more withdrawn. When playing with the other children, he’d always been docile and easy to get along with, but after his mother’s murder, something strange happened.

One day, Evan and a little girl played dollhouse. The two children had played together often, just as they did that day, the girl holding the mommy doll and Evan the daddy doll. But this was different. Suddenly, Evan appeared angry. Wielding the daddy doll, he pushed at the mommy doll in the little girl’s hand, shouting, “No! I don’t like you anymore. You don’t come back here!”

“Stop!” the little girl cried. “You’re hurting me!”

But Evan kept pushing at the little girl and the mommy doll, visibly angry.

Startled at his odd behavior, Evan’s teacher rushed over and took the daddy doll from him. Quickly, she distracted the children, turning their attention to another game.

At Hastings, the first week David returned, many saw an unmarked police car parked on the campus near the Ninth Grade Center. A special surveillance unit at the sheriff’s department, nicknamed the “spy squad,” was watching David, wondering if he’d do something, anything that could further the investigation.

While the deputies waited outside, some of the staff saw things within the building that made them wonder. On one of David’s first days back, a teacher saw him hold Heather’s hand and talk gently to her in her empty classroom. By then, rumors were circulating as quickly through Hastings as they were through Katy. “Some of David’s friends floated the idea that the killer was a student David had in class, someone mad at him, or that it was part of a gang initiation,” said one teacher.

If many were suffering after Belinda’s murder, David didn’t appear, at least to outsiders, to be among them. Just weeks later, he sold the blue pickup truck, the one he so hated, the one he’d repeatedly tried to get Belinda to agree to trade in, and bought himself a brand-new Silverado. Then, he put the house up for sale. One afternoon, after the sign went up, he and his brothers were outside. On the front lawn of the house where Belinda had died, David threw around a football with his brothers and laughed.

In Kansas City, Brenda struggled with all that had happened, the chasm that losing Belinda had cut through her life, wondering if David was the murderer and telling herself he couldn’t be. “I didn’t want to believe it,” she said.

“Some people were saying that the baby Belinda carried wasn’t David’s,” Debbie said, recounting how angry she and Cindy were when they heard the rumors. They never doubted Belinda. Yet the legal system isn’t built on trust, and Ted Wilson had requested that David supply hair and blood samples. When the results came in, addenda were added to the autopsy. Belinda’s body showed no traces of any kinds of drugs, and the DNA results concluded that David Temple was Erin’s father.

Days passed and the investigation continued, as the focus for the detectives remained finding the murder weapon. Mark Schmidt called Brian Lucas and asked if he’d ever heard David talk about owning a shotgun. Brian recalled the dove-hunting conversations he’d had with David, in which David bragged about bagging his limit. But he’d never discussed what type of shotgun he’d used.

Meanwhile, David’s friends and family helped him move his possessions into storage. Among those who volunteered were Clint Stockdick, Kevin’s childhood friend, and his wife, Jenifer. Another was Quinton Harlan. Much of what was in the house was boxed when they got there, and they began carrying David’s possessions to pickup trucks to move to the Uncle Bob’s storage facility, where David had rented a unit. Since he planned to stay with his parents for the near future, it only made sense for him to leave his furniture and other possessions in storage.

That afternoon, Jenifer Stockdick was in the master bedroom gathering boxes. Just being in the room where Belinda died made her uncomfortable. “It was a little eerie,” she’d say. Fingerprint dust covered the walls, and police tape hung across the closet door. Ken Temple had been telling many in Katy that David didn’t own a shotgun, but when Jenifer glanced into an open cardboard box, she saw a box of shotgun shells and a tan hunting vest. The box was orange and green, and Jenifer heard it rattle, as if not quite full. In the truck, on the way to the storage unit, she told her husband about the discovery. “I felt uncomfortable that I saw that,” she’d say.

Her husband, however, didn’t find it surprising, telling her, “David hunts.”

Quinton Harlan saw that same box with the shotgun shells in the dining room, as he loaded boxes into the trucks. He recognized the box of shells as one he’d seen in the garage a year earlier, when he’d cared for Shaka and needed to get food for the dog. Momentarily taken aback, thinking about David’s denials that he had a shotgun, Quinton quickly buried any misgivings. David, after all, was his friend. Yet Harlan did wonder: if David didn’t own a shotgun, hadn’t in years, the way he was telling everyone who’d listen, why did he still have a box of shotgun shells?