Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (29 page)

When Leithner wanted Sanders to take a fourth polygraph, his parents refused, saying the boy had been through enough, and that he was emotionally distraught over Belinda Temple’s murder.

When they talked to the prosecutors, the detectives had little to show to elevate Sanders to the status of a suspect. They had no evidence tying any of the teenagers to the murder scene, not a speck of forensic evidence showing that any of them, including Sanders, had ever even been inside the Temple house. One of the prosecutors, Donna Goode, voiced doubts that if teenagers were involved they’d all be able to keep silent, and she speculated that kids on drugs would have trashed the house, not looked neatly through drawers. When detectives asked teachers and other students, they found no one who’d heard Joe Sanders, Corey Reed, or any of the other boys in their clique ever say an angry word about Belinda Temple.

Days later, the two .12-gauge shotguns collected from Sanders’s father came back clean for glass, blood and brain matter. Still, the shotgun shells were interesting. The ones found in the Sanders home were double-ought reloads, like the one used to murder Belinda. But then a ballistics expert examined the shells and ruled them out, determining that nothing about them, from the lead buckshot to the wadding, matched.

The detectives continued to wonder about the boys, not able to eliminate them, unable to understand why Sanders had failed the polygraphs. Finally, after one of the tests, the polygraph examiner talked to one of Joe Sanders’s friends, one who had been with him that day and who corroborated what Sanders said about his whereabouts. The question that boy was recorded as answering deceptively was: “Do you have knowledge of who murdered Belinda Temple?”

When the boy answered no, the polygraph suggested he was being deceptive. Yet the examiner didn’t interpret the test as if the boy had been involved in the murder, more as if he might have known something he wasn’t divulging. None of it made sense until the examiner asked a few more questions, and the teenager explained that he did believe he knew who killed Belinda.

“My mom told me David Temple did it,” the boy answered.

From that point on, Leithner, Schmidt and the others found little reason to focus on Joe Sanders and his band of teenage friends. “It wasn’t that there was something that said definitively that Sanders hadn’t done it,” said Wilson. “It was that there was no evidence that made me think he was ever in that house. No DNA, fingerprints, no one saw him there, and the other teenagers, the ones he was with that day, all told the same story, all backed up where Sanders had been.”

Goode, too, was convinced. “Teenagers don’t usually make very good criminals,” she said. “They tend to be impulsive, to leave evidence, and they get caught. The way the evidence laid out, Belinda Temple’s murder wasn’t like that. It was a calculated crime.”

The day of the final polygraph of the teenagers, Leithner was in his office when an inquiry came in from the Texas Teachers Retirement System. Belinda had $60,000 in life insurance. As might be expected, David, as her husband, was the beneficiary. Although he hadn’t yet proven it, Leithner checked a box on a form that indicated the beneficiary was implicated in the death.

O
n the forensic front, results continued to dribble in. Gunshot residue tests on David’s hands came in as inconclusive. GSR was present but in low levels, so small that it could have resulted simply from David touching Belinda’s clothes. The blood in the P-trap was too minute and diluted a sample to type, and the blood on the shirt found in the laundry room came back as David’s, not Belinda’s. Could he have cut himself breaking the door glass? It was possible, but he had been examined, and it was just as likely that the blood came from cutting himself while shaving.

The more Tammey heard about the investigation, the more certain she was that David was the killer, especially when someone mentioned that Evan’s car seat was found in the Isuzu, not in the pickup truck, the vehicle David claimed he’d used to take Evan to the park and the stores that afternoon. Tammey had seen David be so protective of the boy that he sat in the backseat of the Isuzu with him while Belinda drove. “There was no way David would ever have put Evan in a car or truck without a car seat,” Tammey said. “It wasn’t an option. Unless he was absolutely frantic.”

But why would David have been upset or even in a hurry? As he told the story, he was simply leaving the house to take his son to the park while Belinda rested.

Something else needled Tammey in the weeks following the murder. She heard more from people at Hastings about David’s relationship with Heather. “I heard about the happy hours, that they were a couple,” said Tammey. “I was furious.”

Officially, the Alief School District stood behind David. The Hastings High School newspaper even ran an article in which Looney complained that police were harassing the school’s assistant football coach. Adding his voice to the chorus of the school’s coaches, who backed David, the district’s superintendent was quoted as saying: “I sure do hate to see things in the paper that have any mention whatsoever of [David Temple] being a suspect. It really bothers me to see the news media do what they’re doing…. If there isn’t an arrest made then David Temple is going to come back as a coach…. If the sheriff’s department had any reason to arrest David Temple they would have already…. We as a School District want to give [Coach Temple] all the support we can give him…. In my mind, I still believe he’s innocent.”

Just days before the article ran, Leithner and Schmidt dropped in at the Ninth Grade Center to talk to Heather again, to ask her to come to Lockwood to give a second statement. While Tara Hall had already voluntarily given a second interview to police, Heather hadn’t called offering any more information. Leithner and Schmidt thought there was more there to know, and kept thinking about the lie detector test Heather had taken, the one where the examiner said Scott wasn’t being entirely forthcoming.

At Lockwood, in the maze of detectives’ offices, Leithner talked to Shipley. Heather waited in one of the cubicles, and the lead detective on the case wanted to know if Shipley would conduct the questioning. “You’re a girl. She’s a girl. See if she’ll talk to you,” Leithner suggested.

The men she worked with had described Scott as “hot,” but when Shipley saw her, she thought she had a good figure but an average face. “Have you looked above her neck?” Shipley asked one of the male detectives, who shrugged.

To set up the interview, someone had to make Heather aware of their suspicions that she’d held back during her first interview. That honor fell to Chuck Leithner, who went into the room with Shipley and Scott. “You lied to me,” he began. “Didn’t you?”

“No,” Scott said, but then admitted, “I just didn’t tell you everything.”

“That’s the same as lying,” Leithner said. Acting angry, he left the room, turning the interview over to Shipley.

The detective sat down across from Heather, who although it was January wore a sundress, and asked her if there were things she wanted to clear up about her prior statement. “Why’s he being so mean to me?” Scott asked.

“Maybe because Detective Leithner thinks you’re not telling him everything,” Shipley answered.

“I answered the questions he asked me,” she insisted.

“In our business, if you don’t tell us everything you know, it’s the same as lying,” Shipley said, staring hard at her. “What do you want to tell us?”

At first, Heather recounted what she’d already said, that she and David had a casual flirtation, but this time she added other information, including that the relationship with David had turned more serious.

“David made me feel good about myself,” Heather told Shipley.

“Have you had sex?”

“Yeah,” Heather admitted, “…about three times.”

“If I went and talked to your roommate, what would your roommate say?” Shipley asked.

“She’d say we had sex all the time because we were in my bedroom,” Scott said.

As Shipley asked questions, Heather paused before answering, hesitant as if measuring her response. Finally, she talked about New Year’s Eve, saying that she’d tried not to advertise at the party the fact that she and David were a couple. They’d had sex that weekend, once, maybe twice. “To me, David was not dating me for the sex. He didn’t push the relationship on me.”

When Shipley asked Heather if David had ever said that he loved her, the young blond teacher said that he had. On Friday, January 8, David told her, “You know I think I have fallen totally in love with you.”

“What did you tell him?” Shipley asked.

“That I felt the same way,” she said.

Shipley thought about the timing of David Temple’s pledge of love, the fact that three days later, Belinda Temple was murdered. Could it have been a coincidence?

“You know,” Shipley said. “One of the things we use to evaluate a suspect is motive. Belinda and David weren’t fighting and it doesn’t seem to have been over money, but if he was in love with someone else, that could be a motive for someone to kill his wife.”

For a moment, Heather Scott looked at Tracy Shipley and said nothing. Then the blond teacher’s face bowed up into a small smile, and she said, “You mean you think he killed his wife for me?”

To Shipley, Heather sounded flattered that David might love her enough to kill Belinda and their unborn child to be with her. Shipley felt disgusted, but tried not to reveal what she was thinking:
Do you think he might kill his next wife if he gets tired of her?

The detective still had the job of finalizing what Heather had told her, but when Shipley finished typing the new statement, Heather balked at parts of what she’d said, not wanting to include her own pledge of love in response to David’s, “You know I think I have fallen totally in love with you.”

“It didn’t mean anything,” Heather protested. The detective suggested that if David had said it, if it were true, it needed to be included, and Scott finally agreed, signing the statement and leaving, still appearing to Shipley as if she were holding back information. Later, Shipley noted Scott’s objections and labeled Heather’s protest as an example of how Scott tried to pick and choose what she told detectives. In her report, Shipley concluded: “It is obvious to this detective that Heather Scott has been evasive and not completely forthcoming in this investigation.”

January was drawing to an end, and the detectives still didn’t have what prosecutors needed: they hadn’t found a murder weapon or been able to put a .12-gauge shotgun in David Temple’s hands. They had motive and opportunity, but no hard evidence.

At the sheriff’s department, the detectives had constructed a timeline of Belinda’s and David’s activities on January 11, the day of the murder. For approximately three hours after Belinda returned to work, David was alone in the house: time he could have used to plan the murder and stage the burglary scene.

Then Schmidt considered Temple’s account of the rest of the afternoon: the detectives had no evidence that David went to either of the parks with Evan that day. If they relied on the times David gave in his statement, Belinda arrived home at 3:45. The next time they were certain of was from the surveillance video at Brookshire Brothers grocery store, where David arrived at 4:32. That left a forty-seven-minute gap. Schmidt had driven the route from the Round Valley house to the grocery store and estimated that it took ten to twelve minutes. Subtracting the ten or twelve minutes from the forty-seven minutes left more than half an hour unaccounted for, time David could have spent cleaning up before leaving the house.

The second unexplained period was the span between when David left Brookshire Brothers and arrived at the Home Depot. Based on surveillance tapes from the two stores, the trip had taken him thirty-four minutes. That was excessive for a six-and-a-half-mile drive that Schmidt made in less than twelve minutes. What happened during that additional twenty-two minutes? Where was Temple? Disposing of the murder weapon? If so, where?

The police had one clue, a man named Buck Bindeman. A Katy High grad two years behind David, Bindeman said he saw David at five o’clock on the afternoon of Belinda’s murder. A truck aficionado, Bindeman seemed credible, describing Temple’s truck down to the shade of blue and the type of wheels. What made Bindeman’s information tantalizing was that the sighting was north of where David said he’d been, at an intersection near his parents’ house, a place where rice fields fanned out under the big Texas sky.

Since they’d begun looking for the .12-gauge shotgun, Leithner and Schmidt had talked often about the possibility that if David were guilty, he could have hidden it somewhere in the rice fields, ponds, culverts or creeks near the Temple house. David had grown up hunting in the area and knew it well. Yet that left an expansive area, much of it flooded by rice farmers off and on during the year, irrigating their crops. How could they even begin to look?

H
eather didn’t want to talk about the murder. She got mad at me one day when she overheard me talking to someone about it on the phone. She told me I had no right, that it didn’t have anything to do with me,” said Tara Hall. Yet Hall was involved, with a ringside seat to the drama unfolding, including the continuing relationship between Heather and David. “He didn’t call the house for a few weeks, but it didn’t seem that long that David wasn’t around.”

On Valentine’s Day, Brenda sent a teddy bear with a balloon to Evan at Tiger Land. David was still living with his parents, and Maureen often dropped the toddler off in the morning and Ken picked him up in the afternoons. On that day, his teacher made sure she gave Evan’s grandfather the gift.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Ken admonished, with a smile.

“It’s from his Aunt Brenda,” the woman said.

“Ken Temple looked angry,” the teacher would remember. “He took the bag and said, ‘Come on, Evan. Let’s go.’”

The Tiger Land staff saw as little of David as they had before the murder. On Friday mornings, however, Maureen often brought a suitcase with the toddler, leaving it at Tiger Land. Around 2
P.M
., David showed up to pick up his son, taking the bag with him. The teachers who looked outside saw a woman with long blond hair sitting in David Temple’s new truck, a woman they’d later identify as Heather Scott.

Soon Tara began arriving home at the town house and noticing David’s new truck pulled off to the side, hidden from the main road. When Valentine’s Day arrived, she found a beautiful, expensive-looking bouquet with roses in a vase. The flowers were for Heather, a gift from David Temple. “I thought it was really odd,” says Tara. “His wife had just been dead for a little over a month, and it seemed really inappropriate. But I didn’t say anything to Heather. I knew she wouldn’t like it.”

“Are they together?” Tammey asked the other coaches’ wives, weeks after the murder.

“Yeah, he’s with her,” one of the women told her. “He sees her all the time.”

“That sent me into a rage,” Tammey would say later. “I was bad, really bad.”

Infuriated with David, Tammey began following him, putting her younger daughters in the car, watching as he left Hastings after class ended for the day. “I thought,
What am I doing?
” she’d say later. “But I couldn’t stop. It was like I had to do it, to make it up to Belinda for not being a good friend.”

Hanging a few cars back, she shadowed David in his truck as he drove from school to Heather’s town house. Once there, he parked next to a wall that backed up to a small shopping center, and Heather pulled her car in behind him, as if to block the truck from view. Tammey staked out the town house, watching David come and go, once even picking up Heather and Tara’s trash from the curb and combing through it looking for clues.

One day she heard Heather and David had both called in sick, and Tammey returned to the town house and saw his truck and her car. “I couldn’t believe the audacity,” she said. “I wanted him caught.” It only made her angrier that she saw the coaches, including her own husband, forming a shield around David, protecting him.

“No one wanted to believe it,” says Quinton. “I didn’t want to believe it.”

Furious, Tammey pounded on the town house door, screaming for David to come out. She felt certain he was inside with Heather, but no one answered.

Before she left, Tammey put a note on David’s truck, tucked into the window: “I saw you. I know what you’re doing.”

At the Harris County District Attorney’s building, a plain brown brick nine-story structure near the web of courthouses, Leithner and Schmidt talked to Ted Wilson about the possibility of obtaining search warrants for the school computers to get David’s and Heather’s e-mails. Wilson, who’d written the definitive book on Texas law and search warrants, began work on the document.

By then, David and Heather had been at it again, e-mailing back and forth at school. On January 26, at 8:57
A.M
., two weeks after Belinda’s murder, David had e-mailed Heather: “I hope your days are going well.”

“It is going great…I hope yours is too…it is better now that I have heard from you,” Heather responded, five minutes later.

“It made me feel better just to see you yesterday and today,” David responded.

“[Another male teacher] thanked me for wearing this dress…. I guess I made his day also.
Just trying to make you smile.”

“That is a job few people can do right now, and you do it very well. Thanks again,” he replied.

“Things will get better…. It just takes time…
,” Heather assured him.

“You are always right,” he concluded.

The next morning, at 10:32, Heather had e-mailed Quinton: “Please make it be 3:00 already…. I want to go home and hug my bear you gave me…. I guess it is safe to talk to him
”

Why was Heather afraid to talk to others? What was she worried about?

That same morning, Heather had also e-mailed David. It would appear later that somehow she’d learned that the detectives were in the process of zeroing in on their e-mails. On the same day that Ted Wilson wrote up a subpoena for Alief ISD asking for all David’s and Heather’s correspondence, Heather e-mailed David: “Please make sure you delete everything in your deleted folder and your sent box.”

Had someone tipped Heather off?

Two days later, the subpoena was served. What the investigators came away with were only those e-mails backed up on the school’s main computer system. If there were others, they were gone.

Meanwhile, the search for the murder weapon continued.

Photos on the front page of the
Katy Times
showed searchers combing culverts and fields, standing only a few feet apart, walking through ankle-high water at times, scanning the ground for the shotgun used to kill Belinda. The hunt went on for three days, as deputies, detectives, even inmate trustees from the county jail, walked ten miles a day through field after field, ditches and low-lying areas infested with poisonous snakes, hoping to spot a glimmer of steel that could signal a hidden weapon.

The sheriff’s department brought in dogs and helicopters to search the fields. While the others explored on land, a dive team began at Peckham Park, in the small lake where Belinda used to take Evan to feed the ducks. From one body of water, they moved to the next. In one retention pond, a deputy dove into the murky water, only to see a baby alligator swimming toward him. The man swam away, lurching quickly onto the shore, worried that the presence of a baby alligator meant a ten-foot, 300-pound mother gator might not be far away.

Much of the area searched was immediately north and east of Maureen and Ken Temple’s house. At one point on foot, Mark Schmidt was so close that he could see their backyard. But there were stretches impossible to explore, including the muddy bottom of the nearby Brazos River. After so much effort without results, the searches were abandoned, and Chuck Leithner noted in the murder book devoted to the Temple case:
The investigation continues
.