Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (33 page)

On August 13 of that year, 2000, Brenda called Becky Temple, Kevin’s wife, who’d been so close to Belinda. The two women talked about the murder, and Brenda admitted that she still felt torn apart by the loss and the lack of closure on the case.

“I have bad dreams,” Becky confided. Until recently she hadn’t even been able to look at a photo of Belinda, and she hadn’t talked to David in seven months.

“We all know about Heather. It’s no surprise, come on,” Brenda said, when saying that Maureen had hung up on her after she’d mentioned David’s girlfriend.

“Kevin and I made a decision that we wouldn’t have anything to do with David and Heather,” Becky said. When it came to David’s mother, Maureen dealt with unsettling issues “by just ignoring” them.

As the two women talked, Becky asked Brenda questions about Belinda and how she’d been during Brenda’s final visit, just days before the murder. “I didn’t see David much while he was there. He was running around,” Brenda said.

“Jerk,” Becky said, and Brenda agreed.

Life was so unsettled after her sister-in-law’s death that Becky said she and Kevin were considering moving to London, to get away from the Temples. When Brenda said the presents and notes she sent Evan probably annoyed David’s parents, Becky answered, “I don’t know that he even gets them.”

Twelve days later, Belinda Temple’s face stared down on commuters who took I-10, the Katy Freeway, from Katy to Houston each day. A billboard was raised along the highway, paid for by Schepps Dairy. Like the fliers, it featured Belinda’s picture and information about the $11,000 reward, $10,000 from the dairy and another $1,000 from Crime Stoppers. At a news conference announcing it, Tom said, “to the person who put the shotgun to the back of my daughter’s head and killed her and my granddaughter, all I want to say is, ‘We will get you.’”

Although it was there for three months, it would generate no leads.

What the billboard did do, however, was unnerve Becky Temple. In September, when she and Brenda talked, Becky said, “I know it’s a good thing, but I really don’t want to see it.” By then, there’d been a truce in the Temple family. Partly it was because Becky and Kevin had stopped asking questions about David and Heather. “It works better that way,” she said.

Tests results came in from the FBI that October. Items including David’s tennis shoes came back without traces of window glass. That didn’t dissuade Holtke and Schmidt, who took the unusual step of hand delivering more evidence to the FBI lab in Washington, D.C. This time they included metal fragments and wadding from the shotgun shell. The detectives also brought the shoes Belinda wore that final day, her eyeglasses, the cordless phone found in the closet next to her body, and David’s warm-up suit and tennis shoes. The FBI had a new test for gunshot residue, and the detectives were hoping for new results.

Meanwhile, in Franklin, Texas, Heather’s mother prepared for a wedding. “Heather and David visited and told us they were going to get married,” said Sandy. “I told David, ‘I just want to know that you’re going to love her with all your heart and take care of her.’”

David assured her that he would, but Sandy didn’t say what was truly on her mind. “I wondered,
Oh, Lord, is this the right thing?
”

Brenda drove to Katy to see Evan before Christmas that December. When she returned home, she sent him a framed photo of the two of them together, and then wondered if David or his parents had given it to the boy.

Weeks later, on the anniversary of Belinda’s murder, Tom and Carol again met Debbie Berger and Cindy O’Brien at Belinda’s grave. Two years had passed, and little seemed to be happening in the investigation. David gave the newspaper a short interview for an article on the case: “Everybody who knows me knows I had nothing to do with it,” he said. “My extended family prays every day for [Belinda] and that this will get solved.”

O
ne day, in his living room in Nacogdoches, Tom watched a video of Belinda playing high-school basketball. Suddenly, he shouted at the image on the television, like he used to what seemed like a lifetime ago at her games, “Go Belinda! Good shot!” Then he stared at the television, thinking about his youngest child, wondering if her murderer would ever be prosecuted. To Tom’s disappointment, the sheriff’s department hadn’t used a profiler he’d recommended, instead asking an FBI profiler to review the case and the crime-scene photos. What that expert told Schmidt and Holtke was that the manner in which Belinda’s head was covered was significant. That the killer took the time to reposition the slacks hanging on the rod above her, that he covered the damage to her head, suggested the killer was connected to Belinda in some way. In a sense, the murderer was attempting to cover up what he had done, perhaps out of guilt.

By then, Tom Lucas’s dissatisfaction with the detectives in Houston was boiling over. He’d e-mailed and called Mark Schmidt frequently, often frustrated, once going so far as to suggest that the case hadn’t been solved because of a cover-up at the sheriff’s department. With the detective feeling increasingly badgered, Schmidt’s sergeant e-mailed Tom: “Detective Schmidt is one of the hardest working and dedicated detectives I have had the pleasure to work with…. I assure you that everything is being done that can be done within state and federal laws. There is no cover-up taking place…. The FBI is looking at evidence that we have and that takes time…. Furthermore, please communicate with me in the future.”

Miffed that he’d been told not to communicate with the detective on the case, Tom complained to a higher-up at the sheriff’s department, and the restriction was lifted. A few days later, Tom e-mailed Mark Schmidt again: “I have to have closure…. I’m 60 years old, and I do not want to take this to my grave.”

That winter a Maryland study was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors concluded that homicide was the leading cause of death in pregnant women. Pregnant women and new mothers were two times more likely to die of homicide than women who had not recently been pregnant. The study’s conclusion: “A pregnant or recently pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause.”

The study caused little notice, despite its surprising assessment. It was the first far-reaching study of its type, but made little impact in the media and didn’t funnel down to the general public.

Meanwhile, at Hastings, rumors floated that Heather Scott was marrying David Temple. “No one seemed surprised,” says a coworker. “We all knew they’d been together since right after the murder.”

Four months later, Brenda called Becky Temple for the final time. By then, Becky and Kevin had moved to Austin, as much as anything, Becky said, to get away from Katy, Kevin’s family and all the bad memories. She brought Brenda up to date, saying Evan loved basketball and that he had a bowling party for his birthday.

“I hear David is getting married,” Brenda said.

“Yeah,” Becky said.

“That’s quite sickening,” Brenda said. “I just hate it for Evan…. She’ll never be the mother Belinda was.”

Becky agreed, saying Evan was a good boy, and that he had “a lot of his mother in him.”

What Becky said next hurt Brenda deeply. Becky and Belinda had been close, and Brenda never thought that Becky would fall into line with the Temples’ unwavering support of David. “Are you going to the wedding?” Brenda asked.

“Probably, you know, for Evan,” Becky said.

On May 25, 2001, David purchased a house in Richmond, Texas, adjacent to Katy, a one-story on a cul de sac called Magnolia Circle, in the West Oaks Crossing subdivision. There were palm trees around the swimming pool and a thickly built front door capped with a glass arch. Although newer, the neighborhood looked little different from Creekstone, where he’d lived on Round Valley with Belinda.

Two weeks later, David and Heather married. The reception was in a country club, attended mainly by family and close friends, and Heather wore a stunning white wedding gown. “To have your daughter married to someone you think might have murdered someone, no mother would allow that,” says Sandy Munson. “But there’s never been anything that we believe points to David committing the murder.”

Yet others disagreed. Only two of David’s fellow coaches attended. “There weren’t many of us who believed David didn’t kill Belinda,” says one. “Most of the coaches didn’t want anything to do with it.”

At the wedding, an old high-school friend of David’s was shocked at how thin Heather was. He’d always known David to prefer athletic girls. “The wedding was eerie,” says Mike Fleener, whose wife was eight months pregnant at the time. “We knew from friends who were Katy cops that police would be watching the wedding, which made everything feel even stranger. The whole time, we were wondering if David murdered Belinda.”

Months later, Tara visited her old roommate at Heather and David’s new home. The house was beautifully decorated and immaculate. “It looked like Heather, very stylish,” says Tara. “She had candles all around, and everything looked like a magazine.” Heather seemed happy, and she doted on Evan, who called her Mom.

At the Harris County D.A.’s office, Donna Goode heard about the wedding. She and Ted Wilson talked of the case often, lamenting that they hadn’t been able to prosecute David. “Every time I would think about the Temple case or Tom Lucas would call, or we’d hear from Mark Schmidt, I’d think, I wish there were somebody who could work on this full time, really go after it, try to solve it,” she says. “But the caseloads in homicide and at the D.A.’s office are heavy, and that wasn’t something Ted or I could do.”

Whenever he could, Mark Schmidt kept the case alive. That fall, he went to Nacogdoches and interviewed college friends of David and Belinda’s, coming away with more stories that painted David as a bully and tales of his explosive violence on the football field, but little else to help.

Back in Houston, Schmidt waited for the test results from the FBI to come in. It seemed at times that only the lab experts had the potential to finally break the logjam the Temple case had become.

Then, that September 11, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by hijacked commercial jetliners used as missiles. As the nation wept, the Twin Towers burst into flames, crumbled and fell. The United States was at war with a frightening enemy, and its citizens demanded their government pursue the evil behind the attack. At the FBI lab, resources were reallocated to help in the fight. For domestic crimes, the repercussions were staggering. The specimens awaiting analysis from the Belinda Temple case, along with those from thousands of other crimes across the country, were pushed back in the FBI lab’s queue to make room for evidence collected to help fight the war on terror.

Two months later, Tom e-mailed his son-in-law, now married to the woman he’d been having an affair with at the time Belinda was murdered. Although he’d been turned down in the past, Tom asked to see Evan for the holidays. “If Evan could come and spend some time with us during the Christmas break, we sure would like to spend some time with him. He is all we have left of Belinda.”

The response from David was a resounding, “No.”

“I am hoping you will reconsider,” Tom e-mailed back, saying that he’d sent out a card with a gift certificate for his grandson for Christmas. As with Brenda, Tom and Carol would never know if Evan received any of their gifts. There were never any notes or phone calls to say thank you.

On the third anniversary of Belinda and Erin’s deaths, Tom wrote a poem lamenting the lack of attention to the case and recounting how Belinda called him and Carol. “Number Five checking in, Mops and Pops!” she’d say. In the poem, Tom called Erin and Belinda “bundles of joy,” and talked of Belinda’s beauty and enthusiasm. He labeled her murderer “a lowly coward.”

While the Lucas family waited, little happened to give them comfort throughout 2002. It would prove a quiet year for the investigation, although Schmidt and Holtke continued to work in the background, conducting an occasional interview or reevaluating evidence. Another study came out on pregnancy and homicide that year, this one conducted in Massachusetts. Again, murder was found to be the leading cause of maternal death, followed by cancer.

As 2002 drew to a close, on Christmas Eve, a woman named Laci Peterson disappeared in Modesto, California. She was seven and a half months pregnant, a pretty brunette whose photo dominated the evening news and sent shock waves around the world. Her husband, Scott, was a good-looking young man who told police he’d been fishing when his wife vanished. Law enforcement mounted an extensive search, but Laci’s body and that of her unborn son, Conner, weren’t discovered until the following April, when they washed ashore in San Francisco Bay.

The parallels between the Temple and Peterson murders were remarkable, including that at the time of his wife’s disappearance, Scott Peterson was having an affair. His girlfriend, a massage therapist named Amber Frey, was a thin blonde who bore a slight resemblance to Heather. Dark humor’s not unusual in homicide departments, where detectives deal almost daily with tragedy. Many see it as a way of relieving tension. As the Harris County homicide division watched the Peterson case unfold, they didn’t miss the similarities with the one that had haunted many of them for more than four years. “The joke that went around was that Scott Peterson called David Temple and found out how to act. David told him, ‘Scott, whatever you do, don’t let them find her in the house,’” says one detective.

The Peterson case dominated the news, making headlines of the studies that had been quietly issued over the previous years linking homicide and pregnancy. Suddenly, they were included in front-page articles on the case and in lead segments on television news magazines. For the first time, Americans became aware of the silent epidemic of domestic violence killing young mothers and their infants.

As the Peterson case progressed, in Houston, it renewed interest in the Temple case. The
Chronicle
ran an article listing the similarities in the two cases, and when Holtke saw friends in Katy, they again began asking about the Belinda Temple case, marveling that no one had been charged with the shocking crime. Holtke agreed, but could give them little comfort.

Frustrated and angry, Tom Lucas complained to the sheriff’s department, asking for Schmidt to be taken off the case. Brian, who believed that the detective cared about Belinda and was doing all that could be done, argued with his father. “I told my dad to leave Mark alone,” says Brian. “Mark knew the case front to back, better than anyone else.”

In spring of 2003, Heather Scott Temple was named Teacher of the Year at the Hastings Ninth Grade Center. She told her mother that she and David were attending church, working hard to raise Evan. In Franklin, Sandy Munson believed she understood why her daughter didn’t get pregnant. “Heather wanted to have children, but how could they, with the murder hanging over them?” Munson asked.

Still, even with the uncanny similarities of the Peterson case as a backdrop, at times Munson thought they worried for nothing. As the years passed, the murder had come up less often. “We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t think about it,” she says. “Nothing happened. David wasn’t charged. We didn’t think there was anything to worry about.”

Then, something remarkable happened.

In Washington, D.C., at the FBI lab, on April 23, 2003, a report was typed on official stationery, listing individual pieces of evidence Holtke and Schmidt had submitted from the Belinda Temple murder case, including a warm-up jacket and pants of David’s found in the master bedroom and a pair of his tennis shoes recovered from outside the back door. On page two it read: “Results of Examinations: During the discharge of a firearm particles are produced. These particles are from the primer mixture of most cartridges and can be deposited on surfaces in the vicinity of a discharging firearm, including clothing worn by the suspect and shooting victim.

“…Gunshot primer residue particles were detected on the shirt from the victim, pants from the victim, the jacket from the victim’s husband, the shirt from the victim’s husband, the tennis shoe from the victim’s husband…

“Tin was also detected in a number of gunshot residue particles from the victim’s clothing and the victim’s husband’s clothing. Therefore, the gunshot primer residue on the victim’s clothing was found to be consistent with the gunshot primer residue on the husband’s clothing.”

In Houston, when he received the report, it felt as if the seas had parted for Mark Schmidt. All the years of working the Temple case, of submitting and resubmitting evidence, had finally paid off. The GSR results “were the smoking gun,” he said. “We were celebrating.”

Yet there were more tests that could be done, the FBI lab suggested. Metallurgy studies had the potential to further analyze the GSR, breaking the elements down to such specificity that the results could not only determine if the GSR on all the items was consistent but perhaps more precisely link the residue on Belinda’s clothes to that found on David’s clothes and shoes, proving that he was with Belinda when the fatal shot was fired.

Excited about the potential evidentiary value of the test results, Schmidt resubmitted the Temple evidence to the FBI lab yet again and waited. Throughout 2003, Schmidt, Holtke, Shipley and others who’d worked the Temple case hoped that at last they were reaching the end of the road that led to a murder charge and a trial.

In January 2004, the fifth anniversary of his daughter’s murder, Tom Lucas told the
Katy Times
that he believed there was enough evidence “pointing toward a particular suspect.” Yet Belinda’s father didn’t name the man on everyone’s mind for the murder, his son-in-law, David Temple. Both Tom and Carol were studiously watching the news from California revolving around the Peterson case. When the trial began late that same year, they monitored the testimony, struck repeatedly by the similarities with Belinda’s death. Then, on November 13, the Peterson jury came in with a verdict. Guilty.