Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (34 page)

In Nacogdoches, Tom and Carol fumed. Why was it that California had been able to successfully prosecute Scott Peterson, when David remained free, living his life, married to his former mistress who was now raising their grandson? Why had David been able to avoid paying the consequences for Belinda’s murder?

For not the first time, Tom Lucas wrote an e-mail, this one to Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal. In it, Tom argued that his daughter’s murder had been mishandled and ignored, and that if Rosenthal’s office didn’t prosecute, “I told them I was going to get on the World Wide Web and tell everyone about Belinda’s murder and how they’d botched it,” says Tom.

Not long after, Rosenthal e-mailed Kelly Siegler, his star prosecutor, a petite woman with dark reddish-brown hair and a fiery resolve. Often described as a pit bull in designer suits, Siegler was considered one of the toughest prosecutors in the nation. She’d handled high-profile murder cases, often using controversial but highly effective tactics. Defense lawyers described her as a great lawyer but also someone who “pushed the limits,” and her methods as “over the top.”
People
was so impressed, it featured her in the magazine, and a Hollywood producer had once pushed an ABC TV pilot for a series based on her life.

What Siegler said she worked for in the courtroom was “that oh-my-God moment, when the jury finally realizes that’s how it really happened.”

When Donna Goode and Ted Wilson heard Siegler had been handed the Temple case files to review, they’d later say that they felt relieved. “I was glad for a fresh set of eyes,” says Wilson.

Some things had changed over the years. First, Siegler now had the FBI lab results not only finding gunshot residue on David’s clothes but GSR that was consistent with that on the clothes Belinda wore the night of her murder. Secondly, “the Peterson case had changed perceptions,” says Siegler. “It made the public more aware that these types of murders
do
happen; husbands and fathers do murder their pregnant wives and their unborn babies.”

Called by some a “drama queen” in the courtroom, Siegler, who’d taken over from Ted Wilson as the head of the D.A.’s special crimes unit, was known for her ability to mesmerize jurors by demonstrating her theories on a case. For one, she brought in a pickle bucket and sat on it while she told jurors that the defendant sat on one like it after he killed a four-year-old girl. Perhaps her most controversial ploy was used in the Susan Wright trial, when Siegler tied down and straddled her co-prosecutor on a bloody mattress, then demonstrated with a nine-inch blade her theory on how Wright stabbed her husband 193 times.

Siegler’s vigor and determination, she’d say, came from her childhood, growing up in the small town of Blessing, Texas, where her father died when she was young. Her mother, who worked in restaurants, married again, this time to a man Siegler described as abusive. When her mother told police, Siegler said an officer responded: “If I were you, I’d learn to keep your mouth shut, so these things wouldn’t happen to you.”

Perhaps that explained her view of her job as a prosecutor, to relentlessly go after those she believed guilty, and a folder filled with cold cases she kept in her desk, one she called her “Waiting on God” file.

After Rosenthal, her boss, asked her to look at the Temple case, Siegler called Schmidt. When they were face-to-face, she said, “We’re going to take a look at the Temple case.” After living with disappointment for nearly six years, the homicide detective was almost afraid to hope.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Siegler read the Temple files. When she finished, she asked another prosecutor in the office, Craig Goodhart, to do the same. With salt-and-pepper hair and a brusque manner, Goodhart had a photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a machine gun in a scene from
The Terminator
as the wallpaper on his laptop. In a courtroom, Goodhart was focused and intense, much like Siegler, and he was someone she’d come to trust, both to help her decide if a case was winnable and to second chair on a big case in the courtroom. “Craig and I both tell it like it is,” says Siegler. “If I get out of hand, he’ll tell me to ease up, that I’m being a bitch, and I listen.”

After reviewing the evidence, Goodhart told her, “I think it’s sixty/forty that we can win this. I’d file it.”

Siegler had been thinking the odds were eighty/twenty. “But I know I can get overconfident. I worry that I’ll get too big for my britches and think I can win a case no one else can,” she says. “But even at sixty/forty, we had a good shot.

“That was all I needed,” she says. “I took the case.”

Goodhart and Siegler met with Mark Schmidt to deliver the good news. “We’re going to proceed with the Temple case, and get a warrant for David Temple’s arrest,” she said. Siegler explained that it wouldn’t be easy, that the evidence was largely circumstantial. They had no eyewitnesses, no DNA, very little forensic evidence, only the GSR test results that could potentially tie David Temple to the murder, yet Schmidt smiled. “Knowing Kelly’s talents, I was guardedly optimistic,” Schmidt would say later.

Before going any further, Siegler invited Brenda and her parents to the D.A.’s office to discuss the case. Once they sat down with her, she explained, “We’re going to proceed and charge David. But don’t think that it means that this case is a slam dunk. It’s not. We’re going to give it a shot, but it’s not a sure thing.”

All three of the Lucases cried, relieved and anxious, grateful and worried.

Days later, on November 29, 2004, two weeks after the Peterson verdict, Siegler wrote the arrest warrant, including facts from the case, everything from Temple’s professions of love to Heather just days before the murder to the staged burglary scene and the jewelry not taken in plain view. For the first time, the warrant disclosed the FBI gunshot residue evidence that tied David’s clothes to those Belinda wore on the night of her murder. Yet Siegler left some evidence out, including the account of Buck Bindeman, that he’d seen David near his parents’ house at five the evening of the murder. That evidence went directly against David’s alibi, and Siegler had no intention of tipping her hand too soon to David’s defense attorney.

By the time she took on the Temple case, Siegler had successfully prosecuted nineteen death-penalty cases. Those stakes wouldn’t be on the table in the Temple case. Belinda’s murder had taken place in 1999 and it was only in September of 2003 that the Texas State legislature passed a law mandating that the killing of an unborn, viable infant was murder. Since in Texas a capital offense required a murder with special circumstances, of a police officer or during the commission of a second felony, David wouldn’t be eligible for the death penalty.

The next morning, David dropped Evan off at school. Holtke and Schmidt tailed in an unmarked car, when two squads moved into place, boxing David’s truck in at a traffic light. Then the deputies turned on their lights. Schmidt and Holtke got out of their car and walked over to David, ordering him out of the truck. As the handcuffs clamped around his massive wrists, David complained that they hurt. “They weren’t built for a man that big,” Holtke would say later.

In Schmidt’s unmarked car on the way to the jail for booking, David didn’t ask any questions. Finding it odd that David didn’t ask what was happening, Holtke read him his Miranda warning, and then decided to ask a question of his own: “Do you know what this is about?”

In the backseat, David said, “No.”

“Belinda,” Dean said.

David shook his head, as if stunned.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said dismissively. “That was like six years ago.”

W
hile Schmidt and Holtke drove David to the jail for processing, Tracy Shipley waited for Heather at the Ninth Grade Center. Once she arrived, the detective told David’s wife that he had been arrested on a murder charge. Shipley then asked Heather to talk to her downtown.

At her office on Lockwood, Shipley questioned Heather about what had happened in the years since she’d married David Temple. While offering little insight regarding David, Heather seemed to want to talk about Evan, proudly telling Shipley how the by then nine-year-old called her “Mommy.”

“I didn’t ask him to. He did that on his own,” she said.

“Did you and David ever talk about Belinda?” Shipley asked. “About who murdered her?”

“No, never,” Heather insisted.

She seemed guarded in her responses, and Shipley didn’t believe the woman, who looked thinner and remarkably older than the last time she’d seen her. “You never asked David who he thought murdered his wife?” Shipley said, incredulous. “You’re living with the man, and the conversation never comes up? You expect us to believe that?”

“We just never talked about it,” Heather insisted.

At the jail, David invoked his right to an attorney and refused to answer questions. Later that same day, Paul Looney walked David through the system, and by late afternoon, he was out on a $30,000 bond.

In the
Houston Chronicle
, Tom was quoted as saying about the arrest: “It’s been hell. You start to feel like maybe Belinda didn’t matter to anyone. Like maybe nobody but us cared.”

The following week, the
National Enquirer
ran photos of David, Heather and Belinda under a headline that shouted: T
HE
N
EW
L
ACI
P
ETERSON
. Heather was the “new Amber Frey,” and David, according to sources, “an outrageous liar whose deceitful tricks seem ripped directly from Scott Peterson’s game plan.”

When David and his family gathered in Looney’s office, the attorney would later say that he laid out the case as he saw it, giving his thoughts on how he would present the case in a courtroom. “I told the Temples that we were going to go with the truth. We had to proceed with the case as it was. We needed to understand that the folks on a jury weren’t going to like David. He had a reputation as a bully. The shotgun incident with Darren was bound to come up. David was unfaithful to Belinda. At the time of the murder, he was having an affair. He’d later married the woman he had the affair with. None of it made him a model citizen,” says Looney. “We’d lay that out to the jury, but then explain that the jurors weren’t going to like what they heard from the prosecutors either. Because they were prosecuting a man with no evidence that he committed a murder.”

Later, Looney would wonder if that speech lost him a client.

The next thing Kelly Siegler heard was that Looney wouldn’t be the attorney she’d face in the courtroom. David Temple and his family had hired the man considered the top gun in Texas defense attorneys, Dick DeGuerin, a man in his sixties who’d been a commanding presence in Lone Star courtrooms for decades, representing defendants in some of the most sensational cases in the state, from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Congressman Tom DeLay to Branch Davidian leader David Koresh. In November 2003, DeGuerin and a Texas dream team of lawyers—including Mike Ramsey, Chip Lewis and Brian Benken—represented New York multimillionaire Robert Durst, on charges that he murdered a neighbor while living as a cross-dresser in Galveston. The jury’s verdict in the Durst case, where the victim had been dismembered, stuffed in garbage bags and thrown into the bay, was a surprising not guilty.

Known for his trademark Stetson and cowboy boots, DeGuerin got his start working for Percy Foreman, the legendary Texas lawyer who defended Jack Ruby when he was charged with the murder of President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. In Texas, DeGuerin ranks at the top of every top lawyer list. In courtrooms, he’s famous for withering cross-examinations, exhaustive in length. “The thing with Dick DeGuerin is that he’ll pound and pound away at a witness until he gets what he wants,” says one prosecutor. “He’ll ask the same question over and over, changing it a little, until he gets the answer he needs. Then he’ll point to that bit of testimony in his closing and say, ‘See, that proves my client isn’t guilty.’”

“It made me sick,” Siegler said about the moment she first heard that DeGuerin had taken on the Temple case. What she also heard throughout the courthouse and floating around the district attorney’s office was that many in Houston’s legal community believed this was a case DeGuerin would win.

Knowing the stakes and the little physical evidence she had, Siegler understood why. There was no DNA evidence, no eyewitness, no fingerprint evidence, no ballistic evidence, and the sheriff’s department hadn’t been able to find the murder weapon. The only scientific evidence she did have, the gunshot residue tests from the FBI, DeGuerin filed a motion to keep out of the courtroom not long after taking on the case, charging evidence hadn’t been carefully preserved and could have been contaminated, along with reports that the FBI science was questionable at best. In the background, rumors flew that there was more at stake than a hefty fee for the defense attorney. DeGuerin, some said, was after revenge. The Temple case was his opportunity to hand Siegler a loss in a high-profile case, after she’d repeatedly beat him in the courtroom.

The first match between Siegler and DeGuerin had been in 2000, in Houston’s infamous “Wig Shop Murder,” the case of Dror Goldberg, an Israeli American charged with the stabbing death of store clerk Manuela Silverio. Before the case came to court, Goldberg fled, and was later found in Germany. At the trial, a school police officer testified that in high school, Goldberg had a notebook where he’d drawn a woman covered in blood and described how to commit a murder with a knife.

As Siegler saw it, that case was a learning experience. “I had never gone up against a warrior as good, as prepared, as aggressive as Dick was,” she remembered. “Dick’s an excellent lawyer. I totally respected him.”

Watching DeGuerin, Siegler thought she saw a pattern: DeGuerin, she judged, asked witnesses not involved in certain areas of the investigation questions about evidence they hadn’t handled. “Dick asks the wrong witness his questions perfectly,” she said. “People try to be helpful and answer, they make mistakes and then he uses that.”

What Siegler did was alert her witnesses not to answer any questions that fell outside their personal spheres of knowledge. In the end, Goldberg was convicted and sentenced to 48 years, and Siegler had won.

Four years later, Siegler and DeGuerin battled head-to-head in a courtroom a second time, in the case of James Tucker, an ex-pastor charged with the sexual assault of a church employee. During that trial, while the victim described what happened from the stand, Siegler reenacted the alleged assault with a male colleague. After the demonstration, Tucker pleaded no contest to an unlawful restraint charge, and Siegler won again.

DeGuerin made similar charges against Siegler. In the beginning, he insisted he was “a big supporter of Kelly.” But over the course of those two trials, in which he suffered two well-publicized losses, his opinion changed. Instead, he charged that she “inserted testimony in her questions, facts not in evidence,” and used tactics usually reserved for defense attorneys, who have more latitude in courtrooms than prosecutors. “For a defense attorney, it’s all about giving our client every possible defense,” said DeGuerin. “For a prosecutor, it’s supposed to be about justice.”

Despite the prevailing opinion that the Temple case was one he could win, DeGuerin would say that he felt less confident: “I figured it would be tough because of the long time lapse, that witnesses’ memories had faded. That David had married the girlfriend, jurors weren’t going to like. And, of course, because I’d be going up against Kelly Siegler.”

The
Houston Chronicle
dubbed the Siegler-DeGuerin match-up in the David Temple case “The Clash of the Legal Titans.” As the news hit the homicide division, many of those who’d worked on the case worried. “I heard that Dick DeGuerin was on the case. People talk about him like they quake when he enters a courtroom,” said Tracy Shipley. “He’s high-dollar, and I wondered,
why this case?
Then I heard that it was a grudge match, that DeGuerin had a thing about Kelly. I got mad. This isn’t about a grudge between two lawyers. It’s about a dead woman and her dead baby.”

One might assume that all was falling into line at the end of 2004, that finally David Temple would enter a courtroom and the questions surrounding Belinda’s murder might finally be answered. That assumption, however, would prove to be wrong. Over the coming years, Andy Kahan, the victims’ advocate who’d befriended the Lucases, would see the David Temple case as “the proverbial Murphy’s Law in force. Everything seemed to conspire to delay, delay, delay.”

The first court battle between the two bitter opponents took place on February 1 of the following year, 2005, when they met in the 178th District Court, the purview of Judge Bill Harmon, a grandfatherly man who had been sitting on the bench since 1984. That day a motions hearing was scheduled, but DeGuerin quickly rose and chastised Siegler for not yet taking the case to a grand jury and getting an indictment. “This family is living with a cloud over it,” said DeGuerin, waving his arm at where David, who looked like a husky banker in a dark gray business suit, sat surrounded by his parents and brothers. “We want to remove it as quickly as possible.”

Siegler bristled, telling the judge that she would soon take the case to a grand jury to get the indictment, but DeGuerin pushed, asking for an evidentiary hearing, one where all the evidence would be laid out, so he’d be able to see firsthand what prosecutors had against David Temple.

Some would see that approach as a mistake.

In the Harris County District Attorney’s office, there was a long-standing open file policy, where a defense attorney was able to inspect everything that prosecutors had against their clients before trial. “It worked well for us,” said another prosecutor. “A lot of times, once they see what’s out there against them, the defendants will plead out.”

There was a wrinkle, however. The open file policy wasn’t mandatory, but rather at the discretion of the prosecutor. When a defense attorney asked for an evidentiary hearing, the D.A.’s office strategy was to automatically close the file. From that point forward, the defense was given only what the law required. On that afternoon, in Harmon’s courtroom, Siegler eyed the defense attorney and asked, “Are you sure you want that, Dick? You know that will close the file.”

DeGuerin’s firm had a long history of asking for the hearings if they entered a case pre-indictment, and DeGuerin frowned at Siegler and insisted that was precisely what he wanted. Judge Harmon set the evidentiary hearing for March 2, but in the end, it would prove a fruitless exercise. Weeks later, Siegler went to a grand jury and got the indictment. Once she had it, under Texas law, DeGuerin was no longer entitled to the hearing. Dick DeGuerin, one of Texas’s best defense attorneys, had lost the opportunity to see the evidence against his client and achieved nothing in return.

“I was trying to get it off dead center,” DeGuerin would say later. “I was pushing the case along. Kelly used that as an excuse to close the file. I knew I wouldn’t get the exam trial. You never get them in murder cases.”

“Dick was a prosecutor before a defense attorney. He should have known,” Siegler would counter. “Asking for the exam trial was a dumb move. How do you prepare for a circumstantial evidence case without seeing the evidence?”

As he awaited trial, David Temple was suspended with pay from Hastings. Later, as the time dragged on, he’d be sent to work at an alternative school in the Alief district, teaching physical education. “It’s a place where they have the toughest kids,” said one of his colleagues. “A really hard place to teach.”

Meanwhile at his desk on Lockwood, Dean Holtke organized the Temple evidence, cataloguing each item with a master number, to avoid confusion between different lab and evidence numbers that had accumulated over the years. When the trial began, he didn’t want any potential for misunderstanding. Whenever they talked about the Temple case, he and Mark Schmidt pondered what would happen in the courtroom, how tough DeGuerin could be. “We were stressing out about it,” said Holtke. “We believed David Temple was guilty, and we had one shot at him, and that was it.”

Siegler was doing her own methodical trial preparation. First she assessed the overriding issues. One was whether or not she could put Heather Temple on the stand. In most states, including Texas, a marital privilege prevents prosecutors from forcing spouses to testify against each other. It’s considered a way to keep the institution of marriage sacred. But Siegler determined that didn’t apply in the Temple case, because the privilege wasn’t retroactive; David and Heather weren’t married at the time of Belinda’s murder.

That August, the attorneys were back in the courtroom. Kelly Siegler, true to her warning, had closed the file, and Dick DeGuerin wanted the judge to release evidence, including any videos, scientific reports and alibis. The judge took it under advisement, and then scheduled another hearing for the following day to announce his decision, but this time, when DeGuerin arrived, Siegler handed Judge Harmon a motion asking for his recusal from the case. Siegler wanted the judge to step down, and DeGuerin was furious.

The rift had begun a month earlier, over a prison informant. After seeing an article in the
Houston Chronicle
, the man, with a long record, wrote to David at the address in the article, the one on Round Valley. The new owners turned the letter over to the district attorney’s office, and it was given to Siegler. In the letter, the inmate said that in 1999, he’d shared a cell with a man who bragged about “getting away with murder” and said his motive had been revenge against David, who had “done him wrong in the past.”