Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (35 page)

In the days that followed, Siegler brought the inmate to Houston to interview him on a bench warrant, but using a different case number so as not to alert the media. “It’s something that’s done relatively often,” says another prosecutor. “Not everyone does it, but it’s not unusual.”

DeGuerin charged that Siegler had taken the step to hide the inmate’s existence from the defense, and to frighten the inmate, who was afraid of his fate if the word got out, because “snitches get killed in prison.”

Eventually, the truthfulness of the inmate came into question by Siegler, while DeGuerin asserted that the witness had been terrorized. Whatever the reason, the inmate later refused to testify. In the meantime, however, DeGuerin had asked one of his former law students to represent the man. That lawyer filed a complaint with the Texas State Bar against Siegler, charging that she had falsified a court document by substituting an unrelated case number. The lawyer wanted Siegler’s law license revoked. “It was a chicken-shit thing to do,” said Siegler, who was notified on a Friday night while she was home with her family.

If there remained any congeniality between Siegler and DeGuerin, the filing replaced it with more bad blood. It was as if this were truly the proverbial final straw. Judge Harmon was caught in the middle when he wrote a letter to the state bar backing Siegler, saying that what she’d done wasn’t unusual in Harris County and showed no ill will. The complaint against Siegler was denied, and the threat to take away her license evaporated. But the repercussions weren’t over.

While Siegler liked Harmon and considered him a good judge, she had some fear that DeGuerin could overpower him. “Dick’s such a good lawyer, some of the judges are intimidated by him,” she said. “I thought maybe that could happen. Judge Harmon is laid-back, and I thought he’d give Dick a lot of latitude.”

“Kelly saw it as an opportunity to get rid of Bill Harmon,” says DeGuerin. “She filed to have him removed because she wanted a judge who’d be more favorable to the prosecution.”

Siegler would say it was a matter of fairness, since Harmon had backed her in the complaint, and that DeGuerin had brought it on himself. DeGuerin fought Siegler’s motion, and the battle was on again. Eventually, Siegler prevailed, but in a roundabout way. As the case languished on the court calendar, Judge Harmon left the 178th, replaced on the case by a visiting judge, Douglas Shaver, a retired, balding man with a stern frown and a monk’s fringe of pure white hair, whose judicial attitude was markedly stricter.

Dick DeGuerin was furious, and Kelly Siegler delighted.

That February, the Temples attempted to show up Tom Lucas where he’d become something of an expert, on television pleading his case. Nancy Grace was airing her first show on CNN, and Andy Kahan had introduced her years earlier to Tom and Carol. The TV personality had listened as they detailed Belinda’s murder and been touched by their sadness and frustration. Having never forgotten Tom and Carol, Grace invited the Lucases as her first guests to tell their story.

That afternoon, in a preemptive strike, the Temple family, sans David, Heather, and Evan, stood at Belinda and Erin’s grave and read a statement vehemently defending David. “This district attorney’s office has decided to choreograph an ill-fated prosecution against David,” Darren said. “It is not coincidence that David’s arrest was a few days after the Laci Peterson verdict.”

That night on the show, Nancy Grace pointed out that the Temples’ graveside statement was the first they’d issued in the six years since Belinda’s death, and that they’d chosen to do it on the day the Lucases were flying to New York to be on her television show. After showing a clip of Darren declaring his brother “completely innocent,” Grace introduced Tom.

“Do you think David Temple murdered your daughter?” Grace asked.

“After looking at all the facts…I believe David Temple killed Belinda,” Tom said.

When David’s father got on the camera via a Houston hookup, he defended the press conference, saying that he couldn’t think “of a better place to do it…. That little piece of real estate is very precious to us. We are the ones who care for it.”

On the interview that night, Ken Temple appeared frustrated, pushing Grace, with her famously acerbic approach, to let him depict the case the way he saw it, as if he and his family were the primary victims. “We’ve remained quiet a long time,” David’s father said. “We’ve suffered and we’ve grieved silently.”

On the roller coaster that propelled the Temple case toward trial, the prosecution hit a high point that April, when Mark Schmidt, who had continued to investigate, finally received a report from the ATF that showed David’s father had, indeed, as David had told so many, purchased shotguns. On the government paperwork faxed to his office, Schmidt saw that on December 11, 1985, Ken Temple purchased a .12-gauge. By then, Darren was off in college, and the only two Temple sons living at home were Kevin and David. Was that shotgun a Christmas gift for David?

Then, from the view of the prosecution, the roller coaster plummeted over the top of a cliff.

On September 1, 2005, while Holtke and Schmidt awaited the metallurgy results, the FBI sent David Rossi, the lead crime-scene investigator on the case, a letter. In it, an FBI lab spokesman said that the agency was abandoning all metallurgy studies. “We no longer do these tests,” it said, without explanation.

Days later, a story broke in the
Washington Post
discrediting the testing. For decades the FBI had been contending that they could break down what they described as the chemical signature of bullets and shotgun shells from gunshot residue and tie the GSR back to a specific source, even a specific box of shells or bullets. The technique had even been used in the investigation of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, when the FBI maintained they’d been able to match all the recovered fragments from the fatal bullets to a single source, suggesting Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.

The problem was that, in an independent review, the National Academy of Sciences found the testing “deeply flawed” and concluded that it gave misleading results. Within days, a letter was faxed to police departments across the country, advising them that the FBI would no longer do metallurgy testing. “It was junk science,” DeGuerin would say. “And it brought into question a lot of the gunshot residue testing the FBI lab was doing.”

The FBI lab’s result was the only forensic evidence in the Temple case, and not long after, Craig Goodhart stood before Judge Shaver explaining that prosecutors needed an extension. The FBI expert who had done the work on the Temple evidence had been decertified. He was no longer licensed to do GSR testing. The FBI had assigned a new expert, Diana Wright, but she wouldn’t use the prior results. The bottom line was that the Temple evidence was again in the queue to be retested. Shaver granted the request, giving the prosecutors more time.

Months later, when the results finally came in, they weren’t as beneficial for the prosecution. Unlike the first examiner, who found GSR on David’s clothes and shoes, Wright only found it on one item, the warm-up jacket recovered from the bed in the master bedroom. Wright also wouldn’t go so far as to say that she could positively link the GSR on the jacket to that found on the clothes Belinda wore.

“We were disappointed,” says Siegler. She and Goodhart talked over the effect on the case and what they still had to show the jury. They’d just lost most of their only forensic evidence. “But we decided we could live with it, and we decided to go ahead with the case.”

Still, that didn’t settle the matter of the gunshot residue. Although prosecutors only had one remaining item of David’s clothing to point to, DeGuerin filed a motion that argued that, too, should be barred from evidence. The FBI lab was so contaminated, he insisted, no tests conducted there could be considered reliable. A storm was brewing over the gunshot evidence, one that would continue to build.

As the months passed, the battlefronts multiplied in the Temple case. While the fight over the GSR evidence raged, Siegler filed another motion, this one to allow extraneous offenses into the trial. Among the prior transgressions of David’s charged in the motion were the car robberies committed in high school, the assault of the basketball player in Nacogdoches, that he’d committed criminal mischief against his high-school girlfriend when he’d reportedly killed her pet rabbits, and something that must have added to the Temples’ seething anger: that in 1984, David had held a shotgun up to Darren’s head.

Anticipating her testimony, Cindi Thompson had talked to her father about whether or not to take the stand. Their families were close, and she felt certain the Temples would chastise hers if she did. She hated to see her family suffer. “If you were involved in something, I wouldn’t expect Maureen and Ken to cover for you,” Cindi’s father advised her. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

Yet Cindi remained troubled about the testimony. Her angst only worsened when, days later, Darren Temple called. They’d talked at times over the years, like the old friends that they were. “What is this about?” he asked, mentioning that he’d seen her name on a list of witnesses for the prosecution.

Cindi told him it was about the night David held a shotgun on him while Maureen pleaded with David not to shoot. As Cindi described it, the conversation that followed was strained. “I’m not saying I didn’t tell you that,” Darren responded. “I’m saying it didn’t happen.”

It seemed clear to Cindi that Darren was telling her not to testify, and they argued, Darren growing increasingly upset. “If asked, I have to tell the truth,” Cindi said. She remembered that night well, including the fear on Darren’s face. She had no doubt that it was real.

“Yes, you have to tell the truth,” Darren agreed. “But I’m not saying I didn’t tell you that. I’m saying that it didn’t happen.”

Upset, Thompson called Siegler, telling her what had happened and explaining that she worried that testifying would hurt her family. “I’m not the wicked witch,” Kelly told her. “If you really can’t, if your family will suffer because of this for years to come, I understand.”

Cindi thought about it for a moment and then said, “No. I have to. I have to do it for Belinda.”

It seemed that circumstances continued to plot against the trial. Diana Wright, the FBI analyst who had conducted the second set of GSR testing, was pregnant and wouldn’t be available for testimony for months, so Murphy’s Law ruled yet again and the trial date was again postponed, this time to October 16, 2007, a full three years after David Temple’s indictment.

Meanwhile, Kelly Siegler packed a long red file box with index cards, hundreds of white rectangles, each bearing a question to ask David Temple if and when he took the stand. It was a complicated case covering a long time span and filling eight boxes of evidence, but Siegler believed it formed a web, one that could ensnare David Temple.

As the weeks before the trial dwindled, Siegler interviewed witnesses and pored over reports. There were disappointments. She’d heard that Michael Slater, one of David’s fellow coaches, was the last to see him at Hastings on the morning of the murder, and others told her that Slater said David was fuming at Belinda, furious that she’d made him leave work early to care for Evan. Yet Slater, a friend of Heather’s and David’s, said it wasn’t true. “Mr. Slater wouldn’t go there,” she says. “If it was true, he’d never admit it.”

One of the biggest problems for the prosecution was that Siegler still couldn’t put a .12-gauge shotgun in David Temple’s hands. Although she had documentation showing Ken Temple bought one such weapon in 1985 and plenty of witnesses to testify that David had shotgun shells and talked often of bird hunting, no one could testify they saw a shotgun at the Round Valley house. Would jurors hold that against the prosecution? Would they be willing to convict without a murder weapon?

Making the situation even more complicated, by then, the prosecutors had been dealt another blow. Sergeant Sam Gonsoulin, the first to respond to the scene, had died of cancer. “I had eight pages of questions for him,” says Siegler. “He was the best one to talk about the dog, Shaka, and he was the one who’d had the most interaction with David, one of those who saw that he didn’t seem the least bit upset about Belinda’s murder.”

As the trial neared, Siegler worried, but she realized the evidence was what it was. She couldn’t change it. All she could do was walk into the courtroom prepared.

One of her main concerns was making sure her witnesses, especially those who’d investigated the case, were ready. They had to understand what she did about DeGuerin, how good he was at cross-examination. “I worried about Chuck Leithner losing his temper, and that Mark Schmidt, who likes to talk, would answer questions he shouldn’t,” she says. “People are people whether they’re witnesses or not. Their personalities can affect how they do on the stand.”

To preview the evidence and prepare her witnesses, two weeks before the trial began, a dry run was held, a mock trial in which the evidence was laid out and the witnesses were prepared. Not all the witnesses would be grilled, only the detectives who’d investigated the case. In a locked courtroom, Siegler put one after the other on the witness stand. She questioned them, taking them through their testimony as they recounted their part of the puzzle that made up the case against David Temple.

Needing someone to play Dick DeGuerin, to cross-examine the witnesses, Siegler enlisted the aid of one of homicide’s brightest minds, Lieutenant John Denholm, a thirty-year veteran of law enforcement who was in the final months of law school. A husky man with a hoarse voice and an authoritative manner, Denholm prepared by reading the Temple murder book, forming questions for each of the detectives, and introducing tactics he believed DeGuerin would use in the courtroom.

Over the course of a day, Siegler and Denholm grilled the detectives, from Holtke and Schmidt to Leithner. In the courtroom were nearly twenty of Siegler’s fellow prosecutors, who made suggestions. In her opening statement, one thought Siegler approached the case too chronologically, and that she needed to put the important facts up front. “It was all an exercise to prepare because of Dick DeGuerin,” says Siegler. “He’d be prepared, and we had to be.”