Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (38 page)

There was a lot of repair work needed when DeGuerin took over Heather’s testimony. He asked about David’s demeanor the day Belinda’s headstone arrived. “He was very upset,” the current Mrs. David Temple said, appearing more relaxed.

“Have you ever heard David say a negative word about his marriage with Belinda?”

“Never,” she answered. The detectives, she said again, forced her to include David’s professions of love in her statement—she hadn’t wanted to. Yet what she didn’t say was that it wasn’t true.

At times, even after the judge ruled she shouldn’t, Heather charged ahead with an answer, leading him to clear the courtroom again to chastise her. There seemed little doubt that David’s new wife was intent on getting her view in front of the jury. Yet she said the detectives were the ones with “an agenda.”

Despite everything, including the shrine of Belinda’s photos David’s parents kept in their home, she said her marriage to David was strong and their relationship with Evan good. “Would you be his wife, would you be the stepmother of Evan, would you be in the Temple family, if you had questions about [David killing Belinda]?”

“No, sir,” Heather said.

Perhaps Heather should have realized that her testimony would be challenged by much of what Tara Hall would say on the stand. Where Heather suggested she was practically held captive when they made their first statements, Hall said they drove their own car and were free to leave. “Were the detectives nice to you?” Siegler asked.

“Yes,” Hall answered.

And when it came to the year after the murder, when Heather insisted she and David were merely friends, Hall testified that a month after the murder, David sent Heather Valentine’s Day flowers and that spring he planted flowers at their town house.

Throughout Hall’s testimony, David, who’d been stoic throughout much of the trial, scribbled on a yellow legal pad, passing it to his attorneys. When DeGuerin took over the questioning, he pressed Hall, insisting that the flowers and the work in the town house courtyard had been a full year after Belinda’s murder. But Hall shook her head, saying she was sure she had the date right.

When it came to the relationship with a married man, DeGuerin asked, “Did you give Heather any advice?”

“I didn’t think she would welcome my opinion,” Hall said.

Yet not all would go so well for the prosecutors.

In contrast to all the sensational testimony and the crowds filling the courtroom, one Monday hearing that followed would be poorly attended, yet it was to decide an important matter: whether or not FBI tests showing gunshot residue on David’s warm-up jacket were admissible. Craig Goodhart argued for the prosecution, while one of DeGuerin’s partners, Matt Hennessy, challenged the evidence for the defense. Kelly Siegler never thought her side wouldn’t prevail. Yet the defense had a lot of ammunition, a wealth of well-documented problems at the FBI, including studies that said the lab was contaminated with GSR. Hennessy was persuasive, and, to the prosecutors’ disappointment, Judge Shaver ruled with the defense. With that, prosecutors lost their only piece of forensic evidence.

Late that afternoon, Siegler and Goodhart met in her office to talk about what the ruling had done to the case. “We decided it would have been a wash in the end anyway,” says Siegler. “If it had been included, Dick DeGuerin would have just told the jury about all the problems at the lab and called it unreliable. We felt good about the way the trial was going, so we forged ahead.”

One reason Siegler wasn’t overly upset was that something else had happened over the weekend, something that might finally allow her to put a .12-gauge shotgun in David Temple’s hands. Throughout many trials, tips filter in to both sides behind the scenes. For the prosecutors, one was from an old friend of the Temple family who suggested that Siegler contact Clint Stockdick, a high-school friend of Kevin’s. When she did, Stockdick seemed reluctant but finally cooperated. That Monday the disappointment of the GSR evidence was lessened when Siegler added Stockdick and his wife, Jenifer, to the witness list.

“What will he say?” DeGuerin asked.

“Ask Kevin,” Siegler answered. “He grew up with Clint. He’ll know.”

That evening, Siegler would later report that Stockdick’s phone rang but he didn’t pick up. “Kevin left a message,” says Siegler. “He told Clint, ‘We’re all clear on this. David never owned a twelve-gauge, only a twenty-gauge shotgun.’”

On the stand, Clint Stockdick described the Temples as his childhood second family. It appeared evident that he hadn’t wanted to testify against David, yet he knowledgeably discussed the Temple-family shotguns. He’d hunted often with the Temple brothers, and said they traded shotguns between them. First, he said that in the past the Temples used to reload shells, like the buckshot used in the murder. Then Stockdick testified that he’d not only never seen David with a .20 gauge, he’d never seen one at the Temple household. Instead, all three Temple brothers, including David, used .12-gauge shotguns. The family owned four of them, including a sawed-off shotgun, a Mossberg.

“When David Temple went hunting, what did he use? Siegler asked.

“He used a twelve-gauge,” said Stockdick.

“Not a twenty-gauge?”

“No, ma’am,” Stockdick answered. “I’m positive.”

Throughout the testimony, DeGuerin looked uncomfortable, frowning, writing on a legal pad. “Were you aware that they had a twenty-gauge?” DeGuerin asked.

“No, sir,” Stockdick said shaking his head. The defense attorney came at the question from different angles, but never shook Stockdick’s testimony.

After her husband left the stand, Jenifer testified briefly, backing up what Quinton Harlan had said earlier, that she, too, had seen an opened box of shotgun shells at David Temple’s house after Belinda’s murder.

In the days that followed, much would be put before the jury, from Debbie Berger’s memories on how unhappy Belinda and David’s marriage had become to the ever-expanding timeline that filled in the events of January 11, 1999, the day of the murder. When Berger took the stand, she felt nervous, but once there, she settled down. “I had a calm come over me,” she’d say later. “It was the last thing I could do for Belinda.”

There were those small moments when it appeared the momentum of the case might swing to the defense, as when Mike Ruggiero took the stand and talked of an unidentified car speeding through the neighborhood late that afternoon. But that possibility seemed to implode when other neighbors testified they’d walked by the Temple house or driven by that afternoon and seen nothing. One impression Ruggiero and the other neighbors agreed on was that Shaka was a highly protective animal. “I got stopped dead in my tracks by their dog,” he said, explaining that he feared the animal.

At times, Ruggiero appeared to be trying to help his old neighbor, as when he talked about Creekstone—which others described as quiet—as if it were riddled with crime. Yet, after David pounded on the Ruggieros’ door, he didn’t wait for Mike, who came out and followed behind him offering help. And instead of taking the dog inside with him, where it might confront a burglar, David left Shaka in the backyard.

On cross-examination, Ruggiero insisted that David appeared frantic that day. He said Evan didn’t look ill, as others had described him. And when it came to the door, the one that earlier he’d said he didn’t see hit anything, Ruggiero testified that it could have hit the hutch, as DeGuerin had suggested as an explanation for the glass pattern.

That afternoon, while David ran toward the house and Ruggiero followed, Siegler asked if “the word ‘Belinda’ ever came out of David’s mouth.”

“No,” Ruggiero answered.

“Have you ever asked yourself why not, Mr. Ruggiero?” Siegler asked, implying that David didn’t shout out his wife’s name because he already knew Belinda was dead.

As the prosecution wound down, witnesses filled holes in the case Siegler and Goodhart had presented. Buck Bindeman proved one of the most important, as he testified that during one of David’s unaccounted-for periods that afternoon, at 5
P.M
., when David said he was traveling from the grocery store to Home Depot, Bindeman saw him at an intersection in his truck, not far from David’s parents’ house on Katy Hockley Road, surrounded by the rice fields where he’d so often hunted.

On the stand, Bindeman described David’s truck down to the shade of blue.

As the prosecution’s last witness, Brenda Lucas had come to speak for her twin sister, to tell of the last time they were together, when Belinda appeared gravely unhappy in her marriage to David Temple.

“Was Shaka ever in the garage?”

“No,” Brenda said, saying the pet-food bowls in the photos that DeGuerin pointed to on the garage floor weren’t for Shaka but for Belinda’s gray cat, Willie.

Like the Harlans, Brenda described the way David ridiculed Belinda. “The whole day of her birthday, did you see David give Belinda anything?” Siegler asked.

“No,” Brenda testified.

By the end of Brenda’s testimony, the lies David told that New Year’s Eve were before the jurors, along with evidence of David’s callous attitude toward his wife. Finally, Siegler played one of the tape-recorded conversations Brenda had with David, the one from September 14, 1999. As Siegler displayed a crime-scene photo of David’s jewelry, including his wedding ring and watch, David was heard saying he had his jewelry on at the time of the burglary.

In front of the jurors, Brenda had proven that David Temple was a liar.

“You agreed with David on the tape that they were happy,” DeGuerin said.

“They were not happy,” Brenda countered.

“It was an effort to get him to say something you could use against him,” DeGuerin said.

With that Brenda agreed.

After a short break, DeGuerin took the floor and did what attorneys often do after prosecutors finish presenting their case: He asked for a summary judgment, a not-guilty verdict. As the attorneys argued, Judge Shaver listened. “They haven’t proven their case,” DeGuerin contended. “It’s at least as likely that it was a botched burglary.”

“What are the odds that three days after David Temple tells Heather Scott he is falling in love with her a burglar breaks in and murders Belinda?” Siegler scoffed. “This is a case of little bits and pieces. You put the pieces together, and you have a picture.”

Judge Doug Shaver looked down, shook his head and said, “Motion denied.” The trial would continue.

D
espite all Siegler’s bits and pieces, many in the courtroom wondered if the prosecution had proven David Temple’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. A group of reporters congregated outside the doorway to the 178th District Court and whispered. “Pretty flimsy,” said one who’d covered many cases over many years. “I don’t think there’s enough. No weapon. No forensics. Not a drop of DNA.”

Another nodded. “You may be right,” she said. “I don’t think I’d be able to convict based on what we know so far.”

As they talked, others offered opinions. One was that DeGuerin would quickly rest, without putting on a defense. With only the prosecution’s case, jurors, it seemed, would have to acquit. This outcome was what Donna Goode and Ted Wilson had worried about nine years earlier: that the case was too thin. Although it appeared David Temple was the murderer, there wasn’t enough evidence to prove it. In fact, since the GSR evidence had been ruled inadmissible, Goode and Wilson had nearly all the evidence Siegler put before the jury within a year of Belinda’s death. The exception, and it was an important one, was Clint Stockdick. For the first time, his testimony put a .12-gauge shotgun in David Temple’s hands. But was that enough?

Perhaps the only one who didn’t consider the possibility was Kelly Siegler. After battling him in the past, she thought she had DeGuerin figured out. “I knew that he’d prepared his case and that he wouldn’t not put it on,” she says. “He’d told the jurors during the opening that he would put David and his family on the stand. Dick wasn’t the kind of lawyer who’d disappoint them.”

So even though she realized the limitations of her case, Siegler was banking that DeGuerin would proceed with his, and that it would work to her advantage.

The following morning, November 6, as Siegler predicted, Dick DeGuerin walked into the courtroom and called his first witness, a custodian of records for the apartment Heather moved into after she moved out of the Perthshire town house. The reason was that on the stand, Tara Hall had maintained that Heather moved into an apartment of her own just months after Belinda’s murder, while Heather said she lived with Hall for another full year and moved out in summer 2001.

The custodian produced records that showed Heather was, perhaps, right. The first month she lived in the new apartment was in the summer of 2001. That was also when Heather filed an official change of address with the School District. Still, Hall, who was recalled to the stand, didn’t back down about how quickly David renewed his courtship of Heather, even when DeGuerin pushed her. She insisted David sent Heather flowers within weeks of Belinda’s murder, and that it was the first spring when he was at their town house planting flowers. “I know because it struck me as so inappropriate at the time,” says Hall. “His wife and baby had just died, and he was courting Heather.”

As the questioning proceeded, the tension in the courtroom built. At times, DeGuerin slammed his yellow legal pad down with a sharp slap onto the defense desk; his face flushed a bright red. Siegler and Goodhart visibly bristled with energy, appearing to want to lash back, Siegler’s eyes burning with anger. To the surprise of many—since she’d been such a difficult witness—DeGuerin put Heather back on the stand. It backfired during cross-examination, when Siegler brought up a three-inch binder of Heather’s school e-mails. During her first round of testimony, Heather said that just days after the murder, Quinton sent her a suggestive e-mail. “Find it,” Siegler said, dropping the binder on the witness stand, the sound echoing through the courtroom.

“It’s not there,” DeGuerin said, jumping up. “She knows the e-mails aren’t all there.”

For not the first time, Judge Shaver shot looks that chastised both attorneys, as if warning them to cool down.

There would be fourteen witnesses that day. Among them were all three of the Roberts boys, now young men, who as young children in 1999 heard a “bang” that sounded like a shotgun blast. It was their testimony DeGuerin counted on to set the time of the murder at approximately 4:30, when David was at Brookshire Brothers. If the Roberts brothers’ accounts seemed credible, the jury could have reasonable doubt.

The brothers took the stand and told their stories. Meanwhile, in the witness room waited one of the Temples’ former neighbors from Round Valley, a man who’d told police that on the day of the murder he, too, had heard a bang at 4:30 that afternoon. But he had been standing outside at the time, and he said he saw the source: a backfiring pickup truck. The prosecution’s problem was that nine years later, the man’s recollections were hazy. So Siegler listened to the Roberts boys, watched the jury’s reaction, and decided not to call her rebuttal witness. In her judgment, the jurors would see the boys as too young at the time to be sure about what they heard.

Peggy Ruggiero’s husband had testified early in the trial, called by the prosecution. A friendly woman with dark hair, she appeared nervous when she took the stand. She described the Temples’ marriage as happy and recounted the day of the murder, backing up much of what her husband had said, yet her testimony ultimately hurt the defense. Repeatedly, DeGuerin had suggested that Evan wasn’t sick that day. It was an important point in the way he’d structured his case, because if Evan was truly ill, it made little sense for David, a doting father, to have taken the toddler to the park and shopping.

“Do you remember testifying to the grand jury that Evan didn’t eat much of his Happy Meal that night?” Siegler asked on cross-examination.

“Correct,” Ruggiero said, backing up the day care workers who testified that the usually ravenous toddler was so unwell that day that he had no appetite.

Over the weeks of the defense, it would seem that Dick DeGuerin’s case never quite gelled. An expert witness testified on the glass pattern from the broken door window, again suggesting that the door hit the hutch behind it, causing the glass to scatter into the den instead of straight ahead. But the diagram he showed the jury didn’t match crime-scene photos.

Recalling Mark Schmidt also proved a disappointment. With an earlier witness, DeGuerin had portrayed the Temples’ neighborhood as a dangerous place, one where other murders had occurred in the past. While the defense attorney used Schmidt to again point a finger at Joe Sanders, detailing the .12-gauges and shotgun shells found in his home, Siegler presented the detective with records of all the police reports for the Temples’ subdivision for 1998 and the first months of 1999. Schmidt described them as nearly all nuisance calls.

“How many murders?” she asked.

“One,” Schmidt said. The victim was Belinda Temple.

In hindsight, however, the most detrimental testimony would come from those who most wanted to help David Temple.

On the stand, David’s father appeared like an erect, proud man, a part-time preacher and a family man. He went through a brief history of the family, with its generations in Katy, and then talked about his sons. Yes, he’d bought his boys shotguns, he said. But although he’d bought his other sons .12-gauges, he said he’d bought David a .20-gauge. Why? Because it was cheaper.

“Did you ever buy any other shotgun for David?” DeGuerin asked.

“No,” Ken Temple said. What happened to David’s shotgun? After saying the barrel had split, he said, “David destroyed it.”

Ken talked of his family’s love for Belinda, and, as all David’s family would when talking of her, sounded sincere. And he insisted he saw none of what others had testified to, that his son ridiculed her or had been controlling. He described Belinda as strong and spirited, a woman who would never have put up with such behavior. That last day, he said Belinda stopped to pick up Maureen’s soup, and they talked briefly. Belinda was in a hurry to get home. Yet he insisted Evan wasn’t ill. When Ken and Maureen learned that Belinda was dead, “it was like a fog…it was like being in a daze that you were hearing words but nothing was ringing true or sounding real.”

The police didn’t interview but interrogated the family, he said: “They told us, ‘You need to prepare yourself that your son is guilty of murder.’”

“Mr. Temple, can you not say that Evan was sick?” Siegler asked, when she took over. If the toddler didn’t want to eat or play, what did that mean about the way the youngster felt?

“Not well,” Ken said, in a clipped, irritated response.

The prosecutor then asked about the harmonious marriage Ken described between Belinda and David, asking, “Would you agree with me that the affair would disrupt a little bit of that harmony you told us about?”

“At the time, yes,” Ken agreed, but then, with an undercurrent of anger, he said, “I have never discussed the affair or its details with David.”

When it came to the shotguns, Siegler said, “So you’ve got three boys. Oldest gets a twelve-gauge. Youngest gets a twelve-gauge. Middle son gets a twenty-gauge?”

“Yes,” Ken said. The questions kept coming, the Temple patriarch forced to repeat his testimony until he turned to the judge and demanded, “Have I not said ‘yes’ enough?”

The judge looked at the gray-haired man on the stand and frowned. First Heather Temple had been so difficult the judge warned her to cooperate; now David’s father displayed little patience with the proceedings, as if he were above it all and the courtroom simply a distraction. “You will listen to her questions and answer her questions,” Judge Shaver ordered, leaving no room for argument. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” Ken said. Yet he continued to argue with Siegler, even over details like the date of his grand jury testimony. During his testimony with the defense attorney, Ken described what would come to be known as the Temple family meeting, when others waited outside while David confessed his infidelity. During it, he asked David if the family needed to know anything. In response, David admitted he’d been with another woman, and that he’d spent New Year’s with her.

“How many times did David deny to you all that he needed to tell you anything before he told you about the affair?” Siegler asked.

“Maybe once,” he said.

“Did he tell you it had been going on for three months?” Siegler asked.

“He did not,” Ken responded.

When asked if any of the women in the family were at the meeting, Temple responded in oddly stilted language: “The females were not present at that time.”

“Your sons knew the [rice fields] like the backs of their hands?” Siegler asked, bringing the jury back to her theory about where David had disposed of the shotgun.

“They knew the acreage around our home, yes,” David’s father agreed.

The Temples’ oldest son, Darren, followed his father onto the stand. A middle-aged man with a slight paunch, he vaguely resembled David. When DeGuerin asked Darren if he and David looked alike, the oldest Temple son casually joked, “They say I’m the better-looking one.”

But quickly DeGuerin turned the questioning to hunting and guns. Like his father, Darren insisted that David wasn’t an avid hunter and that his middle brother had owned a .20-gauge, not a .12-gauge, shotgun. When it came to Clint Stockdick’s testimony that David shot a .12-gauge and that Clint had never even seen a .20-gauge at the Temple household, Darren shrugged it off. “Did you ever see anything to indicate to you that Belinda and David’s marriage was on the rocks?” DeGuerin asked.

“No, sir,” Darren answered, describing their union as a “very loving, healthy relationship.”

David, Darren said, was devastated by the murder, sobbing and distraught, and he described the family meeting as “intense, between my father and his three sons.”

“Did you learn about the affair?” DeGuerin asked.

“We learned about the affair,” Darren said, describing his own reaction to the news as “visibly angered.” When Maureen returned from the beauty salon, she was told, and their mother was “incredibly emotional…upset…disappointed in David.”

During cross-examination, Siegler led Darren directly back to that family meeting, two days after Belinda’s murder. Earlier, with DeGuerin, Darren had talked of David’s “affair,” but now Siegler asked, “Do you remember testifying in the grand jury…that your brother was not having an
affair
and that you had no knowledge of any
affair
?”

“I don’t remember saying that to the grand jury,” Darren said.

To refresh his memory, Siegler handed Darren his grand-jury testimony. Immediately, it appeared Darren realized his predicament. “There’s a definition of
affair
that I would like to discuss,” he hedged.

“Are we doing a Bill Clinton?” Siegler asked with a skeptical frown. “We’re going to argue about what
affair
means?”

Suddenly, Darren changed his language, using the word “unfaithful.”

“So you didn’t lie to the grand jury?” Siegler asked, with a scoff.

More than one juror frowned when Darren said, “No, I did not.”

In the end, when he left the stand, the impression left in the room was that Darren Temple and his father had been less than honest: first, about David’s shotgun; second, when Darren testified at the grand jury.

The response to Darren deteriorated further when Siegler brought up Cindi Thompson. The defense had filed a motion to prevent her from testifying about the shotgun incident, and to discuss the matter, the judge cleared the jury and then asked to hear what questions Siegler had for Darren about the event.

In slow, dramatic detail, Siegler described what Thompson would testify to, that Darren had told her that David held a shotgun to his oldest brother’s head while their mother begged for Darren’s life. Throughout, Darren shook his head, denying it ever happened. The judge reserved his ruling on the testimony for a later date, but that evening, Cindi received a text message from Darren, asking her to talk to DeGuerin’s investigator. “We need your help,” Darren said.

Cindi didn’t respond.

The following day three more of the Temples would take the stand: Becky, Kevin and Maureen. Sparks flew with all their testimonies.

An outside salesperson with a software company, Becky looked professional on the stand. She said she’d never felt intimidated by the Temple men, and that Belinda was a strong, independent woman. She described David as a remarkable father, and said that throughout the last year of Belinda’s life, the marriage was loving and respectful. But Tammey and Brenda had said Becky voiced very different opinions, including her belief that David was Belinda’s murderer. “Do you remember a time, Mrs. Temple, when you had a conversation with Tammey Harlan and you told Tammey that you thought David killed Belinda?” Siegler asked.