Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (39 page)

“Oh, my Lord,” DeGuerin said, standing up and slamming down his legal pad.

Judge Shaver cleared the jurors from the room, and the defense attorney charged Siegler’s question was inflammatory. With as much vigor, the prosecutor assured the judge that Harlan had told her just that, and that she’d asked the question in good faith. Furious, DeGuerin spat out his reply: “I don’t think anything Tammey Harlan said was in good faith.”

The judge ruled for Siegler, the jury returned, and the questions continued. Much of what Brenda had on the tapes contradicted what Becky said on the stand, and Siegler asked to put the tapes in evidence. In the end, a compromise was reached, when Becky agreed to stipulate in front of the jury to nine different statements she’d made to Brenda, including that after the murder she didn’t speak to David for months, that Kevin and Maureen had a falling-out over Heather, and that David’s parents were the ones who took Evan to visit Belinda and Erin’s grave. One of the most damaging statements was when Becky told Brenda that she didn’t want to see Heather because, “I don’t like to be lied to.”

When the judge allowed the statements in, he said to the defense attorney: “So you understand, Mr. DeGuerin, I seem to have a situation here where one side I hear about [the Temple family] being Ozzie and Harriet, and on the other side seems to be information that that isn’t true. You painted in one direction. I need to let them show the facts that show it may not be true.”

As her testimony continued, Becky Temple cried, saying that she had “a lot of anger, a lot of hurt,” after the murder. “We couldn’t stand to live [in Katy] anymore…couldn’t stand to drive down the I-10 freeway and see a billboard with my sister-in-law’s picture on it….” No matter where she went, Becky saw posters and fliers with Belinda’s picture.

When he took the stand, Becky’s husband, Kevin, like his older brother, insisted that David had never owned a .12-gauge shotgun. When it came to his old friend Clint Stockdick, Kevin suggested he must be mistaken when he said the Temples had four .12-gauge shotguns and no .20-gauge. Yet, when Siegler asked, “Is Clint Stockdick a truthful man?” Kevin answered, “Yes.”

“Where’s the Mossberg?” Siegler asked. Mossberg was the maker of the .12-gauge shotgun Stockdick remembered David shooting, the one Stockdick testified was cut down after the barrel split. “Remember a Mossberg?” Siegler pushed.

“No,” Kevin answered, with a frown.

“Anybody in your family have any paperwork on that twenty-gauge?” Siegler prodded, insinuating it didn’t exist.

“I don’t,” Kevin answered.

Like Darren, Kevin had told the grand jury he knew nothing about David’s affair. “Was that the truth?” Siegler asked. “What do you call what David was doing?”

Kevin answered, “That he had been unfaithful.”

Asking Kevin to step down from the stand, Siegler handed him a shotgun, which hung long and heavy in his arm. Then she stood back and asked, “Mr. Temple, could you show us, sir, how you’d hold that twelve-gauge shotgun and pick up that television in State’s Exhibit 220 at the same time?” Exhibit 220 was a photo of the den television off its stand, weighing fifty pounds.

“I could not do it,” he answered.

As the last member of the family took the stand, it felt as if the courtroom had turned against the Temples. Yet Maureen, her gray hair cut short, looked like a prim and proper Southern grandmother, a churchwoman and a favorite aunt. Visibly proud, she described David’s football career. “He was the best middle linebacker Katy High School ever had,” she said. “He was super.”

She described a wholesome home life, including a large extended family and summer vacations on the Comal River. Belinda was a good choice for David and, “I think she loved me like I loved her…. She was a mother who played and sang and danced.”

David’s mother talked on, elaborating in her answers, and Craig Goodhart objected, saying that she was not responsive. DeGuerin asked her to limit her answers, but Maureen looked concerned and said, “Okay, but I do a lot better if y’all just let me visit.”

The night of the murder, she said David whispered in her ear, “The girls are gone…. I don’t remember, but Ken said that I screamed and wailed…. David’s eyes were funny. I assumed he had been crying.”

On the screen were photos from cheerful times, vacations and Christmases that the defense attorney displayed for the jury. David, Belinda and Evan, smiling and happy.

“By any stretch of the imagination, could you ever have expected that David could do anything like [murdering Belinda]?” DeGuerin asked.

“Absolutely not,” she answered. But one of the detectives, she said, shook a finger in her face and told her that David was a murderer.

“Had you done anything to justify that?” DeGuerin asked.

“No, sir,” she answered, eyes wide. “I was just sitting in the room, waiting for David.”

When Craig Goodhart took over, he asked if Maureen really meant to say that David and Belinda’s marriage was perfect.

“Did I say perfect?” she asked, looking surprised.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Twice. I circled it.”

“I’m sure they had fights like every married couple,” she said, and she agreed she’d heard the phrase, “No one knows what goes on behind closed doors.” In her statement to police the night of the murder, Maureen had said that on the street outside the house, David told her when she asked what happened, “I don’t know.”

“He never said, ‘The girls are gone,’” Goodhart asked softly. “Did he?”

Yet Maureen insisted that her son had said precisely what she’d testified to, whispering it in her ear.

Rather than calling her son’s liaison with Heather an
affair
, David’s mother described his relationship with Heather as “time with a schoolteacher, a female.”

“What did he do with the female schoolteacher?” Goodhart asked.

“Well, that he spent a couple of nights with a female schoolteacher,” David’s mother said. When asked how she’d describe what David
did
with the woman he cared so much about he later married, Maureen said, “A two-day weekend…I do not know about an affair. I know about a two-day weekend.”

“Was your son having an affair or not?” Goodhart asked, looking exasperated.

Maureen Temple answered, “No.”

Although so many others saw David with Heather, renewing their relationship quickly after the murder, Maureen insisted they were all wrong. Her son lived a monk-like life for two and a half years, she said, and David returned home to her house every evening to sleep.

And when it came to the detectives, she again described them as rude—Tracy Shipley in particular, who Maureen said, “was ugly to me.”

“Do you remember telling Detective Shipley, ‘I just could not have raised a son that would kill his wife?’” Goodhart asked.

DeGuerin objected, and the jury never heard what Maureen would have answered.

Anticipation spread through the courthouse as David Mark Temple took the stand. Throughout the previous five weeks, he’d appeared unemotional, crying only rarely, as when his mother was on the stand. Sitting behind the prosecutors’ desk, Kelly Siegler was disappointed. She didn’t want the defendant to testify. “I knew he couldn’t do worse than his family, and that he’d probably do better,” she said. When a defendant took the stand, Siegler said, juries expected
Perry Mason
, where a guilty party confessed. “That doesn’t happen,” she said.

“I loved Belinda very much,” David began. “As well as she me, and loved my son and my unborn daughter, as I will to the day I die.”

“Can you expect the jury to believe a man can love his wife and be unfaithful?”

“I made a mistake. I wish I could go back and change, but I cannot,” he said. “But I loved my wife very much, from day one to the day that she died.” Belinda, he said, was “beautiful inside and out,” and “healthy as a horse,” and they’d both planned and looked forward to her second pregnancy.

At the time of the murder, David described his relationship with Heather using the words she did, “flirtatious e-mails, a casual romantic relationship.”

“Were you in love with Heather then?” DeGuerin asked.

“Not at all,” he insisted.

Although Belinda told many that she’d done it alone, David insisted he’d helped paint the nursery, and that he was “working to get the shelving up, the crib and bassinette.”

Although others, including Heather, had testified that he attended happy hours and Quinton explained that they were on Thursday nights, David acted as if they were Fridays instead and said, “It’s impossible to have a Friday happy hour during football season.”

During his time on the stand, David appeared to have much he wanted to say. He had, he said, given Belinda a purse for Christmas and perfume for her birthday. When Evan woke up from his nap the afternoon of the murder, “he felt his normal, rambunctious self…full of energy.”

On the stand, David Temple’s account of that day differed from the statement he gave police on the day of the murder. Instead of Belinda arriving home at 3:45, he now said that it was closer to four o’clock. “I told her to rest, that I would take Evan to the park and we would be back in time for supper.” Although Tammey had testified that dinner was always served at Bunco, David insisted he and Belinda went out to dinner on her Bunco nights, and he’d rushed home that final night to take her to a restaurant. Instead of a nap, Belinda had gone upstairs to lie down and read a magazine, he said, explaining why she was still wearing her glasses when she was shot. Yet, Brenda had testified that Belinda wore the glasses not for reading but for driving.

On the stand, David Temple was a soft-spoken yet intense man with a steely gaze. “I had to buckle Evan into the car seat,” he said about their drive in the truck. When the physical evidence contradicted what he was testifying to, such as the photos that showed the car seat was in the Isuzu, not his truck, David didn’t try to clear up the matter. Instead, shrugging, he said, “I have no idea.”

The reason it took him twenty-five to thirty minutes to drive a distance usually covered in ten to twelve minutes, he said, was because “traffic was heavy that day.” And when it came to Buck Bindeman, who said he saw David miles from where he claimed to be that day, David simply said that the man who knew him from high school, who’d described his truck in perfect detail, was mistaken.

When it came to the teenager who lived next door, David said, “I did not trust the Sanders kid,” and that they’d had problems with him in the past.

Narrating the discovery of Belinda’s body, David talked quickly, his face flushing. Although he had no blood on him, he claimed he’d grabbed and shook her. “Just couldn’t imagine what was going on or just the pain that you’re feeling until you’ve seen something like that about somebody you care about,” he said.

When it came to his interview that night, David, too, claimed the detectives were rude, and said that, “I was called every name in the book.”

“Did you have anything whatsoever to do with the death of Belinda?” DeGuerin asked.

“I did not,” David said, his voice firm. “I loved Belinda with all my heart…. I wanted [Erin] more than anything.”

“Do you have sex with all the women you flirt with?” Siegler asked, sitting behind the long red file box filled with questions she’d prepared. At times, she rifled through, rearranging, as she finished one topic and went on to another.

“No, ma’am,” David answered, as politely as Southern mothers teach their sons. “I do not.”

When Siegler asked if a taped conversation with Brenda, when David said he didn’t sleep with the woman he’d spent New Year’s Eve with, was a lie, David said, “Yes.” One after another, Siegler asked about David’s words preserved on Brenda’s tape-recorded conversations, and he over and over again had to admit that he’d lied.

There would be many things David said that didn’t ring true, like his insistence that he’d hurried home to take Belinda out for dinner, as he always did on Bunco nights. The women in the league knew the hostesses served dinner, and Belinda had always eaten with them. And why would anyone, as David insisted Belinda did, routinely leave her keys on a step halfway up a staircase?

“Are you telling this jury that you really believe Joe Sanders is the person who put a shotgun in the back of your wife’s head and blew her face off?” Siegler asked.

“I have no idea,” he responded. “I wouldn’t doubt it one bit that he did it.”

“So the burglar went through three jewelry boxes and the little stem in the bathroom to get this stolen jewelry?” Siegler asked, referring to the list supplied to the insurance company that included, among other items, three pairs of Belinda’s earrings.

So much of what David testified to sounded unbelievable. To prove the point, Siegler again put up the photo of David’s jewelry on the dish, and played the tape in which he told Brenda that he was wearing his watch and ring at the time of the murder. “Can we agree to the fact that on the day Belinda was murdered, in your house, the burglar didn’t take one single thing that belonged to you?” Siegler asked.

“To the best of my knowledge, yes,” Temple agreed.

When it came to his dead wife, David said again, “Belinda was a strong woman.”

“But as strong as she was, it didn’t compare to you in your relationship, did it, Mr. Temple?” Siegler asked.

As to his relationship with Heather, there were those matters in her statement, including that just three days before the murder, he’d told her that he loved her. “I didn’t,” David said. “I did not use those words. I did not.”

“She made a mistake about all that?” Siegler asked, and Temple said that yes, Heather was mistaken, along with Tara Hall about when he gave Heather flowers and worked in her garden.

Brenda said she hadn’t seen David give Belinda a birthday gift, although she was with them the entire day. “Mr. Temple, did Brenda lie?” Siegler asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” David said. “She did.”

So had Tammey and Quinton Harlan, and Natalie Scott, Debbie Berger, and others who testified that David hadn’t helped in the nursery, that the marriage had been troubled, and that Shaka was a fiercely protective watchdog.