Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (4 page)

It was a heady coming of age, one in which David and the other players felt on top of the world, singled out for greatness. On Fridays the teachers at Katy High School and most of the student body wore red, in support of the football team. At the afternoon pep rallies, the football team was called out to the gym floor by the principal and coaches, where they were lauded for their accomplishments. There was reason to celebrate. The Tigers did well David’s final two years at Katy High School. “As David progressed, so did the team,” says Coach Clayton. “By senior year, we were winning, and David was outstanding.”

Throughout the football season, as the team won game after game, David’s renown grew in the small town. Before long, he walked into local restaurants with his parents and townsfolk got up out of their chairs and stood to congratulate him. On Friday nights, nearly 10,000 filled Rhodes Stadium; news vans filled the parking lot, while TV helicopters circled overhead, and for much of the game all eyes were on the star linebacker, David Temple.

That year, the fall of 1986, the Katy Tigers won every game and took home a district championship for the first time in twenty-two years. David was the defensive captain, and one of the stars of the team. “He was a hometown hero, and it didn’t matter what David pulled,” says Thompson. “Because everyone just adored him. The little kids wanted to be like him. And the adults wanted to shake his hand.”

After the games, parents threw parties, or the team went to victory dances where DJs played rock and roll and country and western. David dated a girl from another school, but his prominence was such that many of the Katy High girls wanted to be his girlfriend. At least on the surface, David Temple had it all. He was handsome, powerfully built, had a devil-may-care charisma, and he was high up on the school’s hierarchy, on the tier reserved for the most popular students.

The season ended when the Tigers lost, 24 to 13, to the Madison Marlins in Houston’s Astrodome on November 15, 1986, but that final loss never diminished the year’s importance. It would seem in the decades to follow that the team had begun a tradition of winning, one Katy High would carry forward. And the members of the team, especially David, would be forever viewed as the players that started it all.

In early 1987, just weeks after his team’s most impressive season on the field of combat, however, all wouldn’t be well for David Temple. He’d talked confidently to friends throughout his football career of being picked up by a big-name school, the University of Texas, Arkansas, or any of the others in the big conferences that went to bowl games and whose star players signed multimillion-dollar NFL contracts. But by that winter, it was evident that wouldn’t be David’s fate.

Early on, there had been interest in David, especially from the University of Oklahoma. “On film, David looked good. He was a fine player,” says Clayton. “Before Oklahoma came out to see him in person, they were saying all the right things, calling David a full-tilt guy, that he could play in their program. But the big schools wanted linebackers to be six feet and up. David was just five eleven, and too short.”

The night the previous fall when an Oklahoma coach came to watch David play football, Clayton had heard the man say, “Temple’s not as big as we thought he was.”

From that point on, Oklahoma pulled back. They showed no interest in David Temple, and none of the other top-tier schools recruited him. As 1987 began, it became evident that an offer from a big-ticket school wasn’t in David’s future. Although he must have been disappointed, David brushed off the situation with friends, saying it didn’t matter. But to one friend he labeled the height requirement “B.S.,” and groused about the unfairness of it all, pointing out that he was just an inch shorter than Mike Singletary, a Hall of Fame linebacker who played for the Chicago Bears. How much difference that one inch in height made. Ironically, if David took steroids in high school, in the long run the drugs may have hurt more than helped. One potential side effect is bone shortening, and both of David’s brothers were taller than he was. Without steroids would David Temple have grown that all-important inch? There was no way to predict what might have been, but the frustration at being left behind must have stung.

“We were all disappointed for David,” says a friend. “He’d worked hard. He deserved to be able to grab the golden ring.”

Crime wasn’t much of a concern in Katy, Texas. Yet a rash of car burglaries had begun the previous summer, and continued through fall and into that winter. Someone was stealing what was then the latest hot technology, radar detectors. Euphemistically called fuzz busters, they were used to warn when police were near with radar guns, monitoring speed and writing tickets. The burglaries were sporadic, taking place in unlocked cars. In early 1987, the frequency intensified, and the thieves began breaking car windows.

In early February 1987, a little more than a month after football season ended, a detective from the Katy Police Department went to the high school to talk to the group of boys he’d heard about, the ones who called themselves the Rebels. “They were known to have caused some trouble,” says then Katy police captain Robert Frazier.

Afterward, David and his friends laughed about the detective’s questions. “It was like the police showed up and made threats, and after the detective left, the car thefts increased,” says one of the Rebels. “It was like the guys involved were showing the police they could do it. There was this mentality that this was our school. This was our town. We could do what we wanted. Most of us, but especially David, felt invincible.”

With complaints piling up from the victims, a source led the investigating detective to the fence buying the stolen goods. The man cooperated, saying he bought the radar detectors from two Katy football players. One was David Temple.

Captain Frazier had already heard plenty of gossip about the high school’s star middle linebacker. Although Frazier had never been able to confirm them, rumors circulated that Temple had once hit a man with his car and then beat the guy up. Another report recounted an afternoon David was supposed to have been driving with a girlfriend, when he spotted an elderly couple walking along the road. That day, as the story went, David swerved toward the couple, who had to jump into a ditch to avoid being mowed down. The girl in the car with him told friends that David stared straight ahead, as if in a trance, eerily reminiscent of the way Darren described his brother to Cindi Thompson, on the evening he told her that David threatened him with the shotgun.

“There were a lot of folks in Katy afraid of David Temple,” says Frazier.

For a family like the Temples, one with such a pristine image, it must have been more than embarrassing when their middle son’s name appeared in an article in the
Katy Times
on February 22, 1987. This time instead of lauding David’s football accomplishments, the headline read, T
WO
KHS A
THLETES
A
RRESTED
, and the article detailed burglary charges pending against David and another Katy High player. Next to their son’s name, Maureen and Kenny’s home address was listed, all on the front page in plain view, for the entire town, all of the Temples’ family and friends, to read.

Yet not everything had been revealed in the newspaper. One thing that didn’t make the article was that the other player arrested told police the radar detectors were being stolen to make money for steroids.

“We were a small town and the arrest of the star football player was big news,” says David’s friend, Mike Fleener.

After his arrest, David gave a voluntary statement. At first he only admitted being involved in one burglary, but his fingerprints matched those taken in another smash-and-grab theft. Before long others came forward who tied David to at least six and perhaps as many as eight car burglaries. Although David was legally an adult, police consulted his father. The investigating officer wrote in his report that this was done because Ken Temple was “known to be a reputable man and a long-term resident of Katy.”

In the end, David and his friend were given deals; although police had a confession and witnesses, his charges were plea-bargained down to a single charge. That February, David pleaded to a single Class A misdemeanor, attempted burglary of a vehicle. He was sentenced to three days in jail and a $100 fine.

Two months later, David Temple graduated from Katy High. Nowhere in 1987’s
Tiger Echo
was there a mention of the February arrest. But as befitting his football accomplishments, David was featured prominently on the glossy pages of the school yearbook. On one page, against a blue background like the other seniors, he was spit-and-polish groomed and wearing a tuxedo. A handsome nineteen-year-old, David had dimples, a strong chin, and a broad smile, and his brown hair was high off his forehead and combed carefully back.

Renée Zellweger had been voted the school’s “Dream Date,” but David was singled out as well. In his letterman’s jacket, surrounded by friends, in one photo David had his right index finger held up, indicating the Tigers were number one. He had a tousled-hair bad-boy look about him, and a disarmingly appealing smile. On other pages, there were photos of David in his uniform on the football field and coaching a powder-puff game. In another, he collected a plaque for being an outstanding member of the “Fighting Tigers.” With a girl on his lap, David slumped back in a chair wearing a blue sweater with jeans. They’d both been voted “Most Athletic.”

The 1987 Katy High graduation ceremony was held at the city’s equestrian center. By then, David’s future had been planned. Although the top-tier universities with their multimillion-dollar football programs had passed him by, David’s exploits on the football field had earned him an offer. He’d accepted a five-year scholarship from Stephen F. Austin University, in Nacogdoches, Texas, the same college Belinda Lucas would attend. It was a 1-AA athletic program, a good-sized school in a town that worshipped football and the players who represented it on the field.

The world waited for David Temple. But before he left Katy for Nacogdoches, Coach Johnston pulled his star linebacker to the side. The head coach worried about David’s inability to separate football-field aggression from what was permissible in the real world. “I told him that if I heard he got in any trouble, I’d be calling Coach Graves at SFA and letting him know,” says Johnston.

Another of David’s teachers, too, had misgivings about him as the Katy seniors collected their diplomas. “I remember thinking that there would be problems down the road with David,” she’d say years later. “It wasn’t anything solid. I just had a bad feeling that we hadn’t heard the last of him.”

A
t the time Belinda Lucas and David Temple enrolled at Stephen F. Austin University the fall of 1987, the enrollment hovered around 12,000 students. The campus covered 401 rolling, heavily wooded acres, originally private property, the bucolic homestead of Senator Thomas J. Rusk. Perhaps not surprisingly, since the university’s roots traced back to a 1923 teachers college, the campus was rich in history along with reports of ghostly apparitions. Mays Hall dormitory, once a hospital with a morgue in the basement, had an unexplained coldness, while a ghost named Chester was said to appear at times in the university fine arts auditorium, his face once seen by students on the theater’s curtain. Legend has it that Chester was either the building’s architect, who died before its completion, or the prowling spirit of a drama student who’d committed suicide.

One of the oldest buildings on campus was the Stone Fort, the site of an old trading post. Campus folklore warned that any SFA student who dared enter the Fort before finishing was destined to never graduate. Most students saw little reason to visit, since the structure housed a museum. The more popular destinations were campus bars, including Monday Night Football at the Sports Shack, happy hours with live music at the Crossroads, and weekend evenings at Speak-EZ.

SFA’s school colors were purple and white, and the football team, befitting the school’s heavily forested setting, was dubbed the Lumberjacks. As SFA was an NCAA Division 1-AA school, the “Jacks” were part of the Southland Conference, made up of twelve universities in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. On game days, students posted homemade signs outside Homer Bryce Stadium, on the north edge of the campus, urging their team to victory. And in the stands the student body, wearing shirts in their school colors, became a mass of screaming bodies dubbed the Purple Haze.

As a 1-AA team, the Lumberjacks traveled by plane, and the stadiums they played accommodated from 10,000 to 15,000 fans. On the football field, as ever, David ranked high on the list of players. Wearing number 42, he’d gained a little weight since high school, coming in at 220 pounds, and his strength was formidable. As in Katy, players dreaded coming up against him, even his friends. “David had a great sense of humor. He joked around all the time. But you didn’t want to be on his bad side,” says Jeremy Rakes, a teammate. “He had a temper.”

At night, when the players went out, David got in fights in the bars, more often than not with the frat boys he loved to ridicule. One night when he talked to a girl, another student said hello. David picked the guy up and threw him against the wall. David even became incensed with teammates if he felt they weren’t being respectful to one of his dates. “He’d yell and scream and threaten,” says Jeremy, who one night caught the brunt of David’s anger just for talking to his date. “He said I was being disrespectful to the girl, but I wasn’t. When he dated someone, he put them on a pedestal, and if any of the guys got close, David went ballistic.”

Anything could set him off. One night he showed up at a bowling alley late, and the worker who answered the door said the place was closing. According to the rumors that circulated afterward, David expressed his disappointment by pummeling the alley’s attendant. “We didn’t know if the guy didn’t know who David was or if it was all covered up,” says a teammate. “But nothing ever happened to David.”

As at Katy High School, the SFA team was a tight unit. Many ate together and lived in the same coed dorm, a low-rise building that resembled a motel, with doorways to the outside. The first two floors housed football players, with women students on the top two floors. During those years, the late eighties, when steroids were a topic across the nation, Jeremy and others heard a lot of talk about SFA players injecting the drugs, but not from David. If he used them, he kept it quiet. While some of the players filled syringes and injected in front of others, if he used them, David didn’t. “I don’t know if David was on them or not,” says Jeremy. “All I know is that on the field, he was tough, and that he had a hair-trigger temper. The rest of us were careful around him, not to set him off.”

So tough that although he played little during his first year, something both awful and remarkable happened. One night, when the Jacks were playing Nicholls State, from Thibodaux, Louisiana, David tackled a player who didn’t see him coming. It was a legal hit, and a hard one. David struck the other player with so much force that he dislocated two of his opponent’s vertebrae. “David nearly broke the guy’s back,” says Jeremy.

Maybe Coach Graves shouldn’t have been surprised by his new linebacker’s power and fierceness. When Graves recruited David, a Katy coach told him that David was the “meanest” player he’d ever worked with. That fall, Graves learned something else about David Temple: the defensive player displayed a consuming need to be in charge. “David was a lot about control,” says Graves. “On the football field, even when he was furious, he never totally lost control. What I saw in David Temple was a heavy-minded person. Focused.”

What players noticed about their new teammate was that the kid from Katy also had a few quirks. When it came to appearances, David left nothing to chance. Obsessive about his clothes, he wore only name brands, like Tommy Hilfiger shirts and jeans and Nike warm-up suits. Everything had to be precisely clean and pressed, and it all had to match, down to his socks and tennis shoes. Perhaps most remarkable, his personal hygiene was more than fastidious. David Temple was so meticulous, he sometimes showered three or four times a day.

At the beginning of his second year, David was put on the Lumberjacks’ roster as a starter, and the coaches groomed him for special teams and middle linebacker, a position Graves called “the hub of the defense.” Few doubted that he deserved the slot. On the football field, David was always 100 percent, fighting tough. And beginning on Sunday mornings, David studied the coming week’s opponents, committing to memory new plays tailored to thwart them. “He read them over and over,” says a friend. “David was obsessive about planning. He had to have everything lined up, everything ready. He didn’t leave anything to chance.”

As they had since he’d first played football as a youngster, Maureen and Kenny Temple attended nearly every game. At times that meant beginning the three-hour drive from Katy to Nacogdoches early in the morning and returning late at night. For evening games, they sometimes pulled into their driveway at two in the morning. Instead of Tiger red, the Temples now wore SFA Lumberjack purple-and-white sweatshirts. They weren’t disappointed during the games. Playing special teams and defense, David got a lot of time on the field. His parents had always been David’s biggest supporters, and to those Maureen and Kenny Temple met at SFA, that didn’t appear to have changed.

The team played well in the fall of 1988, David’s first season as an SFA starter. They won their homecoming game against Nicholls State, 30 to 7, the first win against that Louisiana team since 1983. David was a big part of the Jacks’ improving fortunes. “He loved playing, and he carried that mental attitude to the game,” says Graves. “David had good speed and strength. He prepared, and on the field, he was a leader.”

Still, Graves would later wonder if he should have seen more, something dangerous in David Temple. “You don’t look back and see signs about what someone can do, because on the football field, you’re looking for that aggression. It’s a good thing,” says Graves. “But there’s another side to that equation. Because of the degree of violence in football, it’s not far-fetched for a player to go too far off the field.”

In August of his second year at SFA, David met Pam Engelkirk, an elementary education major. Slim and pretty, with cascading blond curls, Pam had a wide, engaging smile. She was smart and fun loving. David, as he often did with women, poured on the charm.

At the time, Pam wore a pink shirt with a black bow tie and shorts as her uniform at Nacogdoches’s nicest restaurant, the Californian. Her parents had recently divorced, and Pam was feeling a little lost, a little less connected to family. David was affectionate and thoughtful. He sent her flowers, most often red roses, even when there wasn’t an occasion. There were those times he got in fights in bars, but Pam wrote them off. “Everybody on the football team liked David. His friends were his friends and everyone else stayed clear of David,” she says, with a shrug. “That’s just the way it was.”

It never seemed like a burden to stand close to him in the clubs, never venturing away from him. She would say later that she instinctively understood that he wanted her there, and that she wasn’t to leave his side. “It was like we were joined at the hip,” she says. “David required that. And I never minded.”

Besides, it was exciting dating one of the Lumberjacks’ star players. In the stands, she sat with the other players’ girlfriends, cheering their boyfriends on. After the games, the girls were allowed on the field with their boyfriends. Even outside the university, with the team winning, David was something of a celebrity in Nacogdoches. “It was a big deal on campus and around town,” says Jeremy. “Everyone knew who we were.”

A lot of the girls envied Pam. There were the after-the-game parties and all the excitement of watching David’s powerful performances on the football field. “I knew the quarterback and the cheerleaders,” says Pam. “It was fun, and I felt important to be his girlfriend. I was happy.”

That fall, when Maureen and Ken Temple drove in for a game, Pam waited to meet them at David’s apartment. She had balloons, and they all laughed and seemed to get along well. Since her own family was going through a tough time, Pam found herself drawn to David’s parents. Maureen was matronly but fun, and David’s father was fatherly and kind. She began spending all the holidays at the Temples’, even Christmas. At Easter, Pam brought her sister, and they slept in the family room and colored eggs. The following July, she went along to New Braunfels, in the Texas Hill Country, for the Temples’ annual vacation. “David’s parents took me in, and I felt close to them,” she says. “His whole family really put David on a pedestal, but they were good people.”

Looking back, it was as if David took over Pam’s life. He held her hand, looked into her eyes, and whispered in her ear. He was serious and solid, magnetic with a good sense of humor. “David was my first real relationship,” she says. “He was a football star, a really cool guy, and he was my first love.”

Later, others would talk of the way they saw David control Pam, but she didn’t see it that way at the time. “I just felt loved,” she says.

Pam sat with the Temple family at games, and no one ever mentioned David’s tumultuous high school career or the 1987 burglary arrest. While she saw some of the other football players giving each other shots, she never saw anyone giving one to David, and she never suspected that he was on steroids. To Pam, David Temple was an All-American boy, a small-town football hero. And he loved her.

He didn’t have a car, and Pam often drove. When she wasn’t working, she and the other girlfriends traveled with the team, following the bus in their cars. By then, David appeared to have come to terms with his future. He didn’t talk of playing with the pros but of being a coach. “At a 1-AA school, you needed to get your degree,” says one of the other players. “There wasn’t an NFL contract waiting out there for you, so everyone knew if we stayed in the game, we’d be coaching.”

On Thursdays, the Californian restaurant, where Pam worked, booked bands and served quarter beers in the lounge. Afterward, David and Pam went out. It was at those times, when he’d been drinking, that David’s other side emerged. Usually it wasn’t aimed at Pam, but anyone else who crossed him, and often the excuse was that he was protecting her. On one such night, Pam and her sister walked to the car a short distance ahead of David and a friend. Two college students approached them, and after Pam slipped into the driver’s seat, one of the guys kept her from closing the door, flirting with her. For his own protection, Pam knew he had to leave, fast. “I’m not kidding you. You need to back off, because my boyfriend’s coming,” she warned.

It was too late. By the time she’d finished talking, David had picked up the young man and body-slammed him onto the hood of a parked car. Without comment, David and his friend got in Pam’s car. As Pam’s sister sobbed, Pam pulled away and drove off. “I knew better than to argue with David,” she says. “I was upset, but I didn’t say a word.”

Remarkably, David immediately returned to his usual demeanor. “He was fine,” Pam says. “It was like he had taken care of business, and it was over.”

At other times, usually when they’d both been drinking, they argued. “He’d become so angry, he’d punch walls. He once kicked my car door, and once he hit a mirror in a men’s room at a bar and shattered it,” says Pam. “Usually it was over jealousy issues. Most of the time, I wasn’t sure what started it.”

By the next morning, David was back to normal, charming and kind, bringing flowers and going out of his way to let her know that he loved her. “I’d forget about it,” she says. “I just thought that he really loved me. That when you have a real boyfriend who cares about you, this is what it’s like.”

The following fall, 1989, was a big year for the Lumberjacks, and on the field, David was outstanding. “He brought his fighting face to every game,” says Graves. “He was on special teams and defense and he got a lot of recognition.” Soon, the Jacks were racking up wins. They played North Texas, Lamar, Eastern Washington, Boise State, and Jackson State, and piled up wins. The night of homecoming, the cheerleaders led the traditional torchlight parade to the bonfire, and the next day the Jacks crushed Sam Houston State’s Bearkats, 45 to 7.

After one game, getting on the bus, a squabble broke out between a defensive and offensive player. David jumped in the middle of it, and Coach Graves ended up pulling David off one player. The player David fought dwarfed even him, but David didn’t back off. He didn’t appear to even care. By then, David Temple’s fierceness had earned him a nickname: the “Temple of Doom.”