How a Texas football coach twice found guilty of his wife's murder may still walk free.
The gate was open and a window on the backdoor had been broken. Panicking, Temple said he picked up his 3-year-old son Evan, who had been out with his father running errands, and ran across the street to their then-neighbor Mike Ruggiero’s house. He pounded on the door to get Ruggiero to open up.
"Belinda was...quite an athlete, and I’m sure that’s probably what attracted David to her, being, you know, the sports big man on campus star that he was," said Andy Kahan, director of victim services and advocacy at Crime Stoppers Houston and a spokesperson for the Lucas family. Both Temples started working in high schools. Belinda Temple became a special education teacher at Katy High School, her husband’s alma mater, and David Temple became a teacher and football coach at Alief Hastings High School.
"She was just like, 'I don’t know where he’s at. He should be at work. I can’t get a hold of him," Stacy Nissley, one of Belinda Temple’s friends, testified at trial."[It was] probably the most frustrated I’d seen her." Belinda Temple had died from a shotgun blast to the back of the head. Police determined that she was shot with a 12-gauge shotgun based on the size of the wound. However, they were unable to find a shotgun in the house during their investigation -- only two rifles.
That night, investigators brought David Temple in for questioning. He told police that his wife had gotten home around 3:45 p.m. that day and that she went upstairs to lay down. While she was resting, he said, he took Evan Temple to the park before going to the Brookshire Brothers grocery store and then Home Depot.
Investigators also looked at surveillance video from Brookshire Brothers and Home Depot. David Temple was seen on these videos around the time that the police believed his wife might have been shot. His alibi, it seemed, was airtight. "You take a teenager’s car and you might as well take their testicles," he said."And it was because of the lady next door."
David Temple also spent an increasing amount of time away from home. Quinton Harlan, who coached football with Temple, testified that Temple"often" went to happy hours, bars and strip clubs. Heather Scott later said during David Temple’s trial that she felt guilty that she was dating a married man and told Temple the week before Belinda was murdered that she wanted to end it. However, she testified that a few days later they both professed their love for each other.
Four years after Belinda Temple’s death, the FBI crime lab results from the scene came back. The results showed gunshot residue found on the clothes Belinda Temple was wearing the day she was killed matched that found on the clothing David Temple was wearing that same day. It’s a claim that Temple’s defense team later used in their appeal. According to Craig Malisow, a former reporter for the Houston Press, Glasscock told Temple’s defense team that he was at Sanders’ house and that as he was returning from a bathroom break, he heard Sanders talking about a burglary that went wrong where Sanders said they had to shoot a dog and put it in the closet.The defense team wanted to know if there was information that had been withheld from them during Temple’s first trial.
Police never found the murder weapon used on Belinda Temple but they were able to determine that the shell used to kill her was a double-aught buckshot shell used for hunting deer. As the defense pushed their argument that Sanders had committed the crime, prosecutors maintained that David Temple had killed his wife. They said the burglary was staged and that even if David Temple didn’t own a 12-gauge shotgun, he would have had access to the ones owned by his brother and father.
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