Retrial begins for former Katy-area coach accused in wife’s 1999 killing
It’s 1999 in Katy, Texas. A seemingly perfect couple is falling apart at the seams. David Temple, a high school football coach, is having an affair with a beautiful teacher on campus. His wife, Belinda, a beloved special education instructor, is becoming anxious. She’s also eight months pregnant.
The marital tensions were at the center of a Harris County courtroom once again Monday, as lawyers began to reconstruct the murder of Belinda Temple for Harris County jurors, launching testimony for her husband’s second criminal trial in 12 years.
Unlike the first trial, when jurors found David Temple guilty in the killing — a decision later overturned by an appeals court — attorneys were tasked with making the panel understand a story from another era. But what happened on Jan. 11 that year, when Belinda was found shot to death in the closet of her master bedroom, remains in dispute.
“We’re going to go back in time,” David Temple’s attorney, Stanley Schneider, began in his opening argument Monday. “We’re going to hear a story of betrayal, two betrayals.”
The lawyer told jurors
that while the defendant was unfaithful to his wife, law enforcement also betrayed citizens by operating with “tunnel vision” in the case, which rocked the Katy area in the early 2000s and has maintained a hold in the county ever since.
David Temple was charged in his wife’s slaying in 2005. He was found guilty in 2007, and spent 10 years in jail before an appeals court reversed the verdict because of prosecutorial misconduct in the first trial.
The former coach has maintained his innocence from the time of Belinda’s death, avowing that he came home from a trip to the store and park with their then-3year-old son to find his home burglarized and his wife dead. Schneider said that David Temple’s alibi made it almost impossible for him to be responsible for the crime.
Special prosecutors with the Texas Attorney General’s Office countered that the husband had ample time to kill his wife.
“There was only one person on this Earth who had the motive, the means and the opportunity to cause her death,” said Lisa Tanner, a state prosecutor retrying the case in lieu of the Harris
County District Attorney’s Office, which recused itself after the initial verdict was reversed.
Investigators didn’t charge anyone with the crime at first but had questions about Temple’s account, Tanner said. The family’s dog was aggressive and made it difficult for police officers to even gain entry into the yard, making them wonder how a burglar could have made it past. The break-in also seemed staged, Tanner said, as evidenced by the location of broken glass on the floor.
Surveillance videos located Temple being where he said he was on two instances, but the videos are separated by a nearly 45-minute gap, Tanner said.
Schneider calculated the time it would have taken David Temple to get from location to location and cast doubt on the state’s assessment.
“David Temple did not have time to commit murder,” he said. “He could not have gotten home.”
A murder weapon was never found.
The defense attorney instead suggested that a 16year-old neighbor could be a suspect in the case. The neighbor had skipped the end of school the day of the murder, and was also linked to a group of friends who
committed a previous burglary in the area, Schneider said.
Some of the information that the jurors will hear about the teen might not have emerged in the first trial. When an appeals court found that David Temple wasn’t granted a fair trial in 2007, they noted 36 instances of prosecutorial misconduct, including that prosecutors withheld information about the neighbor that could have helped defense attorneys in fighting Temple’s case.
“It’s unfortunate that we still have to come back for round number two to clear David’s name,” his brother, Darren Temple, said after the first day of testimony. “We said on Jan. 11 of 1999 when we lost Belinda and (baby) Erin that David was innocent. We say those words again today.”
On Monday, family members of both Belinda and David Temple filled the benches in state District Judge Kelli Johnson’s courtroom.
Prosecutors brought their first witnesses to speak against the husband, including one of Belinda Temple’s former coworkers at Katy High School. She said she knew the couple was having problems and was struggling with a lack of communication.
The coworker, Stacy Nissley,
said Belinda Temple took Evan to school on Jan. 11, 1999, despite him being sick. She eventually had to leave work to pick up her son, because she couldn’t reach David. The mother was trying not to miss as much work as possible so she could maintain the largest amount of maternity leave possible.
Prosecutors described Belinda Temple as a woman who was “universally loved.” She met her husband while at Stephen F. Austin University, and they were viewed as an “allAmerican” couple, Tanner said.
But the marriage began to fray, the prosecutor told jurors. David wasn’t home for periods of time, he criticized Belinda’s family, and he belittled her for excess weight she failed to lose after giving birth to their son, the prosecutor told jurors.
On New Year’s Eve, David Temple left ostensibly for a “hunting trip” and was gone for two days, both Tanner and Schneider said. Instead, he was actually with Heather Scott, the Alief Hastings High School teacher whom he was secretly dating.
Scott and David Temple were married two years later.