Temple’s second wife takes stand in ex-coach’s murder retrial
David Temple confessed his love to a coworker with whom he was having an affair just a few days before his wife was killed, the colleague-turned-second wife said Friday during Temple’s murder retrial.
Although Heather Temple filed for divorce amid the trial last week, prosecutors and defense attorneys did not discuss the state of the marriage in her testimony. Heather instead spoke to the “inappropriate” nature of her flirtatiousness and romantic encounters with David, while he was still married to his pregnant wife, Belinda.
The second wife’s testimony also coincided with the ex-football coach’s 51st birthday, according to court records. He sat as prosecutors showed several emails exchanged between him and his now-wife, illustrating their burgeoning romance in the fall of 1998 and winter of 1999.
Heather Temple, née Scott, told jurors that she had begun sending messages to David and another coworker at Alief Hastings High School, Quinton Harlan, during the fall.
“It was just bad choices on my part,” she said.
Heather Temple told prosecutors that the emails exchanged were “inappropriately flirtatious.” When asked about the context, she told attorneys on several occasions, “I don’t remember,” saying it has been 20 years since the messages.
Her relationship with Harlan didn’t progress in the same way her relationship progressed with her now-husband. She and David Temple began meeting after work at happy hours with other coworkers, and eventually kissed. They were intimate twice before Belinda was killed on Jan. 11, 1999, Heather said.
Prosecutors previously stated that Belinda Temple had guessed her husband was having an affair. On Dec. 31, a day after her birthday, David told her he was going hunting. Instead, he spent the weekend with Heather, according to her testimony on Friday.
Heather Temple found out David was married a few weeks in to knowing him, and added that she started feeling guilty about the nature of their relationship. The couple had a 3-year-old son, and Belinda was eight months pregnant.
“It was complicated, wasn’t it?” said prosecutor Bill Turner, of the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
“It was inappropriate, I don’t know if complicated is the word,” Heather Temple responded.
“Well there was something in the way, wasn’t there?” Turner asked.
“It was an inappropriate relationship because he’s married,” she said.
“Was Belinda Temple in the way?” he asked.
“I didn’t think about her or discuss her,” she said.
On Jan. 5, 1999, she told David that it was inappropriate to keep dating and that they should stop seeing each other.
They continued talking, and on Jan. 8, he said, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” She said she was feeling the same way, Heather recalled.
Belinda Temple was killed days later in her home in Katy, in what her husband called a botched home burglary. David sent Heather roses on Valentine’s Day that year, and they got married in 2001.
Heather Temple became agitated with prosecutors while being questioned about her conversations with police after the slaying. In an initial meeting with authorities, she didn’t tell them that she and David had been intimate, although she was aware that David was a suspect, as well as why it was significant they were speaking to her, she said.
Turner asked if she withheld the truth, and Heather Temple answered that the initial interview with police was too short. That’s why she decided to speak to police a second time, when she told them details about their affair, Heather said.
“If I am ever in this case again, I will do it differently,” she said in a heated moment with prosecutors.
David Temple was found guilty of Belinda’s murder in 2007, while always maintaining that she was killed in a botched home burglary. His conviction was overturned about a decade later because an appeals court found prosecutorial misconduct.
Temple’s retrial is expected to last through July in state District Judge Kelli Johnson’s court.