Former suspect testifies at Temple trial
A former suspect in the execution-style killing of Belinda Temple avowed on Monday that he had no involvement in the Katy schoolteacher’s death 20 years ago — a conclusion that local authorities also arrived at before arresting the woman’s husband, David Temple, in the slaying.
Riley Joe Sanders III told jurors that while he left school early on Jan. 11, 1999, he smoked weed with friends and fell asleep on the couch before waking up to eventually learn that Belinda Temple, his next-door neighbor, was dead.
Sanders had only been a name to jurors during the first weeks of trial. Prosecutors described him as a then-16-year-old whose main crime was skipping too much school and smoking with his buddies. Defense attorneys have worked to prove that Sanders had a vendetta against Belinda Temple, who was one of his teachers. She told his parents that he was cutting class, causing them to strip him of his driving privileges.
But Sanders, now 37, appeared before the jury on Monday as a grown man who is married with two children. He sat in a blue, button-up shirt, telling jurors in plain words: He liked Belinda Temple and didn’t kill her.
“Did you have anything to do with Mrs. Temple’s murder?” said Lisa Tanner, a prosecutor with the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
“No,” Sanders said.
“Did you kill Mrs. Temple?” she asked.
“No,” he repeated.
Sanders told jurors that the case has followed him in his adult life. One of his children was born on the day of Belinda’s death, he said. And although he is the third in his family to be named Riley Joe Sanders, he didn’t name any of his children after him because “my name, it’s all over the place.”
Sanders admitted to smoking and missing school. As a sophomore at Katy High School in the spring of 1999, Sanders missed 281 total class periods, according to paperwork shown at the trial.
Belinda Temple helped Sanders master his class material so he’d be ready for tests, and she often told him to hurry up in the hallways so he wouldn’t be late for the next period, Sanders said. When she told his parents that he was missing school, his truck was taken away.
“I didn’t appreciate it, but she was doing her job,” he said.
On Jan. 11, 1999, Sanders left school twice during the day. After cutting school in seventh period, he described a quest to find marijuana, which was largely unsuccessful. When he got home, he fell asleep on the couch, he said.
His father also testified in court on Monday, telling jurors that he saw Sanders asleep and woke him up to see police investigating at the Temple home.
Police said they vetted Sanders as a suspect. He was associated with friends who had committed another burglary, and Sanders had once taken his father’s 12gauge shotgun out of a safe to go shooting with his friends.
He didn’t have permission and gave the weapon to a friend so he could hide it until getting it back into the safe without being caught, Sanders said.
His father told the jury that he and his wife gave police a lot of access to their son and to their home. Belinda Temple was killed with a 12-gauge shotgun, but the weapon was never found.
Earlier on Monday, jurors heard more details about the fatal gunshot wound. The person who killed Belinda Temple
placed the shotgun directly to the back of her head before firing, causing a buckshot to enter her skull and leave near her right eye. The blast killed her immediately.
“This was a contact shot,” said Dwayne Wolf, deputy chief medical examiner at the Harris County Institute for Forensic Sciences.
Defense attorney Stan Schneider tried getting Wolf to be as specific as possible in Belinda’s time of death, a point which could alter the outcome of the case. Forensic pathologists were unable to determine an exact time, however, Wolf said.
Schneider was also unable to nail down times surrounding Sanders’ activities on the day Belinda died.
Belinda Temple died in the master bedroom closet of her Katy home. David Temple said he came home from the store and found her dead amid a burglarized house.
The husband in 2007 was found guilty of Belinda’s murder — a conviction that was reversed about 10 years later after an appeals court noted dozens of instances of prosecutorial misconduct in the first trial.
The office of the Texas Attorney General is acting as a special prosecutor in the retrial, which is expected to last through July in state District Judge Kelli Johnson’s court.