Temple’s neighbors walk back statements
A detective was often inaccurate and selective while taking the witness statement of David Temple’s next-door neighbor, the neighbor’s attorney said in a taped deposition for the ex-football coach’s murder trial Wednesday.
The deposition from Jim Galbraith, a civil lawyer who represented neighbors Mike and Peggy Ruggiero, began the second day of defense testimony in the Temple’s retrial in the shooting death 20 years ago of his pregnant wife, Belinda.
Galbraith said he accompanied the Ruggieros to a Harris County Sheriff ’s Office substation on Jan. 14, 1999, three days after Belinda’s death. She was found face-down in her closet with a gunshot wound to the head, amid an apparent home burglary, her husband said.
Galbraith had advised the Ruggieros to write down everything they thought was relevant to the events of Jan. 11, 1999. The detective instead took statements from the Ruggieros himself and bungled parts of Mike Ruggiero’s interview by mistyping what he told them,
Galbraith said.
“Every answer that fit what he thought at the time was heard,” he said. “Everything that didn’t fit that picture, he’d mishear or he mistook.”
Mike Ruggiero got so frustrated that he ended up typing some of the statement on his own, Galbraith said.
Peggy Ruggiero testified for the defense on Tuesday afternoon, telling jurors that she similarly distrusted the authorities because of the way they asked her questions about their neighbors, with whom she and her husband were friends.
“They had pretty much just zeroed in on David,” she said.
The neighbor said that she never
witnessed any issues between Belinda and David Temple, although she found out with the rest of the public that David Temple had been having an affair with a coworker prior to his wife’s death.
Peggy Ruggiero countered earlier testimony that pointed to David Temple possibly isolating Belinda from her family in Nacogdoches. She instead said that she felt Belinda and her family didn’t have a good relationship, and on one occasion, Ruggiero saw her crying after she returned home from a visit earlier than she thought was planned.
Other testimony in the trial indicated that Belinda, who was eight months pregnant, was worried David didn’t want their new baby. Peggy Ruggiero said she felt David was joyous about the pregnancy.
“They had planned it,” she said.
Peggy Ruggiero also contradicted previous testimony about the aggressiveness of the Temples’ Chow dog. Several people told jurors that they were scared of the dog, causing investigators to believe that an intruder would have difficulty entering the Temple home. She said that she had no problems with the dog, and even let her son play with him.
Her opinions on the alternate suspect in the case, then-teenager Riley Joe Sanders, differed from several others’ in the neighborhood. She called him a “heathen,” and someone she wouldn’t have allowed her child to play with outside.
The Ruggieros watched the Temples’ 3-year-old son, Evan, as investigators combed their neighbors’ home for evidence on the night of Jan. 11, 2019. Evan had an orange soda and was excited because he didn’t get sweets or junk food that often, Peggy Ruggiero said.
Evan had been sick earlier in the day, according to prosecution testimony. He didn’t look sick that night, although he didn’t eat all of his McDonald’s for dinner, Ruggiero said. As the night wore on, he kept asking when his mother was coming to get him.
The neighbors witnessed David Temple react to the crime.
Peggy Ruggiero said he looked “shocked, devastated, possibly not believing what’s going on.”
He cried when he told his parents what had occurred, and at some point after the murder, David came over to their house and opened up to them, crying.
Ruggiero wasn’t allowed to share what was said because of objections
of hearsay from the prosecution.
A homicide detective who spoke to Temple after the murder said that the husband didn’t seem to have much anxiety or stress. It wasn’t consistent with the demeanor one would expect of a person “who saw his wife with her head blown off,” he said.
In 2007, a Harris County jury found David Temple guilty in his wife’s murder. His conviction was reversed almost 10 years later, when an appeals court found dozens of instances of prosecutorial misconduct in the first trial. The Texas Attorney General’s Office is serving as special prosecutor in the trial, as the Harris County District Attorney’s Office recused itself from the case.